Hi everyone. My name is Patrick Akio, and
this conversation made me realize that organizational
change is incredibly difficult. Optimizing and making more
effective how people work together.
Having those conversations, persuading people.
How do you do that? Explaining that and joining me
today is Tom Zebenaja, my friend and colleague over here at
Xebia. Enjoy the episode.
Beyond coding, fine. How many marathons have you run?
That was actually my first one, first full one.
The first full one I did 1/2. And the reason why I did it this
year was actually quite interesting because a good
friend of mine called me in February, maybe March and said I
want to run a marathon this year.
I said, well yeah, probably the Amsterdam marathon should be
nice because not that much hills in Epsilon and also the city,
the sky, the skyline on the city itself was nice.
And he said yeah, that's a great idea.
I probably saw the advertisement a week ago, I don't know.
And two hours later I got an e-mail.
Yeah, you signed up for the MSA marathon.
Oh, OK And I said wait a minute. And then I called him and he
said, yeah, well, I thought we'd do it together.
I didn't thought so. I think so bad.
Anyway, so we signed up. We did the preparation together,
even never physically trained together.
We just use lava and then we can back and forth.
And it was always these. Shit, if you wake up and he
already did his 20K at 8:00 in the morning, he said.
OK, now I need to do mine. It was a great help.
And then we also managed to really run the full marathon.
Yeah, really Side by side together, that's also.
Really nice. Still, you probably know the
Vibo start office. If you go down the street where
the university is, University of Amsterdam, there's this crossing
where the street goes down and up again.
For whatever reason, the the marathon route goes down and
then you need to do up again. But it's after 35 kilometer, so
not a good place to go downhill because that somehow works but
uphill. You're done.
So we did and we managed
somehow. But when we came on the bridge,
he looked at me and said, do we walk?
Let's walk. And then we walked.
I didn't know for three hundred 400 meter.
And then it was just finishing through Wendell Park and so
forth. So the feeling at the end was
really nice. But I would also say the last
last five were the hardest part. The rest went somehow smooth
but. The last five was really tough
and did you do this from like scratch?
Are you a runner? Did you run before or was it
just he signed you up and it's going to?
No. So normally it's.
I think I managed to run once or twice a week, maybe an hour,
hour and a half an hour. You're a runner.
Yeah, I'm you can quantify myself as a runner, but I never
did long distance because for example.
I like podcast. I like listening to podcast.
But you know it is. You never record a podcast for
two hours. Normally it's one episode or two
episodes you can listen to during one run.
But if you prepare for a marathon, you need to do 2
hours, 3 hours preparation and it's just it's too long.
That's my reason. Bowing in my head, I had to do 3
* 3 hours and and it was really I was running and OK, two hours
and then another and then. But I also kind of used to
audiobooks because I concentrate too much to it and then I stop,
I stumble. So Nah, it doesn't work.
So yeah, music it is, but even music for three hours, you don't
think, OK. But nevertheless the mouth on
itself was really easy because along the whole course where
people and they would make noise, they would cheer you up.
So that was quite nice. But the preparation, yeah, it's
hard. Yeah.
A friend of mine started getting
into this, I think half a year ago, and he signed up for like a
a, a run in Romania. That's where he's from
originally. Yeah.
He did it with this guy that was like a mini triathlon.
So I had to swim, he had to bike, had to run the whole
thing. Then he did the last round, and
I'm saying he did the half marathon and he's like, next
year I'm going to do the full one.
He's like, you should join as well.
Yeah. And I'm like, I mean, maybe I
should, but for me, it's just it's too long.
It's too long and I'm not that person that then tries to one up
himself and then go further and then eventually become one of
those ultra marathon runners that like runs for 24 hours.
I don't want to be that person. Yeah, I I can imagine.
And one of the guys, actually, after we finished in the stadium
and said, Oh, well, a marathon that's not just two half
marathons. Yeah, which, well, it's actually
right, because I have the feeling 1/2 marathon you can.
Well not without any practice but it's not that much practice
you need because it somehow works But the full one that's
it's harder it's harder. There's definitely harder and
different also doing the preparation there.
Are you then gonna stick to marathons or are you gonna one
up yourself and? No, I think that the nice thing
about it is. That the friend of mine, he
lives close to Frankfurt. We don't see each other that
often and this is a good reason to connect once a year.
So I think we will try to do 1 sport event.
I don't know, it's always a marathon a year just to keep in
touch, train together even remotely and then have this
event together because he came by with his family.
I didn't saw his daughter. I think she's now 1 1/2 years
old, so already quite old in that regard.
And we already said, well, if we do myocca next year, so why not
doing a week of vacation afterwards together.
So that that's the whole idea. I love that.
Like, I'm really bad at keeping up with my network, with my
connections, with the people that I used to work with or used
to be friends with or still friends with.
And I think this is a great kind of hook to keep in touch, to
touch base through Strava or whatever app you have.
And then once a year or maybe when you have a marathon, come
together and then, like, spend time together.
Yeah, yeah, let's see. So next year's already signed
off. And then he also said he's
really pushing for triathlon. But I hate swimming.
Me too. And yeah, well, we're in
Holland, right? So biking, that's fine.
I think we can do that. But swimming?
No chance. So I've probably drowned along
the way, but he's got to take lessons.
Yeah, yeah, he said. Now, now we need to do it.
He said. Well, let's do another marathon
and then we see so. We are maybe up for more, but
I'm not sure yet that this will work out.
This guy's a good driver though. He's like, let's do this.
He's really ambitioned and my girlfriend is 100% behind it
because if you train for a marathon you also lose a lot of
weight naturally. And she said, well, that's
actually really nice side effect, as I've noted.
Yeah. Do you feel any different from
having run for those long periods?
Yes. So I think that my technique got
better. So it's better technique and.
If you've run that long or so, what kind of shoes are you
wearing and what kind of socks are you wearing?
More and more things come to play.
I mean, I'm not a professional athlete.
If you, if you think about it, I run the marathon in four hours,
11 minutes. The fast fastest guy I think on
that day in two hours, 8 minutes.
Wow. So when I was at the half
marathon, he was done. So totally different world.
But yeah, you start to feel these these things, but it's
also. I'm more energetic and also, I
don't know how it is for you, but the work we do is so much
thinking and focusing on things that having this distraction of
being out and just really simple run in One Direction for half an
hour helps a lot. Yeah, yeah.
Mental, mental clarity is what I would kind of assign it to.
Yeah, I do my workouts in the morning and now I'm a little bit
less on schedule than I that I would like to be.
But when I did it, for example, adamantly every day I would go
into my meetings, I would go into work, I would already have
done my work, I would be awake basically.
I would sometimes be exhausted because you do a good workout,
you are exhausted. But when I went into meetings, I
would catch myself being very sharp and I think I would have
the mental clarity for that because I did all my exercise, I
I basically didn't think about anything, just working out,
giving it my all. And then throughout the day, I I
would be able to give it my all on a professional level as well,
what I do on a day-to-day. And I found that if I didn't do
that, I would maybe be slower, I would maybe be sluggish and I
wouldn't like that because I know what it feels like to be
like on top of your game. Yeah, to have mental clarity as
well and no distractions and just being very focused in that
way. Yeah, yeah.
And also having this and this is what I like in my work in my
day-to-day is that having this freedom also to?
Can quote scheduled in or plan it in a bit.
So for example, yes for sure you sometimes have important
meetings which are reoccurring, but if you also get by the
management, it's freedom to say for example potentially
Wednesday, there's a good win. So I would go kite surfing.
So I if I manage I will carve out half a day to go kite
surfing which I then I can make up for later.
If there's no team or not directly.
A relation I need to take care of and this is also what I like
because. Let's say mental clarity.
Squeeze it in where it fits with family, friends and work.
This is also I really appreciate, yeah, absolutely.
I think if if you can combine that flexibility of your
personal life and your work life like that's the that's the best
balance to be in. But the problem is if you let go
of that and if you don't do it, and if work kind of becomes the
main driver, which it has been, and then even maybe you have
side projects like, it's very hard to spiral then out of that
and back into kind of getting control of your life,
exercising, eating, healthy stuff like that.
Yeah, it's a it's a good thing when it's a good spiral, let's
say, but it's hard to get out of a bad spiral in that way too.
Yeah, definitely. And it also quite often gets
gets, well, not fostered, but you have these bad examples.
So I had a client a while ago where I mean do you will get a
bad side eye if you will if you're not at your desk at 8:00
and if you are leaving before 4 because the management was
always. As long as I have the people
around, they will work because if they sit at the desk they
will do productive work, was the assumption.
I think we can all agree with it.
It will not be productive the whole time.
But this was just the way they would manage it and which
creates a lot of frustration, anger because you need to
squeeze in your family life, your friends.
Sometimes having a little, little bit of flexibility helps
a lot, yeah, yeah, I agree. How do you like?
Do you have any pillars in place to help you not overwork?
Because I feel like if you have the flexibility and if you love
your work, you might overwork yourself as well and kind of hit
into a wall when it comes to burning out or even getting
close to that. Yeah, I I even had a situation
where I nearly burned out. I would say it was 2008, right
before I went on sabbatical, where work was everything.
So if I couldn't check my phone for emails, messages whatsoever,
even in the evening, I got nervous and while.
Let's say being on this journey, I also recognize that there are
little signs where I see OK, I'm, I'm under pressure, I'm
stressed out, and so forth. For example, my my sport
routine, if I come to the point there, I say, well, I have a
regular scheduled, let's say slot for for running or for
going to the gym. And if I need to skip it two or
three times, I start to think about OK, what's happening.
So what's the reason I do I have a stressful week?
Do I have two stressful weeks? What?
What's what? And the other thing is that.
Like a Monday, like today when I start working on the Monday and
I already feel tense when I just start working, then I normally
know something is off. There's too much work, There's
things which don't work because what I try to do is I have a 0
e-mail policy nowadays, also applies to Slack teams and you
have all these messages. But if I plan my day or my work
life right, I'd I'm always done with that stuff in a reasonable
time frame, OK? But if I if I recognize that
emails sit in the inbox, or Slack messages sit in the inbox
that I can't answer for a day or two, then I normally have too
much work. So then my planning shifts a bit
and then I try to quote work against it or change it again.
But what I need for that is. But I also see at clients quite
often instead freedom in the frame.
So I know OK, I need to do my 40 hours.
You all know that. But.
When are you do that, doing that and what are you doing when?
That's up to you to decide. So if I now talk with my unit
managers here at Tabia, they also say, well, Tom, this is
what I need. This is when I need it.
Does it work? Does it not work?
And as long as this open dialogue is happening, that's
quite helpful for me. Yeah, in, in organizations where
they have that flexibility or kind of are afraid to give that
flexibility. I'm assuming it has to do a lot
with trust, right? Discipline from the people that
work and trust from the people that give that freedom.
Definitely. And also quite often the the
goal setting system you have in these kind of organizations then
doesn't work. So for example and I had a
coaching a while ago with a guy he said well Tom, I need to, I
need to reduce the back rate by 50% in the next two months.
So that's my goal. I said well that's not a bad
goal but share it with your team.
No, I don't want to share it. I don't want to pressure them.
But now you keep the pressure in quotes for yourself, and you
also take the solution izing away from from the people,
because. When they know this is your main
driver, this is your main goal. They might come up with other
things they they want to do, but this is denositis behavior of
losing control because all they know what I need to do and now
they come up with a solution which I need to argue about
which might be better, which can be, but the people could
unsecure about it. So also on the management level.
This is where I quite often do my coachings around.
It's good to be, let's say, confident enough to let go of
things. So there's also sometimes this
decision metrics, when do you do a centralized and when do you do
decentralized decision? And quite often people say,
yeah, this is a decision I need to take for whatever reason and
then take a look on the decision and said, well, you don't have a
knowledge, you need to gather all the information.
It's not really affecting you. So why do you need to take the
decision? Because I'm here for decision
making. OK, great.
I mean it's probably the same for you with if you act on a
team or if you have a broader team setting, someone will make
a decision and then the team can argue about it.
But yeah, I I like not making all the decisions.
I think some decisions I have to make, but I'm I'm not sure which
ones they are yet and I'm not sure if I go too much into kind
of democracy and letting things be decided by the team.
It's something I'm I'm experimenting with and seeing
what is a good fit, but I'm not sure if I'm not acting when I'm
supposed to act and I feel like in your case people are acting
or they should delegate or they they become the bottleneck
themselves in that way. Yeah, that that's quite often
the situation, but. On the flip side, it also can
happen that people which are sitting in the team or on the
management level say, especially middle management, quite often
they say, well, I will do what my boss is telling me to do and
then I will cascade it down to my teams.
Because this is somehow an easy life, right?
Because the boss says we go left, we go left for two hours
and please let your team know. So they take it, give it to the
team and then the team said, but it doesn't make sense, they
still can safeguard their position with yeah, but our boss
said so. Because they don't want to make
own decisions. But also in the team level you
have the same. I had a team which I started
with Scrum and then two or three of the teammates said, well we
don't want to make a decision. You need to tell me what I need
to do tomorrow. I will do it.
I will do it great, but that's it.
And then this we do a Sprint planning.
Why should I plan? I just want to do my work and
tell me what to do, yeah. And handling these emotions and
these perspective is also quite important.
So what we did for this particular team is 1 specific
case was they didn't want it to take care of any kind of
refinement work. They want to say give me a
ticket which is ready to go and do it.
So instead of having the full team and the refinement, only
two of the people showed up and the rest of the team certainly
don't want to and everyone was happy and everyone was was
living with that. But what we did, half a year
later, I said, well, did you ever ask if now someone else
wants to join the refinement? No, Why?
They said no. I said, well, they said no once,
which doesn't mean they said no forever.
Yeah. So we asked and two people
actually said, well, I think now I want to join as well, which
was great for the really good, having this repetition and also
challenge again what's already set in stone, quotes in stone.
That's quite often awesome. Important.
Yeah, it's it's very hard for me to put myself in in those shoes
because one of my main drivers is like understanding why we're
doing something. And especially I've also been
put in kind of that middle management position where I was
like, no, no, I want you to kind of distribute information.
I was like, no, I don't want to do that.
If I'm in that position. I don't want to be there
basically because I I cannot be kind of a bridge between people
that need to know and someone that's going to tell me
something because then what is my role, right.
I'm just noise there. And you know how you have like
and you do this when you're in school, like elementary school,
you have this huge circle of people and one starts and like
says something to the other people.
Like all those communication bridges, it's all going to be
noise. And at the end you're going to
have not the essence, you're going to have some random
sentence that someone said along the way.
That's really what I feel like. And then to put myself in the
shoes of people that say I'm fine with that, I'll coast in
that position and I don't have really have accountability, but
I can. I can be like, no, that's that
person's fault or we need to execute based on this
information is very hard for me to do, to imagine myself be
there and then kind of from that point on help change it in that
way as well. Yeah.
And I think one of the things I also discovered in addition to
that is that I mean I'm I'm 34 years, so my whole professional
life is roughly 10 years. So, but I work with people which
are already 20 years, 25 years in the job, but they but they
also have another 1020 years to go because we all can retire I
think in Holland around. 68 Yeah.
Might as well be never. Yeah, yeah.
Never, Maybe yes. But to acknowledge that they
grew up in a different setting in a different world is also
quite an important. Because quite often I see these
agile coaches or professional consultants going in and said
this is the new world, this is what we need to do.
And they totally deny the fact that there was a different
world, which also were quite fine for quite a while.
So why should they just switch 100% or make a tall turn and
then having these discussions? Can be really beneficial because
quite often I think we forget that there are people in the
room which have a lot of experience, different kind of
experience, though, yes, I acknowledge that.
But they also have a lot of time ahead of them.
They need to work, yeah. So they also want to have a work
environment which is healthy for them, which might be different
to what we expect. Yeah.
Then from your point of view, like when you come into an
assignment or you're there for like change management, you have
an idea, have a better future, right?
A better way of working for them, and you might get pushed
back. No, I don't want to do the
refinement, just tell me what to do.
How do you balance between what is acceptable behavior and how
much do you push, kind of, for your vision of how we should
work together? Yeah, I think it what I always
try to determine first, what is the sense of urgency.
So why do we want to change? So if sometimes you have
organizations, they say, well we want to introduce Scrum or Agile
because everyone is doing it. Is that usually the reason?
Yeah, quite often it is actually.
And then you talk to the management and say, OK, have you
ever worked in a Scrum team? Now why should I?
My team does. I said OK, good, And you already
have two two red flags in the room.
But what also happened and with the team is so if you say, well,
you now need to work in Scrum. So we determine Scrum is the way
we want to go. And then addressing the concerns
of the team members to say, OK, what does Scrum actually mean?
What does it, what does it do to me, What what is changing?
And then also taking into account that you sometimes have
people which already worked in that environment and really love
it. To say yes.
But you now have people that are not used to having this time
boxes and also not used to let's say this freedom.
So it's like like take a child, If you put a child in the
sandbox and you tell this is your sandbox, stay in the
sandbox and you give it a shovel, it will probably shuffle
or it will throw the shovel away and try to leave the sandbox.
So. But if you say five times no, at
a certain point in time the child will stay in the sandbox.
So and what I see then is that we expect from people which got
5 * a no. I like to jump out of the
sandbox because new world, freedom to grow, yadda yadda
yadda and that doesn't work. So taking these people along and
also quite often explain what does certain things mean for
them and what are the benefits, That's what I normally do at the
beginning. And the other thing is then also
validating, do they actually want that?
And this is also where I see let's say my biggest benefit,
because we all can read the Scrum Guide, it's not that much
pages, it's easy to read, but doing it this translation work
between where do we want to go and where are the individuals in
the system to pathway a route for them which also works for
them. So I have sometimes teams which
I have let's say 2-3 subgroups and every subgroup needs a
different support system to really do the steps in one or
another direction. And quite often I also get the
question, so when are we done with this agile transformation
thingy? So when, when, when can we
finally work which is office? Great, I said, well actually we
are never done. Point #1 and point #2 is the
ideal system if you really follow it.
As always, what is the most beneficial for the group of
people you have? So as soon as you change the
group of people, you need to rethink your operate operating
model to a certain degree. Yeah, I I'm just trying to put
myself in your shoes. And even when you talk about
multiple teams, let's say there's five people in those
teams to build up a relationship with those people and with their
managers and kind of the organization is going to be a
lot of communicating. It's going to take a lot of
time, right? You don't just.
Start with a great relationship that has to take time for them
to be able to trust you in leading them to a better way of
working and a way of working that also works for their
circumstance. Because it's not really a cookie
cutter mold. Like it's customizable.
It needs to work for the people in that team and the people,
especially when they are diverse.
They require like flexible communication, a flexible way of
working in that way as well. How?
How do you manage? All those communication lines
building up those relationships from the position that you have.
Yeah. And it's always several things
which come to play. So one, one thing is how can we
make the change tangible? So how can we create this the
sandbox? How can we create the sandbox
that everyone from a start knows?
OK, this is where I can be. This is where I can run around
and maybe not directly dip the toe out of the sandbox, but this
is my play field and this can be done via standardization.
You can just share and communicate about it.
But then you have, yeah, well you always have someone in the
mix who says no, I don't want to do that, I can't do that.
And what helps quite often is if you tried to catch the early
adopters through, which are really open for it and start
with them because one of the biggest push backs you will
nearly always get is this doesn't work for us.
We are different. Yeah.
Well, and she said, OK, how can we create this fear of missing
out? So how can we create this
movement at the beginning that people understand it's working
for one subset. So for one team for example, and
especially people which are then concerned, anxious or not sure
how to do it, they start to speak up normally because they
see they are happy. I also want to be happy.
How can I be happy too? And I honestly had cases where
people then said I think the way they do it, I can't be happy,
which is fair, which is a fair assumption.
Which then brings you to the situation where you either say,
as harsh as it sounds, do I need to leave the organization
because this is the movement the organization has created or do I
find a different spot in the organization where I can
flourish? I had once the situation from a
really experienced architect, he said Tom, I don't want to work
in the Scrum team. I'm not good in that I don't
like it, but I'm great in talking and I'd like to be
asked. So what helped him was that we
created a model around him and another colleague to architect
where they had this Ask me Anything sessions always on a
Tuesday the 1st day. So the whole day would would be
asked them anything and in between they would design the
concept do the architectural things and so forth.
So the all teams I think it was 25 teams they knew on a Tuesday
or first day I can just go into that room or that's lecternal or
that team's room you never never know and ask them anything I
need to know And this worked perfectly for them.
They never worked in a scrum setting.
These two architects, they never had to, but they knew OK
Tuesdays and Thursdays people will hover us in quotes and the
rest of the time we can work on designs we like to so everyone
was happy. But the issue is that especially
around Agile coaching and this is also a movement we see in the
community nowadays, everyone thinks it's a skill set.
Now everyone already has. So everyone can work agile,
everyone is used to that. And I strongly believe there's
still pockets around the world or in in different cultures,
different organizations, wherever where it's not the
case. But the people are no longer
willing to invest in that journey because as you said, it
takes a lot of time. And I mean you are quite often
working in the system or in a team.
They also would say, yeah, work Scrum, you know how to just run.
Yeah, it's. I don't know, like I I grew up
with it. I I don't see what was before
that. I don't even know what the way
of working was because I joined an organization.
I came from operations. I was like, OK, this is software
development. This is our way of working and
we follow this framework and these are the rituals and.
That's it. This is how we deliver value and
we do that over and over and over again, Sprint after Sprint.
And I was like fine, if this is our way of working, I can.
I can see the benefit of it. I can see kind of the the
conveying of information, the growing together as a team, the
information distribution that happens, the opportunity to
understand why we do the things we do like I could see all the
benefits. Which makes it really hard to,
like, think back and think back from a place where that wouldn't
be there and people would just work.
Like, how would they work? Yeah, there would be no
framework. There would be no processes.
Yet they would still deliver, like, and they always delivered.
Maybe not on a timely manner, maybe like, maybe they did meet
deadlines. I have no clue.
Yeah, that makes it hard. Yeah.
And this is for me also where I got a glimpse at the very, very,
very beginning of my career. Because when I started, I joined
an organization which was focusing on classical waterfall
project management consulting. Yeah, really long and Ruddy
description. But anyway, so I would go to an
organization, they had a waterfall project, they made a
plan, they made a design and would execute it for five years
and hope it works. So I got a glimpse of it and I
think, and this is also what I see when I go to conferences, I
still strongly believe do agile where agile is due and so it
will not work everywhere, but especially like you said,
there's now a generation of developers people not even in
just in software development. I think in a broader sense or
some other areas which never saw the classical waterfall way and
it worked and there's still companies which are extremely
successful with it, but we never learned that.
And I think we are now transitioning sometimes into the
situation that it's not about teaching agility that much
anymore. It's more about how can we
translate between the world we have been for years and now the
world we want to live in in the future.
And not a lot of people can do that because like you and me, we
are somehow, yeah, natives in agility.
We never work otherwise. And now there are people for a
reason which still have a lot of knowledge and stuff to bring to
the table and given the timeline also a lot of years of work
ahead of time. They also want to integrate in a
way and I'm curious how this would play out.
Yeah, same. But like from my perspective, I
didn't wanna be bothered with and I trusted other people to
optimize our way of working. Yeah, right.
And I could see later down the line what people, what decisions
were made and maybe if I agreed or disagreed with that, but I
still didn't care. I trusted the other people to
make those decisions, to have those experiments that you said,
to test the assumptions if this works for us.
And I wanted to focus on getting really good at my part of like
this puzzle within the organization, which was software
development especially because I didn't have any like
professional experience made it very easy for me to focus on
that. But then later on when I saw
that the team aspect, for example, when I was confident
and comfortable within my software development skills that
I could deliver, I started looking outside at what could be
optimized. And I did kind of gravitate
towards optimizing us, working together as a team.
And I feel like if you really get a lot of energy out of that
within that team, you might then step out of that team and look
at other teams and try and like optimize their processes and
make sure they're more effective.
Because I like a well oiled machine.
I like functioning within a well oiled machine.
And if that well oiled machine is not as well oiled, then I
might just step out of it and try and tweak it, Yeah.
And I think that that's something where there still will
be and always is work to do and things you can do around it.
It's just that let's say with my speciality, leadership or
executive coaching quite often. It's also this, I still have
this old guard people which learned for 2025 years.
This is how it should be and it came.
They came into that position for a reason, which is fine.
But also then teaching them how the world change.
And one of the different things is sometimes hard for them to
understand, to digest, because let's, let's see, for example,
value stream funding. So you give the value stream 4
million a year. Yeah.
So you don't know what you get out of it.
You only know that they will do their very best to create value,
which is hard if you in the past had.
OK, I have a fourth cast. I have a business case.
I calculate the business case and this is what I get.
Yeah. So I know what I get already
sometimes as you said, I didn't get it because it took longer or
it got more expensive whatsoever.
But flipping it around to say, OK, now you spend 4 million and
you need to trust your organization that there will be
a well oiled machine which is creating as much value as they
can out of that. That's a total mind shift for
them. And I went to the Scan Agile
conference in March this year and we had a presentation for
around 102 hundred people around that.
And I asked the group, which was primarily executive level, who
have you ever worked in Agile slash Scrum to make a little
more concrete Scrum setting? And I think maybe 1/4 or less of
the people said I I even know what it is, roughly.
The rest of the world has never worked in it, but I expect my
teams to. That's a long Rd.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's I think it's hard if it's
not carried throughout the organization, right?
Because then you're really lacking a vision of.
How? How do we do this within our
organization right and all the way through from a vertical
slice? Your manager should understand
and their manager should at least have an understanding of
how we do this, and it's best if they also kind of work with it
because then they learn. I think it's it's hard to just
go from the theoretics theoretical side because you
need the practicality of how does this work within our
environment and within this team.
Yeah, but it's also if you didn't turn it around like you
said, you're native in that field and you just wanted to
code. You want to be a good developer.
This is what you wanted to do. Sometimes people have the
tendency, tendency to say, well, for me it's logical what we do.
So why do they not get it? But then appreciating or
accepting or acknowledging whatever you will to say, well,
they never learned that they they grew up in a totally
different world. And I never did.
That's why for me it's logical because I never saw something
else. Yeah, for them it's what are
they doing? So it's like translation
template is sometimes missing. Yeah, I get that, does that
because I I think about let's say 30 years down the line, wave
workings are going to evolve and going to be adaptable.
But even the way you're communicating kind of your
position in this, it's a lot of assumption testing.
It's a lot of experimenting. Which means you're flexible
enough to accept when things work and when things don't work.
And I feel like that kind of understanding that that mindset
is sometimes missing because when you have that and the way
of working will change down the line, 20 years from now, you're
not going to be like, no, this is what we did in the past.
This is what always has worked. You're going to be like,
interesting, why does that work and what has changed?
And maybe I need to kind of reframe my way of working and
adopt that right? Because if there's a better
solution, I don't care which solution is the best.
Yeah. But I would like to know which
one is the best and why? Because then I understand.
Yeah. And I think time will also tell
because I I think it was. It was last year.
Yeah. Last year I had a client who
said, well, Tom, I'm 55, so I have another five years and then
I retire early. I don't want to change anymore.
Yeah, I changed my whole life. That's hard.
And I saw. I saw a good reason in that
because he said Tom I don't want to change again and I'm tired.
I'm I'm man I worked for 30 years I'm done with that And I
said you are right and still the organization the the world is
expecting you to change. And I think for you and me right
now for us, it's still easy to say yeah well then we change,
circumstances change. So we change.
But I, I give it, give the point to him to say, well, I really
want to change 2030 years from from now again to something
maybe radically different to what we know today.
I honestly don't know. Yeah, maybe you don't have
energy anymore. It could happen.
I think that acknowledging that that it's also hard for them.
This is also what's sometimes missing.
And this is where it quotes. My sweet spot is to say, OK, I
have a team, a group or set of people which is loving, living
the new world. And I have a group and set of
people which is saying, well, yeah, we want to change somehow,
but it's a long way. It's harsh.
And the easiest is to start from top of the leadership.
But there are a lot of layers in between where we then need to
talk to different kind of people to organize it.
And as you said, if you code something that's tangible,
that's a function, something is visible.
Sometimes I spend weeks with talking to people and they all
do better. But if then the old management
is asking me what have you done, by the way?
Well, I think it was 40 hours of talking.
So I now pay you for 40 hours of talking that doesn't end up and
balance that out, make this transparent that that's the key
as well. Yeah.
Do you have any like artifacts that you measure with regards to
progress that your communication has done for teams and their
output? Or what do you usually measure
as kind of the effect of change? Different things than what the
management sometimes likes to measure.
But there nowadays a lot of good KPIs you can rely on or you can
take into account if you want to make it more tangible.
For example, one of the good things if you for example work
in Scrum is commitment rate. So what has the team planned and
what has the team actually executed?
So quite often the commitment rate is off, so they plan, I
don't know 40 story points and deliver sometimes 60.
So why could they over deliver question mark or they deliver 20
and figuring that out makes it more makes it more reliable.
And the other thing is then also if you think about commitment
rate, there's one thing, the other thing is MPs scores.
You can just ask the teams to do that.
Or the other thing is at some times we use so-called coaching
cards where you can say OK with this respective person we touch
based on the 25 topics we agreed on.
It's like a like a playbook. So it didn't say OK for our
organization, this is the playbook everyone should know
and then you go through that. It's not directly beneficial for
the person itself, but you can at least measure that certain
points are transparent and aware.
So what we then do is Definition of Done is a good example.
We had one setting with I think A-Team up to 3030 teams and we
would just measure, is every team aware of the definition of
Done? You would now say, yeah, well
everyone should know the Definition of done.
But in this regards, no one knew that there's a definition of
Done. We cannot question was it a good
definition of Done. But in the 1st place, it's just
a quantitative measure. Is everyone aware of it?
Yeah. Are you the person that comes
with the initiatives of? This is what we should measure
or we need a definition of done or we need to understand what
that means? Or do you let the team decide
after educating them, like what is what is your role in that?
Are you the driver or do you try and kind of create bottom up
change as well? It's both, yeah.
So I see my, let's say, professional focus also on
providing ideas of recommendation.
What could work in combination to what does the team actually
asking for? So sometimes the team's already
asking for certain things and say we need this or we have a
huge dependency which is always biting our ass.
We need to work on that one which needs to be acknowledged
and done right away and then in combination, OK, but what else
is missing? So where are we struggling and
then also playing the whole field from?
Is it a scaling topic? Is it a additional topic?
Is it whatever kind of topic that that's the key for me, but
it sometimes takes time to figure it out because it also
can be a cultural thing. So I've worked with, for
example, with Tiktok a while ago.
And yeah, Tiktok was all about growing, being being humongous
and a lot of the teams in one area struggled about
dependencies and well then we focused on dependencies.
While the actual request from the management was I think they
wanted to have Scrum at scale setting.
I said well that's not the pain. They already talk quite well
with each other, that's not the issue.
But you add so much complexity by just growing so fast that
they did not keep up with it. And the issue they had was the
so-called feature factory. They would just bump out
features I think every week and no one would use it.
Which is then also not fulfilling for you as a as a
coder to say, yeah, I think we have developed these features
half a year ago, No one is using it.
That's good to know, yeah. Throw it away is what I would
say instantly, Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you get measured on that,
then yeah, that will be your output.
It's like if there's a misalignment between what the
actual problem is and what the management thinks that the
problem is, or even what teams think that the problem is, your
output will change based on that.
And I feel like you need people that have kind of this objective
overview and it helps if they're outside of the organization
because so they have no skin in the game to give you guidance on
that. And the guidance can also be
wrong in some certain cases, right?
Have you found yourself in that position as well where you came
in, you're like, OK, I think it's, it's this or.
I mean we've grown too fast. We need to focus on this and it
turned out to be wrong or it turned out to be unnecessary.
The changes you've made Yeah. And I think the the amount of I
can quote wrong decision gets smaller and smaller the more I I
engage in the in the agile world.
So that's the learning curve that that's good to say.
But yeah for example at the very beginning I I became I think a
Scrum Master for the wrong reasons because the reason I did
it was OK, there's a good new certification in market.
There's a cool project where I can travel to the states but I
need to be a Scrum master. So let's let's become a Scrum
master. Worked perfectly.
But I think two or three years later I also said once that we
need a common retrospective. So we had six teams and I said
now I have the feeling we need to have one retrospective
altogether because there's certain things which I see as a
pattern across all teams. We need to be in one room.
So we created a big, really, really huge retrospective day
with everyone in the office. It was before COVID and we
started to talk about things, but no one would speak up
because the group was just too big.
This, it's a psychological safety where you feel I can
speak out there, My teammates, I can share things with them,
didn't work any longer. So we pushed this whole
endeavour on the organization just to learn, and that one day
it it sucked. Yeah, I can imagine and part of
me wishes like the theory would be easier, but then I think like
organizations are unique. There are a group of people that
come together with a common goal and people hop on board and
people hop off board and things change and adopt, right?
Even if we talk about culture, it's it's such a like flexible
thing and culture can change and it can be better, it can be
worse. But that's a person's opinion.
That's subjective. For the people that hop on.
It's the best thing ever, which makes it really hard to then
just look at theory, which means that if you want to start this
thing, I think you need a lot of practical experience.
But then throughout that journey you will make mistakes and you
will learn just by doing what works and what doesn't work for
different amounts of people within diverse settings feel
like it's a whole lot to get into.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think the one thing which
shows, let's say, mature organizations or organizations
which are ready for the for the world, if you will, is how fast
can you recover from a mistake. So how, how fast or how quick
can you recognize, OK, didn't work, let's drop it, do
something else. And I think some organizations
then hold onto it for too long because they say no, we invested
money in it that needs to work. Yeah and then you recognize to
be honest, no it doesn't. We learn a lot let's go.
And I think it applies to the actual software development also
in other organizations. I was my girlfriend worked for a
big company in the in in in Sweden and they would build a
plant to recycle stuff and they learned OK the factory haul is
too big well let's live. It is like it is mistake we we
spent too much money on on on not enough money actually to
figure that out. Mistake made, but just make the
best out of it. So instead of saying yeah, well
we need to change the whole layout again, they said, well
let's just rent out half of the the factory hall.
Done, done, problem solved. And just this simple mindset
that's all this, let's say pragmatism to say ah come, let's
fix it in a different way. That's what's needed.
But I don't see it that often to be honest.
Yeah, it it's also hard right? Because from me, from like, AII
think it's solutions quite often.
And if I think I have the solution, it's very hard to be
like what? What are other options there?
So if you were like, OK, let's reorganize the factory like it,
it makes sense if you think that's the option, right?
Like sometimes you can't even see a different option and
someone throws you a curveball and says, well, you just rent
out the space and we're good and you're like, man, I didn't think
of that. To acknowledge that and to allow
A-Team, whatever that might be, to bring in those ideas, right,
To just put a problem in the middle and be like we should
solve this as a team. I think it's such a good skill
to have, but it's hard to acquire, I feel like.
It's really hard and it's also this for example if you then
talk about a team what is the frame you have created as an
organization that can act in. And I mean I had once a team
which was really really cool team and I worked together for a
year or two already and they knew directly what is their code
of coding, what is their architectural guidance.
They had everything in place and they then it was an app, app
development team and once the. In the Sprint review, one of the
the stakeholders then said how did you do that?
I didn't know that our platform is capable of doing that.
And they said, well, we actually connected to an an open source
API and did yadi, yadi, yadi. And then the guy got totally
haywire and said you cannot just connect our app to open AIS,
blah blah blah. And then the team said, well,
actually you didn't wrote down anywhere that it's not allowed.
And the API is totally in line with our security and compliance
regulations. Everything's fine.
We checked that and then the guy said, so we have a new
functionality which is working. Wonderful.
We connected to an open API. We can now argue if this is good
or bad, but it works, yes. Yeah, Well, you're right.
I allowed you to. So why not doing that?
But. Having a team which is then, as
you said, thinking so much out-of-the-box, what can we do
to fix it? And also having this freedom to
fix it in the way they think is the most beneficial, That is
quite hard to achieve. Yeah, yeah, I agree.
I feel like and I'm I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that,
like you have different organizational problems, right?
When you start from a small organization and you move to
hiring more people and scaling rapidly, let's say in the
example of Tiktok that you gave, those will have very specific
problems with people and growing fast.
And OK, what what do these people do now and how do we
still deliver value? And you have organizations which
already have established that scale over that level of scale
in the past, very much in the past.
And they need to adopt kind of in this new way of working
because competitors that rapidly scale like that are catching up
and they're afraid. So they look at what they do and
they try and implement that. Are those kind of the two levels
of of organizations that you usually see or is there kind of
an unidentified one in there as well?
Now I think that there are two big chunks, you can quantify
them. There's then sometimes this
behavior nowadays that let's say you have a traditional
organizations like Lufthansa, Lufthansa, I mean they are
around forever, It's the airline in Germany and.
They recognize that it's so hard to change their traditional ways
of working They have so they started to have an incubator and
they always say it's a startup incubator.
But nowadays they also have an incubator it Lufthansa Digital
Hunger I think it's name where they say they are focusing on
our complete IT landscape because we can't change.
We recognize we are not flexible enough to change the whole
organization. So we just found something new
and do it from there. So instead of changing, some
organizations tend to. Let's do what everyone is doing,
starting small and then grow it. That's one option.
And the other option is to then have organizations which say no,
the sense of urgency is so high, we need to tear it down and
start it new. So for example, Air New Zealand
was one of the airlines who recognized that COVID sucks.
OK, we can all agree to that, but it's an opportunity.
So what they did during COVID this day took the whole
organization apart. So in antigen, I think one of
the few airlines around the world would say we have a 100%
agile mindset. They used the Helix model, so
they restructured everything and apparently time will tell are
now outperforming the competition in their respective
area. So by also let's taking
everything apart and starting starting new but still I think
you can you can categorize the organizations into.
Let's say traditional, a lot of legacy, a lot of bureaucracy if
you will and these new fast growing organizations.
And yeah, I think you can say about Tesla what you will.
Tesla was one of the first organizations which managed to
combine these, let's say heavy complex hardware development
with fast moving, fast decision pace and also software.
Will it be successful down the road further?
Don't know, because I think now the the rest of the world
recognized shit. They did it.
So let's pivot. But pivot the tanker like
Volkswagen for example. That takes forever, yeah.
Yeah, I can imagine. And the I think it has a lot to
do with your risk appetite as well.
If you say tear it all down, we're gonna start from scratch.
If you are in an organization which has acquired a certain
level of skill, that is like an like an all or nothing decision,
right? If that doesn't work, then what
is left? Or have you destroyed what you
had before? That's a risky one.
Yeah. And I think I I am more fond of
maybe that's my risk appetite of creating those incubators.
Right. Yeah.
Organizing teams or setting up a a startup environment where they
are disrupting your own market share.
Something in a phrase that a friend of mine told me forget
his name, but he was on previous episode.
I'll probably put it in the in the description, but I think
it's very interesting that more organizations I think should do
that. But don't do that right.
If you are able to disrupt your own market share, it's like
you're creating your own competitor, but you are the
competitor, which means you have those learnings and you can then
either incorporate it or still add on top of that and outgrow
yourself in that way. Yeah.
And especially from organizations which have a
certain level of scale, they have the funds to do that.
They have sometimes even the time to do that.
Yeah. So why they don't do that and
just build on top of what they already have is kind of unknown
for me. Yeah.
I think one of the reasons to me there's not a final answer and
also not fixing the situation is that there's again not enough
sense of urgency that doesn't hurt enough.
So they still make good revenue share, the shareholders are
happy. So why spending money or funding
on something where we don't know what comes out of it.
I think that that's the one thing back to risk appetite and
how much are you willing to pay? And the other issue is they
don't know how. So let's take Deutscheban.
I think they all have the Deutscheban digital, which is.
Somehow an incubator, but at least something which which is
more flexible. But one of the first feedbacks,
I think it was an article I read.
I would need to dig it out. It was years ago, showed that
the ban dodge ban always wanted to do that, but they're always
recognized shit. We don't know how because we
don't have entrepreneurs who want to start up.
So we actually need to find someone who wants to do a
startup in a corporate world and that's hard to do.
And I do see organizations doing that more and more.
So I do wonder if down the line, because again, time is like the
the most crucial factor here, if it's going to be valuable or if
it's going to be like a a lost investment in that way or I hope
there's learnings and I think there will always be learnings.
It's just, yeah, how valuable do you estimate those learnings to
be? Yeah.
And the question is then also do I fund my own incubator or do I
just in quotes laid back? And see what start-ups are
popping up. Acquire those.
And acquire those because you can then see as soon as it's
proven as a business model you can say well just buy them
because you as you said you have the funds.
You can either decide bet on yourself that you can build it
and come up with ideas which are so disruptive that that that
will help. Or you just in quotes spend a
little bit of seed money into start-ups where you think they
can work and just acquire them. But then and that's the next
thing where I think. It was in Germany.
There were a lot of these startups which had for example
different spices or these fancy brands which started to be
around in the in the supermarket as well where then gave a little
on to fossils. Let's just acquire the brand and
add it to our portfolio and the moment I did that the the brand
went down. So it didn't work anymore.
So what is the reason to that? And I dived a little bit into it
and I think the issue is that. They now have a startup
character, ish situation culture which they want to integrate
into their given system, which is again a tough thing to do
because it's not just taking it, integrating it with work.
It's OK. Two cultures are clashing
against each other and yeah that's the that's the challenge
I see with with the acquiring as well.
There was this company, it was called Dollar Dollar Shave Club
and it was exactly what they advertised.
They had a huge marketing campaign a few years back,
Genius Genius CEO, which made a video that went completely viral
and their whole thing was OK for dollar, you get a razor and
that. We have extendable models for
that, so you can get a little bit more for a little bit more.
And Gilana actually acquired them for quite a sum of money,
but then started messing with the whole model, right, and
adding more expensive razors. And all of a sudden your Dollar
Shave Club was like a few $10. And then, yeah, the whole model
lost its purpose. And that part of the
organization was completely lost, like a lost investment,
either because of a mismatch of understanding how the business
model works or should work or what people want, or just by
virtue of not having done enough research, Like, I feel like
acquiring has such a risk and it is a even bigger amount of
investment than investing in starting up your own.
But yeah, you do need the expertise and the skills to do
that. That's a that's a challenge
there. It's a hard one, I feel like.
And this again brings then all this different kind of
leadership or people who lead or want to be responsible for
certain things to to the play because you need people, OK, I
need people which are capable of for example doing merchant
acquisition. How do we integrate then we need
to need to have people which are capable of hyper growth or
growing fast and that. But then we also need to have
people who can stabilize an organization and then we want to
have people which can do a start up so in that.
At the end some organizations try to bring all these people
into one room and say Kumbaya, we are happy world.
There's there's some conflicting even that doesn't work, no.
From from looking at it from your angle, do you ever think
about starting your own organization and experiencing
those challenges from from inside out and not necessarily
from that objective kind of outside in point of view?
Do you have those thoughts? Yeah, I do.
I think I'm always. I have a good friend who has a
start up and he's now. Been doing that for five years.
The interesting thing is that I think I'm lacking the right
idea. I think that's the one thing.
The other thing, I think it would be too heavy on the
process side at the beginning. So it makes sense.
Everything would be perfectly structured, but nothing would be
done. And I don't know, I cannot tie
into this whole idea that a lot of people who are.
Let's say founding a company, they do it for an exit.
So nowadays there's a complete culture around.
OK, I have my idea. I push my idea for 2-3 years
because I want to make a big exit.
What's the point? Yeah, so why?
Why should I? I mean, yes, I can probably make
a lot of money about it. I will probably not have a life
for two 3-4 years. Well, this is rough.
Retiring with 40. It's a fair fault, but.
I think the risk, I'm not the risk taker, I'm too risk adverse
for that. Yeah that makes sense.
And then what? What fulfills you with your
current job that like experiencing that start up
wouldn't do in that way? Yeah, I think that sometimes I
think, oh shit, I could do it better.
But on the other hand, nowadays I see so many different
organizations, also in a larger scale, where I not sometimes, I
quite often can make people happy by changing things.
And this is fulfilling. So to see that they flourish,
they also understand that this wonderful new world, the two of
us grew up and actually works. And that's just what I what I
like. I think that that's that's good.
And knowing that I get a paycheck every month helps, too.
That's so good stuff. Yeah, I agree with that.
I was for you because you, I mean you you have which I don't
have. You have the technical
knowledge. So even if you think about an
idea, something you would need to develop, why not?
Giving it a try, it's it all has to do with fear.
Like I I've said on this podcast and I'm still going to say it
like I I do think I want to do that from moving into high
school. I wrote that on my like, end of
yearbook. I I always thought about it in
university. I followed a minor
entrepreneurship and we we built kind of this thing which is
basically Uber Eats. We partnered with restaurants
and we did the delivery. So I jumped on my bike and we
had a few orders there. We built the website ourselves.
So I've always had that idea of doing that.
It just has to do with how comfortable and when am I going
to take the plunge. And more and more conversations
that I have, people are going to be like you're never going to be
comfortable. At some point you will take the
plunge and I think I will take the plunge at some point.
I don't think necessarily I'm lacking any ideas.
I think I could try and experiment in my way through it
and be like this is what works. Hopefully find something where
my passion lies in as well, which is exercise, anything
having to do with Japan or more of the technical stuff.
And I I like having those conversations of people that
have taken that plunge and learning from them because I
feel like it's going to prepare me more and more.
But yeah, all has to do with fear at the end.
It has and I mean a friend of mine now started on a on a one
year scholarship with doing a start up.
But yeah, he's this. He has thousands of ideas.
He's a vision here, but he now has a hard time to find someone
who's more structurally. Orientated and say OK, by the
way, if he this is your great idea, when, when, when is it
done and he again? He asked me as you.
But not willing to to to to jump.
But yeah, I think it needs, it needs to fit.
But it's also great to see that there are so many different
styles and leadership and the way you can combine it that.
I mean, I'm also not done with my journey diving into that.
Yeah, yeah, I The only thing that scares me is that time I
feel like sometimes catches up and I find myself being like,
man, I've done this for a long time, and long is very short in
some people's eyes. But for me, it's very long.
Yeah, like when I joined this, I was like within X years I want
to do XXY and Z and obviously plans change, but I always want
to be in an environment where I can grow the fastest.
Yeah, and where I have the flexibility and freedom to do
whatever my mind like, my curiosity drives me.
I think when I lose that, I'll either switch organizations or
I'll try and find something else or try and create something
myself. But as long as I have that, I'm
happy. And then I yes, I might have
thoughts, but those are still going to be thoughts until
something changes, I feel like. Because again, happiness is like
priority. Yeah, that's for sure.
And comfort is a big thing as well.
Like a creature of habit, yeah. Yeah, I can totally agree to
that. Yeah, good stuff.
This was a lot of fun, man. I I really enjoyed this
conversation. I've heard you've done a lot of
podcasts. Is this kind of similar to what
you experienced in the past? It's totally different on that
one. I really enjoyed it.
So also from my side, thank you for that because it was a really
nice conversation. I think we pivoted in a lot of
different connect directions and the podcast I did so far were
always which is fine. It's also I mean the listeners
have a certain expectation. Well, it was a predefined topic
and sometimes you have this tendency to now we can derail
into one another direction and. And quotes don't allow it
because they want to stick to the primary topic, which I which
I get. But this was more, let's say,
open and let's see where we end. Yeah.
Was there anything you still wanted to add on that we kind of
left unspoken that you feel like?
I think we we for example touch base the whole where I'm also
going on conferences with that there's always the next Sprint
because you had this one one line in between where you said
well I just want to work on for another one, next one, next one,
next one. And there are so many let's say
traps you can do by doing that. I had a tendency to jump on that
one, but then for now and then, not today.
Because, and there's always what I say at conferences.
Have you ever seen a sprinter, an athlete who's sprinting and
then sprinting again? No, no, It's only what we do.
Yeah, yeah, you told me, you told me that.
I think in the in the intercalls line is so stuck with me.
I think I said it to a person in previous episode as well.
Like it's such a good point of view to have right and
perspective because we do do that and no one takes us out of
that. Yeah, yeah.
So sometimes take a break, I feel like, yeah, definitely.
Good stuff. Then I'm going to round it off
here. Thank you for listening
everyone. I'm going to put all Tom socials
in his in description below, check him out, let him know you
came from our episode. And with that being said, thank
you for listening. We'll see you on the next one.