 Right, okay there you go. So yes, so we, at our book club we read Team Mastery from Jeff Watts and we've invited Jeff along today to discuss with us the book. Hi Jeff, how are you doing? You're a mute, classic. Oh there we go, there we go. It wouldn't be an online meeting if we didn't do that right? No, exactly. Yeah I'm good, how are you? Yep, we're all good, a little bit cold today. I got my fire on so it's nice and warm in here now. So yeah, so thanks for coming along and taking time out to discuss the book with us. I think as we said in our sort of emails to set up this, really the idea of today was, you know, the people who read the book and also we've sort of viewed one of your YouTube videos which actually is about Team Mastery in the remote sense so quite a few people have watched that as well. So it was, it was Ez that bought the club, bought the club your book so Ez maybe if you'd like to start off. Yeah Jeff, I won't ask for any royalties but yeah I was the one who brought this on up. I actually started reading this book before I joined SMART so I've been here for three months and I commented on Nickton actually at the speedy delivery so yeah good service man and it really resonated with me, a lot of it did resonate with me and I read your Scrum Master book as well in the day and what I really liked about it was the fact that, you know, you state what you think good looks like and that's okay, good is good but then you also make the point that actually there can be a step higher than that, you can go great as well but that's fine if you just stay at good and I like the fact you translated that idea into Teams and a lot of the themes in this book actually resonated with me which is why I brought it forward to the other guys and said maybe we should have a look through this because you know we've got a lot of work to do at SMART, a lot of good stuff's already happening but we can definitely use the themes in this book to help improve our teams. Cool, was there anything in particular that made you, made you go for the book in the first place? Well I quite like the idea, I know you weren't going for this but I quite like the idea of having a one place where I can look at some good examples of what good looks like and I know the messaging in this book is not, hey you know if you follow all of this stuff in squad you're going to have the perfect team and if none of it's, if for example you don't have a bit of it then your team's not going to be great, that's not what you were going for but I quite like the idea of having a book that I can go back to time and time again and look at sort of areas where I can help my teams. Yeah and you do have a lot of good stuff in there. Yeah and the idea being that you can, if you're struggling to know where to start then it could give you a few prompts and you know people read through it and they can't help but look through their own lands right and they'll let you say it resonated with you I'm sure every other person that read it a different part would resonate with them because their team's in a different place and their challenges are slightly different and it's kind of almost my philosophy of writing a book is write a bad book quickly and then find out where it's bad rather than try and write the perfect book so it's rated a number of different times but it's the same with a model I think is write something, bad idea prioritize your backlog badly whatever it is and then get feedback on where it is bad rather than try and get it perfect straight away so you've got something that you can go to but equally I really wanted to make the point that it's not the way of doing it it's not an exhaustive list or a complete list. Yeah now definitely I was going to say there were a few kind of you know in relation to it resonating a few kind of head in hands moments where I'm like oh man I wish I'd read this book like two or three years ago and then I would have been able to handle this particular situation way better so I had a few party stories to tell would you? Yeah that's true but I wouldn't have had as much cringing going on either when I look back do we want to go into questions then David? Well just really just sort of like an actual flow sort of discussion really I mean what I'd like to know Jeff is like how did you come to the you know the way that you've you know the way that you wrote the book and the way of using scenarios like you did quite a lot. Why did you sort of decide on on on that path? It's mainly it's my own biases really so when I when I learn I over the years I found that like I really I tend to resonate with people who can tell stories because I put myself in those positions a little bit like Ezra was saying there. It kind of normalizes it for people realizing that they're not the only ones experiencing that kind of thing and I find it a little bit easier to get messages across in that way I suppose than just writing very theoretically. I was never really one for the theoretical textbooks at school I was more for like case studies and things so that's partly where it came from I think and the good to great thing was I'm not really a big fan of anti-patterns I mean they're useful because I'd rather learn from somebody else's mistakes than mine sure but telling you all the ways that things go wrong doesn't necessarily lead to how you can do things right it might do if you eliminated all the bad stuff and avoided all the traps maybe but it's not necessarily elimination of the negative that leads to positive so now I find it's easier to pick holes in things than it is to give you know good things to focus on and I think we all need a lot more good stuff in general. And it also makes people be a bit more receptive I often think if you're telling them a good story as opposed to saying this is why you shouldn't do something or this not anti-pattern in terms of it being a little bit softer for them and a bit more a little less resistant. Absolutely we incorporated that we're writing a load of training material for the moment and we realized that we'd fall into this hole of just like bunging down loads of anti-patterns rather than actually speaking to people from a more positive place and saying this is something you could do rather than don't do this so we really we really took that on board actually that was a really helpful piece for us. We're now just translating all of our anti-patterns into what does that actually mean you do do. Don't throw them away because they're fun right they're good stories they're fun and it's nice have a few things and think oh yeah I won't do that I won't do that I won't do that but one of the things that I can't even remember when it was but it's such a long time ago but it's sort of stuck in my mind I don't even know whether it's true I'm not a neuroscientist but I was told that the brain doesn't think in terms of modality so if you if you think into yourself don't do this don't do this you know don't mess up don't mess up all your brain is thinking is mess up and that's what I can't verify it but it's stuck in my head for so long I thought well rather than if I'm going to repeat something let's have something a little bit more positive. So Nicole yeah sorry before we maybe get into the detail of the book to stick on what Es was saying about your experience of writing it and then your experience of sharing it with people I think we were talking about what are the bits that have most confounded people um where they just you know they've got stuck on it and they ask you questions about it over and over again if if any and then contrast like vice versa what are the bits that people just can't get enough of have you seen patterns like that in speaking to people? Yeah I've probably got more if I thought about it more but the one thing that really pops into my head is people reading it and thinking okay it makes sense Jeff but how do I get my team to do it? Yeah people in the team reading it think yeah it makes sense Jeff but how do I get my managers to let us do it okay so it's all it's the sort of the external focus you know this was to come back to Es's point this yeah there are books written about teamwork but there aren't necessarily that many written for the teams themselves it's usually for a leader to do to a team or to create a team and the idea here is yeah you could you could pick this up as a scrum master, a product owner, a coach, a manager whatever but equally you could pick it up as a member of a team that didn't have any kind of leadership and wanted to create that sense of self-leadership and you could you could do that that was kind of one of the things that I want to get out of this but it's easy yeah it's a common human trait of yeah this this would all work if so and so did something or so and so changed and you know another of my sort of operating principles is that the only person you have a hope of changing is you so focus on yourself rather than focusing on trying to get anybody else to do anything differently and try and work out well why wouldn't they naturally do something different better more helpful and how can I affect that rather than I need to make this person do something different that's that's the number one common thread I would say it's not necessarily around one of the topics although bravery is usually a difficult thing for people in organizations because they have to sort of it's the phrase learned helplessness again I had no idea whether this is true but it's one of those scientific studies that I was told once and it stuck in my head around the tip where the term learned helplessness came from it's something to do with sticking a bunch of monkeys in a cage and giving them some bananas and when they went to pick up the bananas they shot them with a water cannon and I presumably this was done a long time ago when animal rights wasn't a thing right and and so every time they put a banana and they went to get it they hit them with the water cannons so eventually they stopped ignoring they started ignoring the bananas and over time they took monkeys out of the cage and put new ones in so they're replacing them and the new ones obviously didn't know about the water cannon so when they went over to pick up the bananas the rest of the monkeys hit them so don't do that and however they speak and then but it kept going until a point where no monkey had ever seen the water cannon but none of them would pick up a banana and it's that that sense of learned helplessness they just didn't know why they weren't doing it they just weren't doing it and and in our organizations I see a lot of that there's no point that's making this change because change doesn't happen well can you give me any example of well no that's just the way things are around here I can't give you an example of it but I've been told so often that things don't change that there's no point hmm that's a really interesting one because I was going to ask you about audacity that was kind of the one that sticks out to me it's a difficult one audacity to me I know yeah I've since I've read your book I'm always blabbering on about audacity which I would imagine would be quite annoying but yeah I know you've mentioned before that you'd maybe phrasing it as bravery might have been a bit more useful because uh but it wouldn't have fitted into the squad acronym so maybe not but um but actually um well especially during these remote times right or trying to I guess we can't control how people behave right but we can guide them and we can we can at least show them what good looks like but I'm finding audacity really difficult like getting people to challenge the status quo uh based on what you know what you were just saying um to challenge one another even in a in a team full of people that barely know each other and they're all remote uh it's it's a real challenge and um yeah I just wanted to know if you'd had any feedback on audacity um in general from other people yeah the I suppose that there are two two techniques that people have picked out this book more than anything else one of them might spelled out in a lot more detail than the other but one of them was the user manual which which people come out with quite a lot and I only really sort of paid not lip service to but I didn't really go into detail of it in the book uh but the one where I did was the where people had really latched on to his fear setting and that idea of just challenging your limiting beliefs challenging your assumptions about well what what do I think's going to happen here if I'm from being brutal with myself here what am I actually worried about and let's put a plan together to reduce those worries to to recover the situation if it does happen and actually to be a little bit more um have a different perspective on it as well so going through that process for a lot of people whether it's you know speaking up in a in a retrospective or challenging management or you know whatever just starting a new personal habit whatever it is that having that process for okay I'm going to assess my fears here rather than just have this undiagnosed unlabeled unanalyzed just massive which is has been really helpful for people I think yeah it's definitely a part of the book that really struck with me the most because it's that kind of element uh the people I mean loads of people talk about self-improvement and delivery and unity but audacity is often one that sort of overlooked in a way as a as a really you know big part of what makes uh you know a strong team so uh yeah it resonated with me I really I really enjoyed that part of the book and it does take a lot of courage to to do something different to go against you know however many years of culture and you know what you're assumed to be the case um and to step up and take more responsibility so there's got the first one I mean it's got to be benefit to you to do that there's got to be an incentive a personal incentive to do that uh I mean the good news is that most people if if everything was equal and they knew nothing bad would really happen they would rather have greater control over themselves and be controlled um so the philosophical fundamental is is compelling but there are too many butts associated with it um for a lot of people so yeah that being aware that that's that's there and the other thing for me around audacity and courage and bravery whatever you want to call it is a lot of people unconsciously assume it to be binary either I am brave or I am not brave you know I am audacious or I am not when actually there's different degrees of it and you don't have to start big you can start small and it's a habit it's it's all these analogies if it's a muscle the more you exercise it but also the more you see other people do something and nothing really bad happens if you're looking for it and you're actually you know it's not filtering it out with your biases you think okay yeah all right so that happened and all right well didn't end maybe I could do something you know what's the smallest step you could take without those fears being paralyzing and then reflecting on it and thinking okay maybe I could do a little bit more next time so working out where you are on that almost like continuum and taking as as big a step as you're comfortable taking cool I love book club and we were talking to Jeffrey Squirrel sorry Jeffrey Frederick and Douglas Squirrel I just amalgamated their names there and they were talking about sort of related it's not the same technique by any means but they were talking about like mining opportunities for conflict so they're kind of making the sense of conflict and spinning it on its head and saying actually we should be inviting it and we should be building a culture where conflict in this particular way is seen as a positive because we are wanting the kind of dynamic that comes from really digging into our differences of opinion because that's where that spark of creativity is and that's where we can get to greatness rather than avoiding it which I thought was really interesting and also like you say psychologically maybe quite terrifying for people at first but it's how do we build towards that place so that we have a culture where people are more likely to do that yeah and I yeah I think you're right it's for it's gradual right it's going to test the boundaries be a little brave do a little more encourage other people but I think that's such an interesting and tricky mindset actually to mine to purposefully mine for conflict and to kind of have that almost as a working agreement yeah that yeah yeah we'll get one of the most one of the most powerful exercises or techniques I've seen in this area but it is a risky one is is ritual descent I'm not sure whether you're familiar with with ritual descent so it's it's a cognitive edge technique so Dave Snowden's company and and the idea and you can use it for all sorts of different things but basically for idea critique so if you look into generate multiple ideas and get some really quick feedback on them if you've got a number of people and ideally an idea to get a number of people to go break them up into groups and everybody come up with an idea in their teams once you've got a draft of that idea whatever it be for a user story or a solution or a impediment removal or whatever one person from that each table goes to another table and presents their idea to that group and the rest of the group who there who are there listening they don't do anything they don't talk they don't interrupt they just listen when the presentation has been finished and people have heard it the the idea presenter turns their back or if you're in a virtual world turns their camera off now you know you're remembering it and then the job of those people who've listened is to rip the idea to shreds is to say nothing positive at all about it okay they've got to come up with why it's the worst idea ever and why it will absolutely fail and backfire and the person whose idea it has just has to stand there and listen they can't rebut they can't argue they can't defend they just have to listen and then they can take that feedback back to their group and decide which of that feedback if any they want to incorporate into the next iteration of their idea and then they go to a different group and do the same process and the reason I bring that up is because if you know it's a game if you know it's I can't say anything positive then it's not personal or it's less likely to be personal we may need and I say it's risky because you may need some ground rules around respect or a little bit of trust in the room but yeah actually ripping it apart is actually something I encourage people to do with their own ideas you know adopt the the psychopath approach put on the black hat of doom how could this all go wrong um and but if you're doing that with other people then that's it's it builds trust so that once you actually are out of that mindset of I'm going to rip it apart you can be a lot more in the middle and actually real criticism if you like is a lot more tolerable right I actually was thinking about this the other day because I was thinking about how do we proactively build psychological safety um within teams and I think yeah one of the kind of key things was frame it as an experiment whether it's this ritual descent or whether it's something else if it's within the bounds of an experiment then it feels much safer for people to to push and to to give constructive criticism because and to fail because we know that experiments are based on hypotheses and that they fail even in science which is meant to be the subjective thing you know um so that I think that was my favorite my favorite answer when I was thinking about this recently in terms of how do we build psychological safety which is such a tough one in itself like we asked people that in interviews which is what's the best answer you've got so far well that was one of them I really liked that that was actually my answer I think she also said encouraging a culture of of feedback in general continue with feedback uh and making that the norm um which obviously is a great one for building trust um yeah cool you're on mute David yeah actually on feedback I would say um I've been uh re-looking at your book over this weekend and I quite like the uh the the what you pulled out about feedback about actually feedback about being you know when feedback is uh not requested but but but but is given and that those sort of things or those mistakes around around feedback the kind of the feedback sandwich yeah and things like that so yeah I thought that was uh yeah it's it's it's that idea of like when we give feedback it has to be people requesting it and then and they're open to it mm-hmm yeah it's um that was what that was one of the things I was taught on my probably my first week in the job um my first job about the feedback sandwich as it was that was that was a good way of giving feedback people people told me yeah yeah um feel right at the time so in terms of like the the the like the milestone cars that you have at the back of the book it's so it's for any the you know this there's got there's quite a lot of stuff there and is there any that you kind of would would would pull out as these are the the sort of precursors to to making the sort of stepping stone from from good to great or did they not work like that in your in your mind I mean I suppose they I think they probably could um but I don't think they would work like that if I picked them if that makes sense um so for me I like teams to start from where they are um so a really nice exercise is to go through those milestone cards and pick out a couple that they're really comfortable with already and say do you know what we're not starting from scratch I reckon we've already got some of these in place um and whether they they start on building those because they're already confident in that area um or using that what's the next one that we think could uh we could build on and and almost you know move to next I think that is a really nice way of starting we'll often assume that and and I mentioned this um in the book itself actually when she start as a team there are so many ways that you can get better it can almost be a bit overwhelming thing well where do we start and actually jeez we've got so far away from where we want to be but then choose and to view that as well if you've got all these opportunities to improve then brilliant just pick any of them and and that get into a habit of getting better but the cards are like to the ones that I've seen working with teams where you know they've got these ones yeah we like these we're doing okay with these we'll check in now again to make sure we haven't slapped on some of them but where which one would we like to focus on next which one do we think would be really useful to us where we are as a team and then consciously proactively working towards it it's kind of um well partly inspired like I said in the book by new baby but also from um I've just lost it I lose my thread thread down again but yeah this idea of working towards something can be a little bit intimidating if you think it's you know it's normal so the cards we've got um for a baby for example you know they're not time bound on when they should be crawling or anything like because every team develops at a different rate just like a baby develops at a different rate so it's not about putting a judgment on the teams and you know you should be here um by this time you know you are where you are and you're developing when you're developing and you're meeting different challenges well that's that's interesting what you say there in terms of like engage it how do you find that you you sort of engage teams to start making this this journey from from from good to great you know because there is a lot there and what what what's sort of the the natural approach because that that's sort of been my sort of question when I've been reading the book there's so much stuff here how do how do and also about the change about the amount of change you know that am I trying to push change or in trying to do this how how do I do this where I'm not pushing change to people part part of the idea behind these milestones is is it's kind of to try and make the journey to greatness a little bit more enjoyable rather than just enjoying it when you get there because it is going to be a long journey and you know rewarding yourself along the way and having a bit of fun and you know satisfying things as we're going I think it's quite important for a motivation point of view but also you're going to spend most of your time getting there so why not enjoy the process of getting there rather than just being there at the end um so where do I start well I start really with trying to get some permission and trying to tap into their intrinsic motivation you know so it would be a I know some of the teams that I've seen but every team's different so what what are some of the great teams that you've been part of tell me what what was great about them and try and create get that team to create their own sense of greatness that they can you know come to agreement on because there will be edge cases that aren't relevant for some members of the team maybe someone's talking about a sports team and someone's talking about a software team someone's talking about being part of the um working in a hotel or something and it's there are there are commonalities and there are overlaps but there are things that aren't that they're domain specific so try and find the core threads that they can agree on and then then ask them what would what would it be to them to get to that state here in this team would how beneficial would that be for you what would it give you um almost you know effectively doing a bit of a cost benefit analysis is that it's the process of change worth it is it something you want to go towards and if the answer is yes because you don't they don't have to as you can stay as a good team that's fine it's probably better than most of the teams you go with but if you had the opportunity would you want that okay and if the answer is yes then would you like my help and then we agree on how what that helps going to be it's not going to be telling them it's not going to be holding you know i'm not holding them to account they're going to be holding themselves to account all that kind of stuff and so also where do you want to start next this is a list that may be something jumps out but equally you might already have something that's forefront of your mind this would be a great place to start so i i try and meet the team where they are i want to get their permission for themselves but also my permission um and then give them something that they can work with if they want to but in the knowledge that it's their agenda not mine so i have to be open to the fact that they'll say no so that's the tricky thing when you're a coach right um if people are struggling with items that you feel from your experience could be super helpful like in the i was just looking at the cards again and you've got reference on there to things the process and the system and some of these words can feel quite dry and i know you're trying to alleviate that through the cards right but um that's where i've come unstuck sometimes and is that there's uh this um resistance or this difficulty getting rid of that hurdle of how to think about the system and how to think about the process particularly in terms of how to measure it and how to really understand some of those metrics that can look really scary and can seem really dry um and that's where often i found myself having to do lots and lots of work and then you know sometimes you may not succeed um so i yeah i guess in a in a roundabout way i'm saying how do you deal with some of that where it can seem it can seem a bit dry and overwhelming when you're talking about system process and metrics so by the sense of it the fact that you said sometimes it doesn't work would imply to me that sometimes it does sure sure so in your experience when has it worked and what have you done to help it what you're doing there jeff i see you you're coaching me now yeah i i think you're right it's about putting the empowerment back in their hands so i've asked them how they would want to how can they tell if we're going to run this experiment so i've framed it as an experiment how will they know that it's been successful and how will they know that potentially it hasn't and they want to drop it and try something else um so that's helped um but i still have found them kind of looking at some of those metrics you know with our scatter plot diagram and things that's still we can have had a really positive start and to yes we do want to improve and we've agreed these are the things that we think are important to track and now i'm looking at the scatter plot diagram and all i've kind of lost the thread of why we were here you know so what is what was the thread sorry yeah you had it at some point when you had it what was it um so i think the general gist here for me is why why are they doing it not not how are they doing it but why are they doing it and what does the system what does process what does metrics mean and do for them so why would they want to improve the system tell me tell me a story of when the system screwed you over all right you did your bit but it didn't work out all right so why is it in your interest to change the system that these kinds of questions tell me a story of how the system can work for you rather than against you okay what would you need to do to get closer to that and who do you need to bring into the conversation to make it more likely to happen but bringing it back to the personal bringing it back to what's in it for them why should they you know um and again it's kind of story based because they can tell me a story of when the system screwed them over yeah yeah yeah and then by doing that we're tapping into their emotions we're tapping into their drivers we're tapping into things like frustration and then we can start rewriting that story so how would that have felt or what how would that look like if the system had been working for you where's the gap so what's how much value is there to you in changing this actually David was has been talking about this quite a lot recently say sometimes we get lost in our own sort of coachy world where we're so used to some of these concepts and some of the jargon and we forget to kind of put ourselves in the shoes of that individual within the team in so many different ways in terms of their like personality type and their role so I know David had a lot of success kind of putting himself in the developer's shoes in that way recently and it can be easy to forget to do even though it seems obvious in a way it's almost like taking it down to forgetting who we are and thinking more about what the people want that you're you're working with I think Jeff in your you know the video that we made reference to before the remote one I think you're you're when you were talking I'm not a big cricket fan but when you were talking about a cricket coaching and you were talking about that bit and I think it's towards the end of the video I found that really powerful actually you know it really actually really put a lot what you talked about in the book in context for me which is like like what do you want to get good at people know like you say that that question that it's a really great question it's like what do you see as being great let's let's let's start from there and maybe not bringing you your own preconceptions which I've now done in the past it's like well I see a great team is doing x x y and z but but and people within the team may have a completely different different view of that and they they come from a different perspective they're they're not thinking it as an agile coach they're thinking it as a as a developer how they want to take forward their career or how what stresses they have on them yeah I thought I thought that was really good that what you thought it's about about cricket coaching is it in many ways it's a scary concept if you talk to a parent about it they said but what how does my tenure know what to get better you're the coach you're the expert you've played the game you know what so to teach them teach them so I could but to be taught you need to be receptive and what's better way of being receptive than to ask to be taught something rather than to be told what they're going to be taught now the the rhetorical question that I would generally ask back is can you imagine anything that your your your child would ask for to get better at a cricket training session that would be bad for their development no so it doesn't matter what they want to get better at they're going to get better and and the multiplication factor there of not only the fact that they're more receptive to the thing they want to get better at but they're now also think proactively in the habit of thinking what do I want to get better at and how can I get someone to help me get better at it it's much more powerful than turning up thinking what's someone going to tell me to do this week Mimi you've got to give your examples you got to hi hi no I'm nodding like profusely like I'm nodding like crazy because I totally agree I used to be a nanny so I totally understand the whole idea of um encouraging children to take command of their own learning and allowing them to kind of learn on their own or be in charge of that because they the bite you don't need you don't need to figure out how to get buying they're already bought in if they're trying to figure it out if they ask questions about certain things or if you can give them tools to kind of figure things out on their own then when they come to you then you know okay they definitely need my help but the more you kind of give them tools to figure things out on their own the more that they eventually learn I have a brother and I've I've given him free reign of YouTube and he's messed up my settings because now all I see is everything to do with space craft and space and this rocket and there's this game that he he doesn't play it he just watches how people play it but it's building spaceships he tells me about the different parts I have no idea what he's talking about but he's taking his own learning to the a completely different level he's only nine but some of the things he can talk about he can probably have a conversation with some kind of rocket science you can tell I don't know anything because the terminology I'm using but he can have a conversation it's so I'm just I was just resonating with what you were saying about you know giving a child letting allowing a child to ask for what it is that they want to learn and the fact that they will you know the whole idea of buying and things like that but exactly push versus pull um but then it's I think again like I sometimes forget that adults I don't know how to explain it's like sometimes you wonder if adults will figure it out on their own and I'm just like well they're adults so of course they'll figure it out on their own but it's like it's finding that balance of giving them tools that they can figure the things out and not allow I don't know how to explain do you get what I'm trying to say I think so I mean we we it's amazing how ingrained this this culture of being waiting to be told what needs to be done is yeah seeing that between the difference between a parent and a child is is quite illuminating because children haven't got that drilled into them yet and so the natural curiosity and the natural they just want to be independent yeah it's sort of part of our natural development as a human being we need to develop independence and so we're facilitating it but we can have this learned dependence as well as learned helplessness within the organization and so what helps I think is is it's nothing that's particularly groundbreaking here but as well as having the tools to be able to do something having a purpose you know something's a reason to self-organize a reason to take autonomy and a valid assessment of the safety to do so because we do assume that something if something goes wrong there's going to be and I was guilty of this when I first started doing scrum I was with the opinion that we were going to be back this is like 20 years ago that we were just waiting to the end of the sprint and vote off the weakest link genuinely thought that you know we were going to hold up cards yes Steph the person we voted off this week um I was really worried that was going to happen right because there was such transparency so that sense of that's just the culture that was sort of bred into us if you like so yeah it takes quite a while but for me what I'm seeing is certainly over the last 20 years I'm seeing a shift leadership level wise in terms of appreciation that culturally the the domain that we're in as an organization we can't we can't rely on expert leadership we need collaborative leadership we need engaged leadership um so it's been slow a lot slower than I would have liked but changing human habits is slow and when they're reinforced by money and culture and family and all these different things it's very difficult to do any quicker than than you can so you just got to be patient and keep working on the kids the kids of the future so don't don't get them to a point where we have to get them to unlearn what they've been taught because unlearning stuff as human beings is quite painful I'm gonna ask actually about the whole idea of culture um we're quite lucky that we have a very very open culture in in this organization but there are some places where you go and it comes from the top that kind of closeness or the command and control style of of working so sometimes you find that even if a team a specific team is doing great things they're deemed to be lazy or not doing enough work or having too much fun or something like that what advice would you give to those teams to kind of encourage them to keep doing what they're doing and hopefully kind of let their what they're doing shine shine as a beacon for others to follow rather than maybe thinking it's actually easy to just conform to the current culture and stop what they're doing yeah all right before I answer your actual question I've just got a little bit of advice for you if you want it yes please you said you were lucky to have a culture of openness it's not luck that's been created definitely it's been nurtured it's been maintained and using the word lucky although it was in no way intended this way is a little bit disrespectful to the people that have put the effort in to create that openness so it's kind of leading me on to my answer to your actual question which is that those teams that are doing that stuff the the good stuff but are being met with the responses that aren't necessarily reinforcing that commitment is to have a little bit of empathy because it's very easy to say you know we're doing all this stuff and they're not doing their bit and they're keep asking us to do it it's natural and it's actually on the face of it exactly what's happening however those people that are responding that way still I would be willing to bet want that organization to be successful I'm pretty sure those people don't want to demotivate or disempower or sabotage those teams but there's something going on that's making the behavior that they're demonstrating a no brainer for them so they are facing some difficult challenges whatever they are we don't know what they are because we're focusing on our own stuff but they've got other challenges other conflicts other demands pressures and if the team can empathize with that and say all right I you must be in a really difficult position here how can what we're doing help you so you use the phrase you know be it shine a light for others to follow but I think there's something else there around shining a light for others to share that light if you like because you know one of my favorite quotes is it's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit and if you can let other people take the glory take the credit then you're more likely to get the result you want and if it means a senior leader getting the credit for doing something agile or getting the credit for you know your your team's success and change so be it it's a bigger game of play here thanks for that I appreciate it Aurelia did you want to say something you used the little symbol Hi um yes uh I I had this it was a bit of an impulsive question because you you know when you asked the question I called Jeff sort of turned around and started asking all these coaching questions but like but really good ones really good ones and uh not like how to say I kind of it's a bit of a big question like on learning to ask the right questions where the person doesn't you know feel interrogated or you don't yeah essentially how did you learn I assume it's some of the experience but maybe yeah just how to learn to ask to ask the right questions um and and on the spot uh well through doing right not just doing right mindful and reflection okay so I have a I have a hypothesis I have a I have a feeling I have a intuition call it what you like that this question would be useful many different ways that I could phrase it I've got to try something and then not only do I ask the question but I'm also asking for feedback on how useful that question was how did it make you feel did it make you feel defensive did it make you feel curious how did it make you feel so I can do that actually as I'm going or not just or and I could do that as an actual practice so one of the things that that I do myself and do with other coaches is is hot seat questioning um and it's it's a really simple technique it feels a bit weird but it is basically to practice one particular skill which is asking good questions what was the technique sorry I didn't catch that hot seat questioning so practically how it works is in a small group say six people one person just talks for about 60 seconds on something that you know they're struggling with they want some progress and make some progress on and the other five people are listening and then when that person's finished they get to ask one question each just one question and they ask it knowing that they won't get an answer to it so I would ask you my question and it wouldn't be I don't want you to answer my question I want you to tell me how useful the question was to you okay now knowing that I'm not going to get an answer frees me up a little bit because I'm not indulging my curiosity anymore it has to be useful to you not me and that's the first step is try and take your curiosity out of the equation um and and it's not that any there it's not that some questions are amazing and some questions aren't it's um it's that some are useful in certain circumstances with certain people and it's about building up that that almost database if you like because that's all an intuition is it's just a set of data points collected over a number of years that is and you can't really draw that the a precise pattern from but you you kind of know through experience so that's just practice and get feedback is the short answer thanks but uh yeah the specific technique and yeah thanks it was really helpful okay um we're we're out of time unfortunately um but Jeff thank you so much I really appreciate you taking time to come along and talk to us today it's been for my perspective I think for everybody else it's been uh really useful and uh really enlightening thank you ever so much thank you thanks so much people thank you so much