 Hello dear listeners and welcome to the historic event that is episode 100 of the Agile podcast. I'm Geoff Watts and I got together with my good friend Paul Goddard to record this landmark episode where we started off talking about the usual nonsense such as what's been changing for us recently after our summer hiatus, how our businesses have had to pivot and how businesses in the wider world have had to pivot. And then we went almost back to basics where we started talking about servant leadership what it really means and where it all came from and a little bit of a digression around the community, the Agile community as it is right now Well it was good to get back to the podcast and hopefully you'll enjoy joining us for this historic episode in more ways than one actually because we had a happy surprise for you after the jingle. Yeah, just off the A417, so a new build suburb. Easy trip down the dual carriageway for you. Yeah, wasn't too bad, wasn't too bad. In my daughter's little one litre Ford Fiesta. Oh you've got a new car, isn't it? Is it the blue one outside? Yeah, with the Minnie Mouse balloons on the dashboard. Sushi mate, my head touching the roof. Small car, sushi. I bet it's easy to park though isn't it? That's the benefit, easy to park. Well, not as easy as the other one, it poked itself. But yeah, it's pretty easy to park. A bit of a come down from the Tesla. You can fit it into a space quite easily. But yeah, nice to see you again mate. We were just trying to work out how long it's been. It's been a long time. Nearly six months, half a year. Kind of like a virtual Jeff for six months, long time. Well it's good to be back. I'm still an agile leadership coach. How about you? Business changed? Business changed slightly. Not so much as there's less of it. Deliveries and... That's a growth market isn't it? What's that? Delivery. Delivery of all? Yeah, yeah, I was thinking I could do that. I sent some stuff off with the DHL guy this morning, yesterday. And he said it's never been busier. I bet. Or if you're an Amazon delivery driver, I bet you're busy. But no, unfortunately I'm not in the market of PPE, which I was. Apparently there's someone telling me, company in Bristol, a single guy in his garage bought a load of PPE just before, started his own PPE business just before March. Made £3 million, six months. Done very well. Out of his garage. Kenny's sleeping night though, that's the question. Happy birthday. Oh really? Well, you know. Happy birthday to the pubcast. Oh right. We've both had a birthday. We've both a year on this. We did one of these. But yeah, this is it. This is a completely arbitrary milestone, but this is episode 100. Cheers. Cheers mate. We're still here. Who'd have thought it? After what is it now? Probably four, four and a half years. You're still getting stronger. Jimmy Anderson. Yeah. 600 wickets. It's a nice milestone. I was never really bothered. There's no marching band, there's no 24 gun salute. No flyover from the Red Arrows. I didn't have time to arrange that. No cake. No party hats. But together, which is something that you wanted, all through lockdown, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, we've got to be back in the pub by episode 100. We've got to be. And we are. There was despondency, wasn't there? There was despair. Yeah. We made it. But we're there. Yeah. So you've had a bit of time off, haven't you? This month, I have. Yeah. Yeah. And really did try. It helped being, certainly last week, I was in deepest, darkest, rural Wales. And it did help the fact there was no very little signal. And when there was signal, it was very poor. Camping? No, we had a cottage. We had an Airbnb in the middle of nowhere, which on kind of like a nice, a kind of a farm that's been reconverted to pods and cottages. So it was nice. There was only about, you know, kind of eight accommodation families there. So it was nice. It was remote. It was, it wasn't very busy. Did a lot of walks, got outdoors. Yeah. Just tried to, because just before August, I was pretty busy. I was felt pretty snowed under. So I think mentally as well, it was good for me just to disconnect for a while. And I've had a good two and a half, three weeks off. So I've got no news, no work needs. No, but I've got no, I've just been nice to me to kind of down tools for a bit. Yeah. Good for you. Good for you. I haven't had a break. So you've, how, you sound like you've been busy. Well, busy-ish, you know. I've still got some, still got some people that I'm supporting, some teams I'm supporting. Ideas that I'm germinating and feeding. Yeah. Testing. Has this, has this time helped for that or has it just accelerated that? Has it just? No, I actually imagined it would help more. But I think I've had to put more effort in other areas than I, you know, didn't imagine. So, no, it's, it's been different. It's been different. And yeah, I've gone back to my roots a little bit. So I was asked to chair a track at the Agile Online Summit this year. Oh yeah, I've seen your tweet about that. And I asked, you know, what track do you want me to chair? And Tom said, well, make one up. So I made one up. And I've been going, thinking about, thinking a lot about how the term servant leader isn't particularly very well understood. Right. And what it actually means and how, I don't think many people in the Agile world actually have read Greenleaf stuff. I think it's quite interesting. And so I'll do that. I'll do a track on servant leadership. But because of the remote nature of things, we'll put the online spin on it. So what's the difference between a traditional servant leader, if you like, and one that's forced to operate online? And they've had some really interesting submissions. I'm looking forward to it, actually. So I get to pick five tracks and speak to people who've got different ideas about it. Okay. Different parts of the world and with different lenses. Yeah. So, yeah. Let's get you busy then. When is that? When's that summit? Well, so I'll be doing the interviews this month and next month. And then it's going to be live in October. Okay. So I'm, as normal, pre-praster-mating. Yeah. A lot of the other tracks. A lot of the other tracks are sort of spacing it out. I prefer to get things done. Yeah. So I'll be having my conversations soon, looking forward to them. I was supposed to have one this morning, actually, but things conspired against us. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it looks like a good track. There's women in Agile track. There's engaging Agile leadership track. There's all sorts of different tracks. There's culture and technical practices and things. I've seen a lot of that, that kind of more creative ways of looking at trying to get people to connect online and stuff, conferences or user groups. And all that stuff's become more accessible to everyone, isn't it? The fact that you can be on the other side of the world as long as you're prepared to get up at different times. Yeah. Well, I was doing a meetup group last night and I think they were about people from about 30 different countries. Mm-hmm. It's quite incredible, really. Yeah. You know, they're aiming for about 10,000 people, I think. Wow. Yeah. One thing I really liked about it that would sort of tip the balance in terms of me saying, yeah, all right, I'll put my time and energy into this was the format of it. So you and I used to conferences or summits, gatherings, where a speaker would submit a talk or a workshop. Yeah. Well, in this one, they submit a topic, an idea. Right. And I will interview them about it. Right. So they don't get to talk at me. Right. I get to ask them questions. They don't know where it's going to go and see where this conversation leads. So that's the bits that's online, is the conversation. Yeah. Okay. So it's like a fireside chat type thing. Pretty much, yeah. So all I get is the abstract of their talk and a little bit of, you know, why it's going to be important, why it's relevant, what's their experience, what are they hoping people will take away from it. But, yeah, they're not in control. Yeah. So they're going to know their stuff for a minute. Yeah. Well, either that or it's just, it can't be... It's the interesting topic. It can't be a sales pitch. It can't be a, you know, I've said this before and I'm going to say it again. They can't rehearse it. They can't read a script. Which I personally quite like. Not because I want people to be on edge, but I just want it to be a little bit more real and a little bit more from the heart. They've got to really live their stuff. Yeah. To be able to have those kinds of conversations. It can be interesting and interesting enough to engage a conversation about it. A little bit of a challenge for me as well, because I don't know what they're going to say. So you're playing Michael Parkinson. Kind of. For our international listeners, Michael Paxton, very famous interviewer, had his own talk show. Good at asking the right questions in a kind of homely, kind of warm way. Yeah. Not your Howard Stern shock jock type. No. Very much a sit and sink in front of the fire for a nice chat. Very good. So you're a busy boy. I'm busy enough, you know. I think it's a good opportunity to really focus. So, you know, I haven't done hardly any training. Which has made me think, actually, that's the direction I want to continue going and away from training. Yeah. Even more than I have been. So, yeah. Having different conversations with different people. Yeah. And focusing on different things. Which is good, I think. I think I'm getting a lot more a lot more contacts. People have started. There was a period where I didn't really get many emails from people. Yeah. It was noticeably dry. Well, I'll cover you at that. So those are screens of happiness, by the way. Children thoroughly enjoying the play. Well, not in some kind of dungeon torture situation. But yeah, I think the types of contacts I got had changed quite considerably. So I got very few requests for internal training classes and things like that. But I got a lot of requests for speaking. Yeah. So I would get sort of five requests to speak every week, at least. Yeah. At different things. But almost none from companies. So we'd like to give our some scrum masters a bit of training. We'd like to talk to our product owners or something like that. So, yeah, that completely changed. But I think it's, you know, people are starting to come out. I've had a few companies contact me about getting things going again. Okay. Online, albeit online. So that, I think, yeah, we've kind of crossed that point where the breaks went on when, and now that I think a lot more companies are used to the fact that this is going to be online for a while or remote for a while. We just carry on and adapt how we deliver various things to that way. So hopefully, yeah. It's given me the opportunity. So I've been pushing my whole improv that you doubt that. So I wrote this new course. When did I write it? June time? May June? Something that I probably was always going to want to do anyway, but just never had the time. Now I have the time and the focus, the direction, the push. I rewrote it into five modules. To be fair, it's done incredibly well. So that's kind of kept me busy. It's kind of more so than anything scrum related, anything certified from the scrum alliance type thing. But the same seems like different types of training and it's more modular and it's more flexible and it's less intensive. So yeah, that's kind of kept me busy. It's kind of given me a bit of hope to push. That's the thing that I kind of imagined I would end up doing longer term. So it's kind of sped that up for me a little bit really. Which is nice. I think it's been quite interesting to not only see what we talk about every day, every week for the last 20 years in action in a much more pressurized, focused way. So companies having to react to really big challenges. But also having to as we used to say it be to eat our own dog food or drink our own champagne. So almost everyone is looking at their business models and thinking is this fit for purpose anymore and pivoting that and the fact that some I found it quite useful to have a pretty varied pipeline if you like. Lots of different types of work. Some have flourished and some have floundered when the circumstances changed and that's from a resilience point of view. That's pretty good. Others haven't. And if you're too reliant on one thing and the market conditions change you can become extinct pretty quickly no matter how strong you are. And those conditions significantly changed. I'd realised we hadn't said what we were drinking. We're out of practice mate. We are, we are. I didn't really have to be honest a great choice. It was lager lager or lager pretty much. Compared to at home you were probably a bit more experimental with what you were buying but when you're in a pub you think there'd be more but there's actually probably less isn't there. So I'm drinking a Moretti Italian lager which wouldn't be my choice but it was better than Fosters and Carling. Well I'm drinking Stoford. Stoford Press. But I have another point of Stoford because you don't tend to see Stoford in cans in the supermarket as much as you see matches, no? I mean you should do really because it's all local stuff it's all west country based but it's harder to, it's more surprising sometimes maybe just as simple as I was going to it's nice to have a Stoford every now and again. But one of the pubs near me has gone into administration. Is it? The castle. I've been there. Yeah you probably haven't. On the ring about? Yeah, so it's, I think a guy bought it just before in February, like before locked down invested a lot of money in it and then Covid and it's gone into administration since then so. It's a freehold was it? It was, yeah it used to be brewery owned but I think this guy literally bought it off the brewery in February. Tough. Yeah, so one of many businesses I think that well, but yeah it's that explore versus exploit isn't it? About whether you're willing to and I've had obviously myself I've had to diversify and you do. Necessity is the mother of all invention isn't it? So that trying to push yourself into different areas. I'm quite pleased. I feel like I've been busy even though I've not been busy. Yeah. So from the balance sheet point of view I'm not very busy. No. But from my brain point of view I feel like I have been busy. Well it's a completely different part of the product lifecycle isn't it? Yeah. You kind of, yeah almost in startup mode. You've got to invest, know what to invest in and kind of ideas that you want to back and ideas that you want to kind of leave behind and so yes it's been good for me really. Probably it's probably been good for me in that respect because I think I was getting a little bit comfortable and a little bit complacent. Hmm. Yeah. It's how you respond to it isn't it? You can see it as a threat. You can see it as an opportunity. That kick up the arse that you've been waiting for. Yeah. It's good. Yeah it doesn't seem, when I look at the wider agile world at the moment I see a lot of fighting again. It's, yeah I mean I try, I'm not as, I'll be honest, I'm not probably as clued up as others are and I see a little bit of it. I don't see all of it. I don't spend, I try not to spend too much time on social media and by that I mean immersing myself in the in the discussions and the comments but I see, yeah I see a lot more what's the word? Volatile. I did read that I read the court transcript from the Scrum Alliance versus Scrum Inc. So you have to update me because I knew that there was problems but from what I've seen it's all blown up more recently and that's probably since I've been on holiday. Yeah. Can you give an overview? Well it's so the court transcript is a public record. You can go and see what the judge said. Anyone can see it. But basically it's Scrum Inc. So that's Jeff Sutherland and JJ Sutherland's company who run Scrum at scale. They've been handed an injunction so they're not allowed to run some of their courses and it's based on the fact that they allegedly deliberately set their courses up to create confusion in the market so they copied the logos, the learning objectives and so on of the Scrum Alliance courses to sort of piggyback on their work. And so while there's all sorts of other aspects to the litigation that I don't really understand but so far, while the rest of the court case continues the judge has an injunction in place against Scrum Inc. So it's a shame that you see this fighting again. We've seen it before. We've seen really good parties fall out. But that's not necessarily a sign of the time because that was something that's been bubbling away for a while, isn't it? Oh yeah, I don't think it's anything from the last six months or so. So Scrum Inc. aren't allowed to do any training? I don't know whether they're allowed to do any training but there are certain courses that they are running that they're no longer allowed to run while the courts hear out the rest of it. Is Jess to the CST? I don't believe so. I don't believe so. J.J. to the CST? I don't believe he was, was he? We need Niger, Niger no. I see that and that's a bit disappointing. Not completely surprising, if I'm honest, but disappointing nonetheless. And yeah, there's witnessing some of their arguments on social media which I'm trying to stay out of, but it goes in waves, isn't it? There was quite a lot of animosity a long time ago and then there was an effort to bring people together and focus on what we agree on and our common strengths and things. And then it just went away again and then more arguments sort of comes and goes really in waves. Yeah, there's 20 years since the Anjan Manifesto next year? Yes. Which is another arbitrary milestone? 2021, isn't it? Yeah. But I know that Scott Sivrite is trying to organise a 20-year retrospective and he's got a lot of people involved. Yeah. Just to look back and sort of hold the mirror up and think, well, where do we go next? With the original, as many of the original authors as you can? He's trying, I think. Yeah, pretty sure he's got Ron involved. Alistair Coburn. Yeah. Yeah, I think there was, I think maybe, yeah, Van Benakim, I think, was maybe. Okay. Yeah, I think there were quite a few. Another, you know, John names that you'd be aware of that are influential. Yeah, it could be, it's one of those things that could be amazing and could be an absolute, yeah. But I do, yeah, I think maybe there's a bit of confirmation bias from my own perspective here, but when you are, when you've got, maybe when, let's say there's less work happening and obviously there's a lot of lockdowns and people have got a lot more time, they're attracted to that kind of news, that kind of controversy, that kind of social media. And that's where I get, I'm guilty of this myself, you get most of my updates from, it's LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever it might be. Devil makes use for idle hands. Yeah. But the people have that time that they'll, and I've noticed that as well, that comments seem to be a lot more quick and a lot more things can exacerbate really quickly, that's the wrong word, but escalate really quickly because all of a sudden you've got 100 comments on a thread and it's like, I know controversy brings that controversy anyway, but it just seems that people have got that time and it's just a little bit more bitey, a little bit more, yeah. It just made me laugh. I saw one of the most commented threads on Twitter the other day, I just stumbled across it. Some guy said, look, I'm sorry, I know this is going to upset people, but coffee just tastes the same, it doesn't matter what bean it is, it doesn't matter where it's from, it doesn't matter if it's been pulled out by a monkey in the depths of Indonesia, it's just coffee. And coffee lovers just went crazy. It's just like, petrol, plain and stand back. I think you would have seen the same thing, the Ricky Gervais humanity, I think it's his standard shape. He talks about Twitter, and he metaphorically describes Twitter, it's like having a notice board in the middle of a town centre and somebody writes up guitar lessons, phone here, and Twitter is basically someone walking up to that saying, the number is saying, I don't want guitar lessons. Those messages are not meant for you, so don't respond to them. It's very true how he describes it really. Some of the stuff is very inflammatory, I try and distract myself from it really as much as I can. It is hard though. I feel I need to have a voice there, but I don't necessarily want to be there. I tweeted something the other day, I was amazed. So I went through Greenleaf stuff again, and just looking for tweetable things just to try and get other people in the industries aware to it. And it was amazing how so much of the stuff that we come to take as new, he was talking about 50, 60 years ago, and he's not claimed he was new then either. He was Senghe, he looked like Stephen Covey, they were all influenced by him. And one of the things that I've mentioned before, but in very different words, and must have completely forgotten where I got that inspiration from, was wait before silence. It's a devastating question to ask, but it's necessary. How am I sure that I'm going to add value above and beyond this silence? I mean, if the answer is yes, that's devastating to hear, because you think you should be able to add value, but don't talk unless you need to talk. And I think that, I was asked the question yesterday about what are the key characteristics of a servant either. And I hadn't really thought of it before, hadn't really come up with an acronym or anything. But one of the things that I said was around, humility and reflection, flexibility. But that humility of, well, do you know what, I might be wrong here, so I'm just going to hold back. And maybe my opinion isn't needed right now. My opinion might, even if I'm right, my opinion might not be needed. It might be unhelpful, even if I'm right, which is perhaps a counterintuitive thing to think, but you find those servant leaders generally think that. What was that phrase you've used before? Listen, do they listen when I think I'm wrong or something like that, or speak when I think I'm right? Yeah, I'll argue as if you're right. That's right. Listen as if you're wrong. Yeah. In that sense, the other thing I thought was really important and relevant was this sense that certain leaders generally look at something that's going on outside as not going on out there, but going on inside, i.e. it starts with me. So I can see a problem over there or I can see a problem with this relationship. But is that problem really with that relationship or does that problem start with me? And whether it's right or wrong, it's probably more helpful to think that. I think that's where Scrum Masters look, isn't it? Look first within, look in the mirror first. Yeah. And we tell people, you know, the only person you can really change is the one in the mirror. Yeah, well that's it. You're expecting people to do things in a certain way but the number of people that, or Scrum Masters I work with, and I won't name names, but let's call them Ian, but would rather have emailed someone rather than pick up the phone and talk to them. Yeah. You're expecting people to exhibit these principles but you're not doing it yourself. You're not acting in the way that you expect other people to act. Yeah. Hmm. Another thing that I was asked yesterday, which I thought was, I spent a bit of time thinking about it, is so one of the conversations that, one of the submissions to this track included a sort of subtopic, so part of it was around servant leaders need to, need to serve themselves as well as others. So if you look at the Scrum Guide officially, the Scrum Master who is a servant leader is expected to serve the product owner, is expected to serve the development team and serve the organisation. Which is great, but there's nothing in there about who serves the Scrum Master. Where does the Scrum Master get help? Who looks after them? Who makes sure they're okay? Make sure their needs are satisfied and their needs are met. So one of the submissions is around as a servant leader you should serve yourself first. Now that's in direct contradiction to Greenleaf. There's nothing debate to have. And who does do that? If you're no use to anybody, if you burnt out and we've talked before about putting your own oxygen mask on first, but then it got me thinking about how, and again we've probably had this conversation, if not directly then, over a couple of different sub-part conversations. If I spend a day coaching, I could have six, maybe even seven sessions in a day. By the end of the day, people are saying, you must be absolutely knackered. I've got more energy now than I did at the start of the day. And it's genuine, it's true. But one day in a training class and I'm lying in bed holding myself because I'm physically in pain. So I'm more energised by a day being a servant leader than I am a day being an educator. Now I know that people would be the other way around. But that to me says that that's more natural for me. And that strength is. And so if you find yourself as a leader being drained at the end of the day or trying to be a servant leader, then it's not saying that you shouldn't be one, but it's saying that it's more unnatural. It's more unnatural, yeah. Then you start picking that apart and how can I help myself with that regard and how can I work on some of those aspects so it becomes more natural. And I think there's a lot of leaders where it is an effort and it's an unnatural state for them. They're fast tracked through that process. And maybe they haven't built those skills of over a long period of time. Maybe they've for whatever reason been chew-horned into something quite early on. It's very unnerving if you're not used to that level of seniority or whatever you're expected to do, responsibility or whatever it is. For me the biggest challenge for people in those regards in that regard is the definition of the internal definition of strong leadership. So they've traditionally been brought up on the view that to be a strong leader you need to make decisions. You need to be in control. You need to have the answers. You need to give off an air of confidence and knowing and certainty. Putting other people at ease delegation and stuff like that. And that's great in some circumstances, in more complex environments that's going to get you into problems. So you've got the culture that's expecting that type of leadership you've been successful with that type of leadership and now you need to change. So not only do you need to develop and learn different skills, more complementary skills you have to let go of other habits and in the knowledge that well, with the lack of knowledge with the lack of certainty that the environment is going to actually appreciate what you're doing because the culture still may well recognise and reward what you used to do. And I think that's the number one challenge for a lot of leaders even if they get it at an intellectual level that emotionally and culturally it's still, there's some dissonance there. Regardless of the industry I was just listening on the radio on the way here that we live in a culture where especially right now especially right now because the levels of uncertainty we have people are craving the opposite they're craving they want they're valuing decisiveness, certainty and leaders in government or whatever that are prepared to and the whole thing around the U-turn the government have gone back on a decision. Huge uproar in the community how dare these politicians admit that they're wrong. But you know, like saying in these situations then there's an air of experimentation that we made a bad call there. I still find it fascinating it's just because it's the forefront of my mind but even that was something that Greenleaf said one of the biggest challenges you're going to face as a certain leader is people are going to want more certainty than you can provide and that is a challenge people would prefer order to chaos even if that order results in them having less freedom less happiness they would prefer that to chaos and so as a certain leader helping them move towards that and that's why he emphasized don't try and go from where you are to the end result straight away don't aim for perfect because you won't get there and in the meantime people will just revert back it's got to be slowly it's very prescient so when was his book published? it wasn't really a book as such it was a set of essays so the servant as leader was in 1960 so imagine he wrote that 58-59 obviously it wasn't about Scrum it wasn't about himself but his background was academia no so he worked at AT&T and he was looking at culture in large institutions so one of his other essays was called the institution as servant how do institutions such as churches governments banks things like that encourage or discourage the right kind of behaviors he's quite focused on the fact that from a society point of view if you have this hierarchy where one person at the top and that pyramid then we're saying to our people to be successful you need to aim to get to the top of the pyramid now obviously by definition only one person can be at the top of the pyramid therefore everybody else is unsuccessful which is toxic and you get sabotaged and you get all sorts of dysfunctional behavior to try and achieve that whereas if success is that by being at the bottom I've created more servants who want to help other people to be successful then everyone can be successful at that and you've got innumerable people helping you that's better for everyone and we may view that as a philosophical idealistic stance but I think he was ahead of his time and said it's not going to happen in my lifetime and if you are looking for that whether at an organizational level or a community level while you're in the middle of it you won't feel like anything's happening you'll feel like things are standing still because you're in the middle of it is he still around now? he died when? I can't tell you what I'd say in the 90's but anyway right on that note cheers guys nice to be back cheers everyone