 Yeah, thank you for the introduction. Yeah, so it's, I do these sort of meet-up groups fairly regularly and I don't like repeating myself but equally I don't like having to spend a lot of time preparing for things. So this seemed like a pretty good way of covering off bases of me being able to join more things and not have to write a new talk every two weeks. So it's a fairly informal, basically whatever you want to get out of this we will talk about and different places use different tools, different technology. It's not that I don't like technology, I love technology but I'm also a big fan of keeping it simple wherever possible. So the simplest possible way of doing this is either by raising your hand with the reaction button or just typing a question into the chat and we'll pick it up as we go and we'll just see where it flows. It's the scrum masters of the universe but I notice your introduction Jamie, you were changing the word scrum to agile quite a lot. Is that sort of a rebranding on the horizon or? You know, I'm not sure. We started off as a community of practice for scrum masters but then our content has really attracted product owners and folks from the development team and people who are using Conman and you know all those other areas of agile that people are interested in. So it seems a little limiting. I don't think we'll change our brand though. Scrum Masters of the Universe is a cool name that the group voted on from the beginning so I think we'll stick with that but knowing that we welcome anyone, not just scrum masters. It does bring back memories of my childhood. I was a big fan of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. There's a photo somewhere of me dressed up as Skeletal when I was about five or six I think. One Christmas when I got a plastic mask. Oh yeah. So everyone if you have any questions start putting those in chat or just raise your hand or go ahead and just unmute yourself. We've got the master here. Got to have some questions for him. We had, can you share the Skeletal picture? I have to find it. I don't know whether it's digitalized yet. It's probably just we need to scan it in somewhere. Yeah I'll try and dig it out. Hey I have a question about product ownership. Jeff I saw you wrote a book on product management. So kind of the, and I'm Daniel I'm from New Jersey in the U.S. The context for product management is like portfolio planning and one of the challenges we face is working with our sort of senior leadership to identify you could call them initiatives, big things that have a big business benefit and cost a lot of money and make decisions about those and have those kind of flow down to the teams that are actually doing the work. And there's this challenge of understanding scope and estimating enough to make business decisions but not too much that you're wasting a lot of time and burning a lot of hours from people who are supposed to be doing real work. So I wonder if you could talk to that kind of context in which a product owner has to operate. Yeah it's a really relevant question because things are getting more and more complex and more and more difficult to get return on our investment and a lot of organizations not just because of the pandemic but a lot of organizations are a little bit scared about taking big gambles on big product development efforts and to be fair they probably should be and so what I do a lot of work with with the product owners that I'm working with on is experimentation but not just trial and error like actual proper running experiments. So really really working out not necessarily where they think the value is but hypothesizing where the value might come from and running experiments to get data quickly and cheaply that they can act on. And that's something that is a different way of working for most product managers because most product management 20 years ago was still you still call it data-driven but it would be very much subjective data-driven in that it would be relying on research focus groups things like that. And fortunately we're sort of having a very brief discussion about how people are weird earlier on and people are very weird and one of the weird things that we find around human nature and human behavior is that what people say they're going to do doesn't necessarily match up with what they do do. And so product managers product owners they can't necessarily rely on customer research customer data being an indicator of what will happen. And I was working with a CEO of a beverage company here quite a few years ago and this was before well before alcohol-free beer and so on was particularly acceptable in common. Now I can find a lot of different alcohol-free beers and ciders and things in the supermarket and even in pubs but back then you just didn't there was perhaps one and it was pretty horrible and in the UK the government was on a bit of a social kick for making reducing alcohol binging reducing the alcohol consumption certainly within younger people and this sort of healthy living. And so they were putting a lot of money into the research and the beverage companies were being incentivized to try and branch out into more alcohol-free areas and they did the market research around alcohol-free beers they did tests they tried them and people say yeah yeah I would drink that I would drink that that seems fine blind taste tests and everything like that but when it came to actually launching it it didn't sell people didn't buy it despite all of the research and all of the focus groups and all the forums suggesting that they would sell it didn't and it lost millions of pounds. Had they run real experiments for example just putting something in one of one of the pubs or two of the pubs or three of the pubs on tap different things like that they would have found out a lot sooner where the real issues were what the real thoughts were. So this is a bit of a long way around to your question Daniel but the natural historical way of looking at this is to try and break a problem down into its component parts prioritize and deliver and that's great but when it's such a big delivery we need to figure out where the biggest risk is and so the phrase I was having conversation as Jamie mentioned my pubcast with Paul Goddard we did we recorded a pubcast on Monday and the topic of the conversation was around MVPs and MMFs and MMRs and all these different three-letter acronyms that are around in product management and the one that that I quite like is the RAT the rat which a lot of people aren't necessarily familiar with but it's not necessarily about finding your your minimum viable product or your minimum valuable product or your minimum releasable product or anything like that it's about finding your riskiest assumption to test and so product tenders it might seem like a very negative way of looking at it but a lot of product tenders these days are actually looking at where is the biggest risk and that's what I'm going to prioritize that's what I'm going to test where could this product fail and I'd rather find that out now rather than a few months down the line and when it comes to those big things that's often the biggest area of return on investment is mitigating those big risks early does that make any kind of sense Daniel yes I understand that thanks thank you for the question you're right Russ not to be confused with free alcohol alcohol-free Stephanie wanted to know what my favorite beer I'm not I'm not someone who tends to have favorites or I do but they change so it kind of depends on the weather kind of depends on my mood I do have a particular favorite alcohol-free beer at the moment it's by a brewery called beaver town which I think is somewhere up north leads people would you be able to confirm that I'm not sure where it is but I think it's certainly in the UK and they make it an alcohol-free beer called laser crash which is which is really quite nice and pretty very nice in summary but if I was going to go to a pub and have a drink a normal drink as it were I typically go for a nice hoppy fruity IPA okay Vincent what are the next big ideas around continuous improvement or new ways of working that you're seeing I might link that a little bit to to Jamie's question about my team improvement model and team mastery because that's that was my sort of inspiration around the the model that I brought in team mastery is that all teams are different all organizations are different but they all have some very fundamental common patterns if you like when it's in terms of getting better at things so by looking at a lot of the agile teams and I'm lucky enough to be to have worked and observed I've probably say thousands of agile teams now the ones that get better don't necessarily follow a particular maturity model per se but they do have a number of things that tend to be in their in their focus while they are getting better if that makes sense so self-improvement as a as a thing so the idea of our retrospectives being the most important part of an agile process is something that I believe you know if you weren't going to do any other part of scrum or campan or anything else just take time out now and again to think whatever it is that you're doing how are you doing that well and could you be doing it slightly better it's based on the principle again this is just the subjective view that I hold not everybody would agree with me on this one but I I'm based on the view that given the choice everyone would rather be slightly better tomorrow than they are today all else being equal they would rather get better rather than stagnate or stay the same or or regress and so given that natural desire to want to get better if you have something in place that enables you to to reflect and then improve then we're going to get better as a team but those that improvements should be based at the team level not necessarily the individual level because what I have seen in the past is individuals within the team on an improvement drive which can actually be to the detriment of the overall team which might sound a little strange but if you've been in a team where you've got a very selfish ego who's really ambitious and driven and will put their own needs and growth at the expense of the team then you can probably resonate with that so self-improvement is one thing but quality is important as well this is something that I was the number number one certainly in the top three concerns when I started out with scrum back at the turn of the century that if you if you enabled self-organizing teams that quality would drop because people will be lazy they will take shortcuts and all these different myths but what I found is that actually teams do take pride in being able to do things well and in some cases we need to actually this is sort of going back to Daniel's question a little bit we actually need to pull them back a little bit at times because sometimes gold plating it doesn't allow us to test that risk soon enough we actually need to really strip things back a little bit and do things even more simple than we would like so quality is something that people do aren't they are motivated by and it's also a hallmark of a really good team that's continuously improving and something that an organization values highly as well and we've probably all been either we've been part of or we've heard of an organization that while not saying we don't value quality their behaviors would belie that and pushing teams to go even faster and pushing product owners to hit earlier dates and so on just leading to technical debt and compromising a quality the behaviors would indicate that they're not that keen on quality and then other areas being together that sense of togetherness that sense of bravery that sense of pushing boundaries of trying new things and continuously delivering as well I think for me the the biggest thing that I'll pull out of that and I'll again I'll try and link that to to Jamie's other question around organic agility is that there's a growing acceptance I find that improvement and agility at the organizational level is a good thing but it's impossible to standardize that and so while you can look at things like a Spotify model or even elements of dare I say it safe or less or something like that you can look at that and think you know I can probably take some of those things here and they would be they would work but the ones that would work are the ones that are relevant to the pain and the value and the opportunities that you're facing within your organization right now for it to stick it has to be something that people can look at and think yeah that makes sense to me that would add value to me we can do that not there is a framework here that somebody says we need to adopt whoever it is whether it's a highly paid consultant or even a highly respected leader within your organization whoever it is that's not what makes something stick so having that sense of well at the individual level a lot of my coaching work is around you know self-awareness just knowing yourself better knowing your strength knowing your triggers knowing your your your tools and techniques for self-mastery equally at the organizational level do we know what kind of culture we have right now what what is our instinctive response organizationally culturally to a particular stimulus is that leading to the kind of actions and the kind of behaviors that we need to be a resilient organization in the circumstances we now find ourselves in if it's not can we be honest about that without being judgmental about that and can we structure and encourage and support alternative ways of responding to the same stimulus and that that's that's the commonality that's the standardization it's the standardization around the neutral non-judgmental inspection and adaptation that conscious inspection and adaptation I've waffled for a long time there that's all right so we've got a question here from Russ Russie said I'm on the cusp of doing a baseline survey of psychological safety for 15 scrum teams in my org using Amy Edmondson's seven key questions this will be new territory for me to roll out the survey any thoughts or words of wisdoms around psychological safety or doing this kind of applied research so um where are you Russ there you are and what's the what's the goal of the survey do you mind me asking here can you hear me okay yep so I think it's just to get a baseline of where are we as an organization when it comes to psychological safety at the team level what I anticipate will do is say you know we've got some variability here across these 15 teams why do we suppose that that is what actions might that drive there's actually a research design that's based on Amy Edmondson's research where they do first round at the team level and a second round at basically shifting the focus to the organizational level seeing what kind of delta you might observe I that's the direction I think we're heading ultimately I think where I'm trying to you know I don't want to I don't want to bias my own I've already got bias as we all do right but where I really want to take where I really think this has got value is to be able to say to some of our organizational leadership here's where we are just so you know here's a snapshot but ultimately the psychological safety has a lot to do with you guys at a leadership level and and your behaviors the way you operate creating the causes and conditions for in which psychological safety can take root and grow or not yeah does that help yeah it does and it's and I'll I'll go off on a slight tangent here and I'll I'll take what you've said and sort of make extremities of it for for illustrative purposes and so if I get asked to survey in fact I went out to where did I go I went to you sushi and afterwards they sent me a feedback survey through the email and you could you could provide feedback in every single thing that you'd ordered but one of the things that asks you is value for money do you think this thing was value for money now there's yes we all have our biases and we all have our perception of what value for money is and they got to take that into account but equally there's a part of me that's thinking do you know what if I say that that is really good value for money are they just going to put the prices up there's a part of me thinking what are they going to do with my answer and if I'm thinking from yo sushi's perspective I want as honest and as unbiased and as unfiltered and as clean as answer as I can get now there's limits to that when they're asking me through email and I don't know the context and my first question for you is what's the context here and is everybody aware of what that context is or do other people have different perceptions of what the context might be because we all do we all have sort of suspicions we all have our filters we all have our own experiences um and so thinking well if what what might incentivize people to give slightly less than honest answers what might be going on that could lead to this data becoming contaminated and that's in the positioning of it it's in the wording of it it's even in whether you're doing this through email through a one-to-one or a focus group or even just an informal thing over coffee all sorts of different factors will affect it but the primary purpose is where I was starting off because and like this is where I'm going to take what you said and really make an extreme out of it because this isn't what you were implying right but a lot of people will set up things like that to serve an agenda that they've already got in mind right so they've got an agenda that do you know what our leaders are acting in a way that is not encouraging psychological safety and the only way that I think they will listen is if I get proof and evidence to that so I can hold it to them and say look you need to change what you're doing here is the evidence now that's one even if that's not true if some people think that's what's going on it's going to affect things so if we can get first of all a positioning of what it is and what it's for we've got buy into this is in everybody's interest and there's no judgment going on here whatsoever then we've got a closer to to usable data whatever it is but also the other thing for me not just around psychological safety but just in general in terms of perception of what's going on I'm a big fan of stories rather than data points so I would I would be tempted for example to say something like can you tell me a real story something that happened where you felt that there wasn't enough psychological safety for an optimum result okay we can we can anonymize the people but I need to just tell me the situation as you see it okay but also tell me some stories when there was enough psychological safety and can we start seeing some patterns and equally what you'll find I would be surprised if you didn't find this is if you took that story and asked for different people's interpretations of that story you'd get very different interpretations based on who they were where they were coming from and what lens they were looking at it through and so this it's data but it's it's still subjective was that any help yes it was thank you and one of the things that you said is context matters and so that's got me thinking you know and just even in the way that we we roll out this survey you know creating some context a little bit on the front end maybe an important piece of this to think through I've thought a little bit about that but you know just being honest I've been more focused on the questions themselves than on the rollout so far and I need this I need to start to shift my focus so that was that was actually a good sort of prompt you know get me thinking in that in that space so thank you nice one cool thanks for the question what else have we got Jamie I haven't been looking at the chat so Mark's got a question I'll just let him ask here yeah thanks Jamie um so Jeff I'm gonna kind of paraphrase my question as a scrum master how do we move a team that that supports a product that it's not a greenfield project product it's much more well established it's monolithic in nature how do we move the mindset towards scrum where we are releasing incrementally in production away from these larger releases because the application is just too darn hard to to release frequently yeah so I mean I another principle that I tend to work on is that and again I might be wrong but generally speaking people want to be successful and they want to be able to do good work and they want to be able to complete work and that tends to be a huge motivator in the teams that that I see and I work with actually getting completion getting something done rather than just seeing a progress bar fill up a little bit more and so if I'm seeing behavior that's not aligned to that then either there are really strong incentives for something else or there's something else that's missing that's stopping them from being able to do that so I'd be really interested in what was driving the push for or the push away from continuous delivery and production and it may well be a lack of confidence in you know release ability to deploy it deployment and the fact that whenever we release something we tend to create more problems or it takes longer to work do something in this area of the code than it would be to build a new API that's sort of bolted onto it and just increase the technical debt a little bit but at least we've got something whatever it is and again there's similar to what I was saying to Ruster there's there's always people overthink everything and our first driver is self-preservation largely is safety so I'm thinking you know if I'm if I'm going to be honest about what's going on here how does that make me look so am I admitting to this is what this is what could be going through people's heads for example am I admitting to being party to creating technical debt am I admitting that I'm not as skilled as perhaps I would like them to think I am all these different cell systems are coming into play that could be incentivizing different behaviors there could be incentives on on the product owner in terms of releasing certain things or stakeholder political influence or all sorts of different things but if I can try and get those out into the open with our sense of judgment and think what's best for the product and what's best for the organization even if it's impossible right now and that's that's that's quite an important thing because the amount of times that I say to people I know it's not possible now but let's just assume that it could be all right what would be the most desired outcome and what's stopping us from getting there looking at the risks looking at the rewards looking at the effort looking at the the vulnerabilities all those different aspects and thinking well this is where we are that's just life we can only start from where we are what's the closest we can get to where we would like to be and what help do we need to get us there now depending on who you're talking to you may will be having different types of conversation there so it could be the leadership team for example incentivize people to to look for actual value delivery rather than what they're doing right now how can reduce the the the negative incentives for the less than optimal behavior that we're seeing right now accepting that that is logical and rational and not sabotaging behavior if it's the product owner what do you need to be able to make better decisions for the product that you don't feel you can make right now if you're the development team how can you make better or easier decisions with regards to easier might not be the right word it might be the opposite it might be the harder decision but the right decision with regards to architecture and having that real honest conversation about balancing the short term and the long term because neither of those two options in my experience is desirable if you just focus on the short term you're just building up more and more of a problem if you just focus on the long term you're not delivering any value for such a long time that yeah by the time we ever finish it we might be out of business so it's it's having that really honest conversation about this is where we are right now it's nobody's fault it's not about getting vengeance it's about working out what could incentivize the right kind of decisions for the pros and the organization all right thank you well switch gears a little bit Jeff I know um you know as we all know it really takes a great team to to deliver value to the customer so you know I noticed your first first books were focused more on a role a scrum master other product owner a coach and and then and then your your most recent book uh team mastery which uh which I have here I've been diving into um you talk about how great teams have squad depths can you tell us a little bit more about squad depth and then also do you have any favorite tools or do you measure this over time to how do you how do you know that you're going from a great team to a really high performing team and and how do you how do you set the team up to to make those incremental changes to to move towards becoming that cool I'm just going to shut these windows which might mean I start sweating more but at least you might not hear the neighbors kids as much cool the beauties of working from home in a shed in the garden um so yeah so squad depth was around those the acronym because I'm a sucker for an acronym um and I wanted to to capture the aspects of teamwork that I've seen as hallmarks of the great teams that I've been part of so self-improvement quality unity audacity delivery all great teams that I've seen being part of they all want to get better they all value quality they all have a sense of togetherness and unity they don't just just accept things for what they are they push they push boundaries for themselves their organizations the technology they're audacious and they're always delivering so those are the those are the hallmarks and while I'm not I'm not using that as a maturity model as such what I had what I have done is I picked out a number of sort of realizable or achievable or even targetable milestones that teams can say do you know what we've done that that's a good thing that that is a tangible moment in our maturity and development and life as a team that we can look back on and think you know what before we did that things weren't as good as they are now there's a horrible analogy of boiling a frog some of you might have come across it before but I don't encourage you to do this but the saying is if you put a frog in a in a pot of boiling water it will jump straight out but if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and slowly heat it up the frog will just stay there and eventually die because they don't notice the gradual change and while that's there's there's positive interpretations to this and there's also negative interpretations to that as well as the frog dying that if you're in the middle of something you don't tend to notice the changes so I see a lot of teams who've made huge strides but over such a long period of time that they don't realize how far they've come so actually taking stock and saying you know what what milestones have we reached recently is is a really valuable and fantastic thing for teams to to not only look back retrospectively but also build in proactively so I've I've I've seen teams now that are sending me screenshots of their Trello boards or whatever tool they're using with these milestone cards on that they're looking at in retrospectives saying these are the ones that we're focusing on in this sprint you know we want we want to get better at arguing with each other without you know taking it personally that's that's our focus as a team this sprint we think if we can argue as a team in a healthy way we will be a much better team so they're practicing that for a sprint and then next sprint they'll pick off another milestone that they're going to aim for and meanwhile they might have accidentally just got better at something else they might have hit bug zero for example this sprint I could mention the milestone cards he's referring to if you get the book team mastery there are milestone cards really beautiful milestone cards that you can for all of these milestones that you can actually they're appropriated so you can actually throw them out of the book but but my uh my favorite one actually uh is at the very end congratulations on the first milestone here with little baby Grayson so I started the idea of team mastery started many years ago and it was it was an evolutionary thing so a lot of the teams that I was working with I was just encouraging them to keep journals so I just went down to the local craft store and bought a huge what looks like a scrapbook or a photo album type thing that you would stick on you know the old for those of you that used to get your photos printed out and stuck in an album you know what I'm talking about the old ring binders and and I encouraged them to to to capture their growth every sprint to say this is what we this is how we've grown as a team this sprint and annotate it with retrospective actions and photos and selfies and pictures of burned down child anything that's just captured their growth and so they would make their own team journal and over the course of the year they would have a year's worth of growth as a team that they could look back on and it's it proved such a you know really nice thing for teams as an artifact um they actually wanted to make copies of them for when people left the team and they wanted to take take a copy with them to remember the team by that they would get them reproduced so then that coupled with the fact that when we had our third child I was given a set of milestone cards to the way you were supposed to take a picture of when they first puke on you and you know um first wet the bed and stuff like this and you take a picture and you stick it on instagram to shame them forever that sort of inspired me to this this celebration of well this is actually a tangible thing that we can celebrate this is a card that we see oh we've done this let's have a selfie with this card we've you know we've achieved this obviously the book came out just before the pandemic hit and everybody started working from home so there weren't many team selfies with them but but hey they've they've iterated and they've innovated and turned them into digital cards so yeah that's where that came from so we have a question here from Justin how would you explain working with the unknown for the fee suite in the context of predictability this is the big one I think this is the big one for for leaders in organizations now um so I'm I'm actually really excited I'm doing my first in-person workshop for probably 18 months next week getting together with the leadership team for the first time and that's not on zoom or something really excited about it and just talk just met them today online to to go through the kind of things that we're going to be talking about and one of the things I said that is is that we're going to be looking at things that you don't know anymore and that's that's a really tough thing for for leaders to come to terms with is because lastly people have risen up through the ranks in their organization because of what they know because of what they've been able to do because of their expertise because of their experience and actually the more complex work we get involved in the less useful our knowledge and experience is and it can actually hamper us because if I'm the expert of you know hammering things in everything I see tends to look like a nail and I stop asking questions of is that a nail I just assume it's a nail that's what's worked for me in the past so for leaders themselves as individuals this this greater complexity this greater volatility this greater uncertainty is massively challenging to them because what's worked for them in the past isn't going to work for them going forward they need to instead of answering more questions they need to ask more questions instead of taking control they need to give control they need they need to do something very very different to what's got them where they are and when you factor on top of that uncertainty we're not built for uncertainty human beings we don't like it it causes us all sorts of anxieties and stresses and pains and we try and get rid of anxiety we try and get rid of uncertainty as quickly as we can regardless of or not of whether it's the most effective way to do it so we tend to oversimplify quickly we don't tend to sit in that not knowing but when we are actually dealing with the unknown unknowns we need to sit in that area of not knowing we need to suspend our disbelief we need to temper our cognitive biases to to to go back to what Russ was saying we all have them we don't realize a lot of what they are we don't realize what a lot of our prejudices and our preconceptions are but if we have them then it really hinders our ability to let the actual data the real data emerge because we see what we expect to see we don't see the world as it is we see the world as we are through our own lens and that's that's the challenge for a lot of leaders because it seems like it's a challenge to ego no i do a lot of work with leaders in a one-to-one level and this isn't just a cultural thing it's it's working with leaders from lots of different countries there's there's a need to redefine what strong leadership means because historically strong leadership has been i'll take charge i'll take the tough decisions i will step up i will that that that sort of i will take responsibility i'm ultimately accountable all this this kind of almost machismo about the strong leadership when actually the strength in leadership now is being able to say i don't know and that's okay i don't need to know right now we're going to figure it out or we're going to let it emerge and this is how we're going to let it emerge we're not just going to sit back and wait for something to happen we're going to craft some cheap safe clever experiments that limit mitigate our cognitive biases and allow data to emerge and we can use that data to make slightly more if not subjectively more objective decisions all right so catrin wants to know if you would have to stick with just one retro format for the rest of the life of the team oh which which format would it be that's a tough one huh yeah that is a tough one because it actually and i suspect catrin has been very clever in in putting this in this format because i wouldn't be surprised if she had a similar opinion to me that it's not so much the the format of the retrospective but the fact that a we're having one and b that it's it's not becoming monotonous so to me it's not so much the format that matters just the fact that the meeting the ceremony is engaging and one thing that going back to this thing that humans are predictably weird is that we do tend to get bored very quickly and we we tend to develop blind spots we tend to develop more blind spots over time and that's that's natural it's quite normal because as human beings we are filtering so much information on a minute by minute basis that if we didn't filter out what we were expecting to see and putting that really quickly to one side in a box we would be overwhelmed so it's a natural mechanism for us to actually cope with the world but it can lead to us to getting more blind spots it can lead to us missing things it's why you can you can google all sorts of your own search engine you can you can you can find all sorts of funky videos on there where you you're looking at something and you're not seeing it the old basketball playing gorilla and things uh gorilla playing basketball so where am i going with this so in general i would say it's not so much about picking one technique it's about trying to keep it fresh and keep it engaging but i will answer the question because i'm people who don't answer the questions frustrate me so i'm not going to be one of those people if i was going to pick one format for a retrospective for the rest of the life of the team it would be the awesomeness retrospective so that is what's one thing that we can do to become or get closer to being the most awesome team ever so that would be what i would pick awesome so claire has a question here um what suggestions do you have to help establish trust and and basically teamwork good teamwork between in that relationship between from masters and program leadership which means by program leadership it's not necessarily line leaders but but let's say a company is going through a platform change so they're changing a large suite of software and you have leadership of that initiative and so the scrum masters work closely with the product owners product managers as well as the leadership of those initiatives and how how do you have any suggestions for how scrum masters can improve that relationship between that leadership team and and then the scrum masters and and really the individual contributors during the work yeah and i i think i would probably i would genericize my answer here because it it almost to me doesn't matter of course there are going to be nuances but it almost to me doesn't matter who the other party is but when i'm establishing trust and a good working relationship for me the first thing that i always start with and people are always surprised the fact that they haven't really done this already that is just having some having a conversation about what people expect of each other because what that scrum master in that organization expects their role to be expects their responsibilities to be is judging their success on can be profoundly different to how the program leadership in this example is expecting the scrum master to to be acting to be taking responsibility for to take a really extreme example and it's not it's not extreme in the fact that you'll never see it it's because it is still quite common is the amount of organizations where some people in the organization are expecting scrum masters to be responsible for the delivery or the estimates or for example but the scrum masters that's not even cross their mind they'll be responsible for that because they know that's not officially their responsibility but the people who they're interacting with they just see them as something else they see them as a for example a project manager and so that mismatch of expectations is doomed to fractious relationships but having a conversation about well this is what you know i need from you in order to be successful in my job this is what i'm happy to do or i'm prepared to do for you so that you can be successful in your job what do you need from me and so on having that conversation just gets so much of that out of the way and then you can build on top of that some of the more standard good working relationship practices like just getting to know each other a little bit more as human beings rather than professional acquaintances and now what do you like what are your habits what do you that so that something i've mentioned almost in passing in team mastery was was the concept of a user manual and it's probably one of the things that people have picked out the most from it just that idea of you know how do i work as a human being what can you expect how can you get the best out of me you know what are the what are the things you need to be wary of you know don't put this person in water after midnight type thing don't feed them snacks after midnight whatever it is you know don't email them on the weekend whatever it is so understand a little bit about what makes that person tick what what their drivers are that what their goals are what really annoys them and then you can start playing to the strengths of that relationship then how is that clear that was wonderful i i'm formulating some more questions so i will put them in the chat cool very all right so waiting for that we have mark he says in scrum mastery um you look some of the fantastic examples of moving the team toward healthy conflict uh have you come up with any additional ones since you wrote the book probably um could i remember them that's a challenge so we do um so paul got out and i when we ran um some of our more advanced scrum master training courses we started looking at things like change agency within the organization we started looking at more of the you know the deeper and more perhaps risky and touchy parts of team facilitation so conflict facilitation for me a lot of the conflict facilitation falls into two areas one is can we prevent unnecessary conflict all right and and that's a little bit of what i was just talking about before in terms of expectations but thinking of it as a team level what do we if we're part of this team what do we expect of one another what are we prepared to tolerate from one another what are we not prepared to tolerate from one another and having those conversations before we've broken those expectations can can avoid some of that stuff so there's an element of preventing unnecessary conflict but then there's also the second side of this is actually facilitating useful conflict and that's something that people feel really generally speaking feel really uncomfortable about and so you can you can make little games out of these kinds of things and depending on how confident you are the the more or less provocative um game you can play so whether it's just picking a a subject that's not related to politics or religion or anything like that but having some kind of uh almost like high school debate where you break off into two groups and one group has to put forward you know i believe in i believe that you know sports should have an hour for halftime break or something like that and the other group has to say no i no i believe that's a terrible idea and just arguing and arguing but part of that high school debate if you remember i'm assuming that some of you would have had this at school i don't know i did we did some debating at school and i loved it and part of it was having to try and work out what the other what the other side's arguments were going to be so you have to empathize with that other side um and often you were positioned to to back up the side of the argument that you weren't naturally leaning towards just to encourage you to to empathize and build up that sense of empathy so there's there's the high school debate which which i encourage within teams um i also use um came up with some things called the decide cards which is a little bit like planning poker but for making decisions within a team so it's um basically set of cards that every member of the team has will have a discussion about a topic for for a fixed amount of time when that time box is finished one person and i generally encourage them the the most quiet person in the team because generally they've been listening the best they would summarize the discussion not with an opinion but they would summarize what they've heard um and then say based on what you've discussed here is what i think our suggestion should be and then the rest of the team would would raise a card it's just like planning poker at the same time so we don't influence people that indicates their level of support for that proposal so you can either have d for deny uh e for endorse c for concede not really bothered either way yeah it's another acronym right you get the idea so you can either iterate on it you could defend it or you know inquire ask questions about it so that is a good way of having a bit of a open conversation in the knowledge that we're not going to necessarily agree something straight away or you could go to real maybe it's not the most extreme but it is quite extreme called ritual descent which is a cognitive edge technique which actually i quite like but you've got to be you've got to have a certain level of psychological safety to be able to do this well um so usually this is done with with large groups doesn't have to be large groups but generally speaking works really well with larger groups so you have um have a discussion you have a topic and one each small group let's say four or five people are in a group would discuss what they think their proposal is going to be their solution is going to be it could be around the design of the product or the architecture it could be to do with you know how we're going to change our reward policies within the organization whatever and each group would come up with their own solution within a fixed period of time at the end of that fixed period of time one or two people would take that suggestion to the next group so sort of like a round robin situation and they would just read out their suggestion while the rest of the people at that table listen no debate no conversation just listen and then that person who read out their solution would literally turn their back to the table so they would stay there but they wouldn't be looking at them they could hear what was being said but they wouldn't be able to see them and then that table's responsibility is to come up with all the reasons why that is a terrible idea they have to rip that idea to shreds find all the holes in it all the reasons why it will never work and it would be a terrible idea to even try it and that person just has to sit there and listen to it and then they take that feedback back to the table choose which bits they want to accept or not reincorporate it iterate on their suggestion and then go to another table and repeat the process all the while people are coming back to that other table and so on so that ritual descent that idea of we are deliberately going to have dissent about this and because it's such an extreme case it's quite funny and we know it's not personal we're being told we have to so we get past the politeness of I don't really want to upset people it's the rules of the game you have to and so those kinds of things I've quite liked I like that a lot um Jeff I want to honor your time here it is top of the hour and you have a hard stop at 11 so first of all thank you Jeff for coming and sharing your knowledge with us thank you to all of you who came um but there were a couple of questions left in chat and Jeff has agreed to answer those offline so I will be posting those to him and when I get those answers back I'll send it out to the group hi there Jeff back again and I needed to cut that session a little bit shorter than advertised so as promised the couple of questions that I didn't get chance to answer at the time I've been sent through to me and I'm just going to cover off now so the first one was can you describe an ideal partnership between project managers brackets project management office and scrum so I was a project manager when I first started using scrum and so um I my I was still called a project manager even when I was uh experimenting with being a scrum master uh so I have some experience of this and um yeah I think my my my real answer to this one is this relationship this partnership I like the word partnership has got to be based on realism and support so the biggest challenge that I see between a PMO and a scrum team is understanding the difference between what's planable and what needs to be explored so in my experience in no in my opinion a PMO should exist to support teams not undermine them now it would be rare to see a PMO setup deliberately to undermine I admit that um and if you if you look at the definition of a PMO it would probably say something around setting standards around how projects are delivered and that's absolutely fine standards are are great but standards can enable and standards can disable they can encourage functional behavior they can encourage dysfunctional behavior not deliberately um but uh I mean I I'll give you an example from my experience so the very first project that I was involved in in my career as a project manager um was going okay um and my customer was an internal customer so they were a business representative from a different part of the organization and they asked me they gave me a set of requirements and they said Jeff can you tell me how long this project will take can you give me a date and a deadline and a and a cost now I'm one of the I was one of those project managers who didn't you know I wasn't very technical so I needed to go and ask my team what they thought the estimates were so we had a little workshop we looked through the requirements and the clever people told me that this was going to take six months now I didn't know any different and they didn't seem to be lying they genuinely had some solid explanations for their estimates so I went back to my customer and said six months and my customer said to me well that's a good answer Jeff but it's not the right answer because I really need it in five months and I was I didn't really know what to do with that I said well they've told me six months and he said yeah I know Jeff but can you just have a word with them see if you can get it done in five and so I went back to the team and said can we do it in five and they said well could you could you remove some of the functionality so I went back and asked my customer can we remove functionality he said no I'd love to Jeff I'd love to if I could I would but you know I've got rid of all of the functionality I possibly can this is the bare minimum this is the must-haves I can't remove anything else okay all right okay so I went to the team said we can't do that they said okay well could you could you give us some longer some some more time I told him he's already said we can't have more time he said well how about giving us some more people you know maybe if we had some some more people on the team maybe we could we could do more work at the same time maybe we could come in sooner so I went back to my customer said could we have some more people I might be able to get you a couple of people yeah but take a couple of months if I get them off this project they'll have to wind down and then we'll have to bring them on or if we hired new people it would take a couple of months to get them in so maybe a couple of months time we might be able to get you a couple more people so I'll look great I'll go back to my team they said that's no good you know we'll be already halfway through the project and then we'll have to slow down to bring them up to speed after you'll actually make us longer so okay well we can't do that and then eventually my customer said I'll tell you what Jeff just tell them I'll give them a bonus tell them I'll give them 500 quid each if they bring it in in five months instead of six someone to the team said 500 quid and they said yeah all right so they worked a little bit harder they didn't just wake up a little bit cleverer the work didn't become any easier they just worked longer they worked harder and they basically did some overtime and they made a few more mistakes they cut a few corners but they did it now we had some technical debt that's another story the biggest story here is that the team realized that their their estimates weren't going to be taken as estimates they were going to be negotiated so the next time they were asked to do something instead of saying six months they said seven thinking that maybe we'll get negotiated down to six but my internal customers had seen that game yeah so well they're they're doing that because they want to be negotiated down to six so I'm going to say five and we had this dysfunctional behavior going on and I tell you this story because that's that can be what excuse me that can be what our PMO encourage not deliberately but that that kind of behavior can be what's encouraged because they're expecting predictability in the work and like I said the main challenge here is to understand what's planable and what's not so we are most of the time most of the people that I'm working with most of the organizations that I'm working with are dealing with high degrees of complexity they're dealing with things that haven't been done before or if they have they've been done differently before and the technologies change or the people have changed so most forms of product development they're complex endeavors that can't be predicted accurately so we can't expect a team to predict the unpredictable to plan the unplannable but a PMO could actually help a scrum team to emerge solutions and dates empirically by taking that pressure off to produce accurate predictions in the first place because if we're forced to predict the unpredictable generally what we will see is games so it's around realism like I said it's around this acceptance of what's real what's possible what's planable sometimes it is sometimes it isn't sometimes it needs to be explored and a PMO that understands that will generally get better results for themselves and they can standardize around those aspects around when things are planable and when they're not very long-winded answer apologies for that whoever asked the question I hope that helps and the second question we had was we have teams that assign backlog items to individuals resulting in among other things one person having all the technology knowledge what's an approach to working with managers product owners and other stakeholders to enable a shift towards a more collaborative approach okay to me this isn't this doesn't really sound much it's not like it's about collaboration to me as much as it's about effectiveness versus efficiency and it's quite similar to the context of my first answer actually I didn't really mention that but it's about what's planable and what's not what's predictable and what's not what we can make efficient and what we can't most organizations the big challenge is that they're lured by efficiency efficiency is such an attractive thing to aim for the reduction of waste delivering things at low unit cost high efficiency and that is that's brilliant in predictable environments is fantastic I definitely encourage that but in unpredictable environments then generally what we'll see is what Jerry Weinberg I think was the first person to use this phrase the law of raspberry jam now you can probably google that phrase and get a much better in-depth definition than me I'm just going to give you the high-level thing where the experts those those functional experts like the question is saying one person having all the technology knowledge they are the lumps in the raspberry jam and if you're trying to spread that raspberry jam on some toast those lumps can't be spread thinly enough to give you coverage for the toast and so it's a bit of a stretch of an analogy but that idea that actually those bottlenecks in predictable environments are brilliant because you get things done really really quickly really really cheaply ultimately because they're the best people are getting it done but in unpredictable environments we can't be sure that we're going to need that skill all the time work can change demand can change so rapidly that we can't rely on having efficient handoffs of predictable skill sets so in those situations we need to be focused much more on effectiveness than efficiency and having people with a high bus factor which isn't so it's not a very nice analogy but the idea that if that one person who has all that technology knowledge gets hit by a bus we're screwed we can't do anything now because they're the only person that knew what that was my friend Ashley and Green used to use the phrase lotto factor if they won the lottery and never came back to work it's much much nicer way of doing it but that idea that we have these people as bottlenecks because we're lured into the the nice it's not necessarily an illusion because in predictable environments it is a reality that those people are very very efficient but and not just that we have what's called temporal discounting or short-term hedonism which is that we prioritize the things in the short term so if I've got a piece of work and I know that Nigel is the best person to do this they will be the quickest to do this then my short-term hedonism the actual you know I want instant gratification on short-term results then I would give that to Nigel because he could do that really really quickly but that disables my long-term agility because if I gave it to Paul who isn't as skilled as Nigel and asked Nigel to mentor Paul that slows us down in the short term but gives us greater redundancy and agility in the long term because now two people can do that piece of work if we don't do that then we might not see the negative impact straight away because this this this bottleneck factor has has a certain lag effect to it but we will get to a point almost certainly in certain complex unpredictable environments where we've got two three four five things that only Nigel can do now and so we have to make a choice then of doing something less important that doesn't require Nigel or getting more people to do work that they can't do and that's not a great place to be now in highly volatile highly fast changing environments that's much more likely to happen and so it's much better to prepare for that by creating more resilience at an individual and a team level so how do you do that what's an approach for working with people on that well there has to be a potentially mutual benefit to to changing the way that we work to focusing more on long-term resilience long-term agility over short-term productivity the good news is that for most people there is a potential benefit to changing that approach the bad news is there is almost certainly some conflicting policies or incentives that are actually discouraging that so as a prototoner for example i may be incentivized on hitting short-term targets so actually me encouraging Nigel to mentor Paul is going to risk me missing those targets missing my bonus missing my incentive so there has to be mutual benefit but i would only expect anybody else to change what they're doing or change what they're trying to achieve if they could see some evidence that it was valuable so i would want to run some experiments now these experiments are slightly easier to run in a larger organization because we can run some controls we can have some situation some teams or some departments where we focus purely on functional specialism so we let Nigel be the best that he can be at one particular skill and when that skill comes in we give it to Nigel and we can run some other departments where we have some greater resilience we have some greater cross-functional skill setting we have some greater t-shaped people and we can we can sort of compare and contrast over a relatively decent time frame not too long but not too short so i would encourage some experimentation to to prove whether this is valuable to us or not i'd possibly look at the the value streams to work out where our skills what skills are needed what coverage we have of those skills and the proportion of the work that we have coming in that require different skill sets so it's an exercise that i would call competency mapping which is something that i do with a lot of a lot of organizations a lot of teams to see where our bottlenecks are and see how we can over time gradually remove and reduce those bottlenecks i hope that's that's a good enough answer for you that at least picture interest in in in learning more about what you might do in that situation those were the two questions thanks again for for coming along to the Ask Me Anything session thanks to Jamie for organizing it i do these types of sessions internally within organizations so if you wanted to set something like this up for your own company your own community of practice then give me a shout all right take care everybody see you soon