 Hello everyone, welcome to this talk about how a digital operating model creates diversity, equity and inclusion by Terry Christian. We are very glad to have her here and joining us today. So without further delay, handing over the stage to you, Terry. Alright. So yeah, I'm Terry Christian. I've been a coach for a very long time. About seven years ago, I started working with a group of people to come up with kind of a digital operating model before we understood what digital was. And so over time, we've worked on this model. And what we realize is the model actually helps people come together in a kind of team of teams approach in order to overcome exclusion. So instead of using diversity, equity and inclusion, it's mostly around how do we be more inclusive? How do we not exclude people? So just wanted to share that today. We're going to have more of an interactive type of a session. So in order to come on stage and share your thoughts and your experiences, you'll need to raise your hand, which is over on the right hand side of the screen, I believe. And then you'll be invited on to the stage and you'll need to turn on your camera and your mic and accept the invite. So we'll see how we go. We were just experimenting with this, but yeah, we want to get your experiences and especially around our work as agile people, whether it's coaching or scrum or whatever, just agile people. So I wanted to get started with looking at how it feels or how experiences we've had when we were not heard, seen or respected. So thinking about times in our careers or in our lives when we felt that we were not heard, seen or respected. I just want you to think about has that happened in your work environment? Have there been times when you were not heard, seen or respected? And thinking about how did that feel? What does that feel like when you feel like people aren't hearing you? And then what kind of reaction did you have? What behaviors did you exhibit? I don't know about you guys, but I know that I've been experiences where I was with supposedly top-notch agile coaches, but at the same time there were some barriers to inclusion. And it made me feel like I really wasn't up to par or it made me question my ability. And then I had some reactions like I would withdraw, I would try to protect myself, and sometimes I had some negative behaviors like I would over respond or put up barriers. So what I'd like to do is ask you to share times at work when you felt like you were not heard, seen or respected and talk about what that felt like and what kind of behaviors you had. That maybe didn't feel like your normal behaviors. So if you'd like to share, if you'd like to come on stage and share, just ask you to raise your hand and accept the invite, turn on your camera and your mic. Good. Hi. Hi. We're talking about a time when you were at work, a work experience where you felt like you were not heard, seen or respected. And how did that feel and how did you behave? How did that drive your behavior? Yeah, I mean, in the first instance, I'm a bit upset. Then normally I take a step back and try to think where I go wrong. And then try to come up with some kind of strategy to get highlighted or basically try to communicate myself how I felt on that. Normally, yeah, that's what I do. Yeah, I basically do not have any, what do you call it, aggressive reactions most of the time. I just try to figure out by myself why it happened. And if I feel like that, okay, there's some things that I need to pass or basically make others aware about how I felt. Basically, it's very open and go and talk to them and try to see if they have done it intentionally why. And if it is not, then how we can move out. Very good. Good. Is there anybody else that wants to share experience? Hi. Hi, tell me. So one, as you were speaking, it really resonated with me. So I'm a part of this large group of coaches, and we are in different geographies. So we have people from the US, people from India. And we have these sessions where all the coaches are coming together. We are presenting ideas or we are sharing our experiences, etc. And there have been instances when an idea that gets presented or an experience that gets shared is just met with complete silence. And it's a distributed setup. So you don't necessarily always have the body language cues, etc. to pick up on. So when you're just met with silence, one, it feels really odd. And then after the silence, people just move on to talk about the next thing. So you don't feel like you've been heard. And I think it raises a little bit of self doubt. It makes you wonder, was my idea bad? Did I not present it well? Was I not heard? Was I on mute? I think that if you believe in the idea, you want to keep at it and make an effort to be heard. But I think what's difficult for me, what I find really draining is to have to constantly be my own spokesperson. Speaking up again and again for myself and make sure that I'm heard. Something that I would expect would just happen organically having to put a conscious effort to make that happen. I find it a little draining. But again, like I said, if I believe in my idea, I have to keep at it. So, but it's an effort for sure. So I thought I'd share that experience. That's really good. Yeah, I hear what you're saying. I feel the same way. I've been seven years working on this framework and it's kind of like, some days you just go, maybe I'm crazy. Yeah. And what does that make you do though? Like, you know, I don't know about you, but I go through some self-defeat. You know, I have to work myself out of that hole when I get in that hole, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. And then, you know, you have to really like, I think the earlier speakers have said, you've to strategize. Okay. How do I get this back on the table? What am I doing that is not landing well, right? So a lot of introspection follows for sure. Over the years, I've learned to, you know, bounce back and keep at it, but it's an effort. It doesn't just happen. So there's a cycle that I go through before I'm able to get back on. Right. Right. Thanks for sharing that. Is there anybody else, one more person maybe that wants to share? So, hi all. I could not just woke up so I could not show my face immediately. That's fine. I wanted to speak about it. Initial career during the initial career. Now I'm a coach as well as a process consultant. But in the initial terms of my career, there are times when it's about to prejudice what generally happens. And when a junior person speaks their own original thought that can get suppressed by the group of people. That's mainly the senior management people. So at that time, you can, I was kind of holding on, not all the time able to bounce back and give it. But as time goes by, I got much more decent. And that actually made me to feel why I had to become a coach also. That's one of the reasons because there are many developers and testers in the team who sometimes won't have a voice about it. Because sometimes they wouldn't have stands for what they have burnt their effort on. So that's actually a trigger for me to become a coach so that I can still voice for others because I have gone through that when I was a developer. So everyone would have gone through this and this is what actually makes what they wanted to become in this career. Yes. Very good. Thank you so much for sharing that. So the thing of it is like, we know, we all know what it feels like to be excluded or to experience barriers to entry. We've all felt that at different times of our life. And really that is caused by oppression. So oppression creates exclusion. And there's four eyes of oppression. So there's ideological, the idea that one group is better than the other. Therefore, they have the right to control that group. There is institutional, which is the idea that one group is better than another and has the right to control the others. The other gets embedded into the institutions so they can control who gets into where in the institution. There's interpersonal, which means that people then because they're part of a certain group feel like they have permission to dominate you personally. And then there's, I think the worst is internalized where you're no longer oppressed. You actually just accept that this is where you are and you can't do certain things because of where you are in the organization. So the thing I wanted to hone in on is the institutional. So the idea that one group is better than the other group, which I call a closed operating model, meaning I can't talk to a VP or I can't talk to a senior leader. Because institutionally, I've internalized the idea that I'm not good enough. I'm not smart enough. I'm not senior enough. And what happens when we do this is we actually stop innovation. We stop ideas flowing and we create kind of boxes for people to live in. And so what I've been working on for the last seven years is developing an operating model that's open. So I call it an open operating model where we allow people to get through that door to come together and to talk to each other. Because in this current situation that we live in, the janitor or the people that do whatever kind of work have as much information at their hands that anybody else in the organization does. So what we need to do is look at how do we help remove the institutional barriers that stops people from having those discussions or having those opportunities to communicate. And that's how we create diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. So I'm wondering, anybody have any thoughts on that? Just like one person to people like, what do you think about that? It's so inherent in what we do. If you think about having to develop or getting to develop a presentation for senior executive as opposed to a presentation for your team. What's your emotions feel like there? We internalize that we are just not good enough to have that conversation with that senior executive. So I'd like to get some thoughts about that. Is there anybody that wants to talk about that subject at all? Okay, so if you understand what I'm talking about, how oppression causes exclusion, could you put a thumbs up so I could see if we're all on the same page? Very good. A few? Okay. All right. Awesome. So I'll keep going. If at any point you want to have a comment, please put your hand up. So what Simon Sinek says is, you know, if we need to as leaders, we need to have leaders create this circle of safety so people feel safe enough to overcome the institutional oppression so that we can bring people in and be able to have open conversations. So he says, when people in the organization have to invest any more than the minimum, if any energy at all to protect themselves internally, they're taken away from the energy that they could be applying externally. That's why great organizations are ones where people where leadership commits to their people first. So I'm wondering like you could put even in the chat how much energy are you spending protecting yourself at work? Do you feel like you're safe at work 100% or do you feel like you have to continually protect yourself and make sure that you're safe? Any thoughts on that? I don't know if I can see the discussion. I don't think I can. Yesterday on the right hand side, if you click on the discuss, you should be able to monitor the conversation there. For some reason my mouth is, oh, there we go. All right. So what do you guys think about that? Are there ever times at work when you feel like you need to protect yourself that you're not safe? 30% in the past 5% now, very good. And any event can trigger a change in that behavior, right? Like sometimes you feel 100% secure. An event can occur that changes trust. It can be less secure, right? So that's great. Thanks for sharing that. And we really want to look at what is that circle safety? How do we create that? And what does that look like? So the first thing we want to think about is culture. So that's the behaviors we do repeatedly. And culture is a result of the way people behave and the processes that they use every day. So if we want diversity, equity, and inclusion, that's the result of changing the way we think about work and the way that we work every day. How do we bring people in? How do we make people feel safe? And I have another comment. I think the impression you build initially goes a long way. I don't know exactly what that means, but I agree that you're probably right. I'll keep going, but just keep your thoughts coming. But this is a deal. How do we create an operating model where people are included as part of the model? And that's where we came up with the thinking of, hey, how about we build an operating model where culture is intentionally at the top? Meaning we desire for community autonomy and mastery and purpose in a trusting environment. And we think it's key to people's satisfaction. So basically, if we want to gain market share, which is the green, we need to have a relationship with our customers. So how do we have an inclusive relationship with our customers? How do we create a culture mindset within our organization? And then how do the things that we do, the mechanics, actually support that inclusion, that diversity, and that equity? How do people get their full voice? And again, the reason why we want the full voice is because no longer are we in an organization or any organization where the boss has the answers. Now, actually the people on the ground have as much information or even more information than the leaders that are running the organization. So that's why we looked at how do we create a digital operating model where we remove the institutional oppression and empower people. And that's really what we need to think about. It's not in my mind any sort of group of people. It's actually any institutional oppression. It really doesn't so much matter about gender, skin color, all those things that we tend to think of when we think about diversity. It could just be your role. You could just be automatically judged because you're in a certain role. So how do we break that? How do we stop that? How do we put people first? So what we look at is, you know, when we think about business results, what we try to help organizations think about is what results that they want for their people first. Yes, because I got a comment because being judged because you're in a role very true, right? So instead of putting our business results first, how about we put our people first? How about we think about how we empower people, how our relationship with our customers, and then how we change society? If we made those our base goals or our base desired results, then you'll get your business results. I think of Richard Branson. He started a campaign to unseat Coca-Cola. So he came out with Virgin Cola. And he did that with any thoughts about how that impacts anybody. He just thought it was a great idea and that idea did not work. You can look it up. He's very open about it. But then you can also look that he learned from that because he posts stuff like we're using recyclable bags on our Virgin Airlines. And now that's a societal result. So because he's giving back to society, people are then more inclined to use his business. So what we look at is how do we build an operating model where we put people first and then the customer, have a relationship with a customer, and then how do we make society a better place? Like how do we do that? And that's how you start thinking about how do we bring people in to have those discussions? And when you do that, you then can develop a very clear vision. And a lot of times when there's not a clear vision, that's when you start to see the institutional oppression. Because if people don't understand the vision and they aren't able to reach out and ask questions and get answers, they're just told just do what I said to do. Then that's where you have this environment where you start internalizing and saying, well, maybe I'm not smart enough. Maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe there's something wrong with me. And that's what we want to get rid of. And one way we can do that is to start helping organizations create a clear vision around their people, their customer, and their societal results that they want to achieve. Any questions or comments about that? If you do, just throw them in the chat. Happy to read them out. So the thing is that clarity is so important. We need to make sure that people understand clearly what the company is going after and along the lines of the people results, the customer results, and societal results. And then the business results follow. If people don't understand that, we need to give them an avenue to get clarification. So we need to remove the structure that says the vision, whatever it is just goes down and there's never a discussion back up. We need to stop doing that and have an open operating model where people can come back and feel comfortable to challenge and ask those questions. And I got a comment saying putting people first is easier said than done. Utilization first mindset is deep rooted. So true. So, so true. And I think that's really interesting that you say that because, you know, we have this kind of picture, right? We have the developer on the ground doing the work. And we have the other people who are around him, but they're actually not in the trenches doing the work. He's fully utilized, absolutely 100% fully utilized. But how is this better for the organization? So who's included? The developer is basically on his own doing the work. He's not really part of the group of people watching him. And the question is there, who's closest to the customer? Who's really delivering a result to the customer? The developer. So should the developer have the opportunity to have those discussions? And you notice the developer is not of any ethnicity or any, you know, it's not a gender thing. It's a role thing. The other people that are watching are actually in different roles that don't require them to be in that trench. So the question becomes how do we help the person in the trench get his job done to please our customers? So we care about that person in the trench. How do we help him? How do we help that person deliver value to our customers? How do we get information from that person who's actually delivering the value to understand what he's seeing and have him input into what we're trying to develop? So that's what an open operating model is. We need an operating model where people are actually not excluding, but people are including. So this is what we look at. Instead of having people watching, we want, I'll see if I can move this icon. I don't sure I can. We want to build a team of teams. So the team of teams concept is that you have strategic results and those strategic results are developed by your enterprise strategy team. And that team is responsible to align the leaders. So when you think about that, this would be your executive team and their job is to align their leaders to a vision. And then those leaders are responsible to enable the results. So instead of in the previous slide where they're sitting and watching, they're actually helping to build the way for this developer to be successful. So leaders are aligned across the vision to the vision to enable flow. That's what leaders need to be able to do. And that flow is to deliver products and services. So the first team is yours, enterprise strategy team, and they're responsible for this, establishing the strategic results. Then you have an enterprise product delivery team. These are your leaders who are aligned and they're aligned to deliver the results. So they enable flow. What does that mean? They remove systemic barriers. They remove, they create enterprise standards, quality standards, DevOps, CICD. They create the opportunity for the product delivery team to be successful. And that product delivery team is responsible to deliver a quality outcome and measure those outcomes. Now this is the interesting part. And this is the part that's missing in most operating models. So you've got the strategic results from the enterprise strategy team. They then align their leaders and they enable flow and they support the product delivery team. So rather than manage the product delivery team, rather than watch the product delivery team, rather than blame, they are as much responsible for delivery of the product as the product delivery team. Now the product delivery team is responsible for quality delivery. But here's the interesting part which you don't see very often in organizations. Their job is to then interact with the team that does the enterprise strategy so that they can learn together. So it's not the product delivery team just to deliver. They need to share their experience with the strategy team so that that team then can readjust their results based on customer centric design. So they can say we measured the outcomes. This is where we landed. This is what we learned. How do we change our strategic results? So what we create is a team of teams. We create teams of people that operate together in an open operating model that is open to learning and open to delivering, supporting everybody in the organization who's delivering that product. Anybody have questions or comments about that? See if I have anything. How do we build consensus around what measurable outcomes means to each stakeholder? Have you seen instances where people don't want to be included because it limits their accountability? So yes, I have seen where people do not want to be included because they don't want to be held accountable. Yep, they stay in the comfort zone. How would you motivate such individuals? I think the reason why people want to stay in their comfort zone is because they are in a closed operating model that's based on fear and institutional oppression. So if we create an open operating model, can you imagine if you're a developer and you know that the results are going to be measured, not to measure the team, to measure the outcomes and then learn. If you have that environment where you're measuring to learn and then feeding what you learn back into strategy, I feel like people would be motivated then to be open and not want to hide. I feel like people want to hide right now because really the strategic results are not well defined. The leadership doesn't always align to help create flow and it becomes all on the product development teams back to make sure that they're delivering to some mysterious thing that people haven't fully aligned around, haven't fully, you know, haven't fully verbalized. So this operating model opens up the opportunity for people, regardless of their role, or even people on the ground who are doing the work and are closest to the customers to feed that information back into the system. I have another question about how do we build consensus around what measurable outcomes means to each stakeholder? That's a really good question and that's definitely another topic I could cover for hours. But the reality is it's all about team of teams. So we don't build consensus around measurable outcomes. The stakeholders build the consensus around the measurable outcomes. It's not the job of the product delivery team to figure that out. It's the job of the entire organization to figure that out. Thanks, Terry. I think a more open system can gradually bring some individuals out of their shells will take time. It does take time and it does take effort. But the way I like to think of it is everybody in the organization needs to support the product delivery team. They're the ones that deliver the outcomes. Nobody on the strategy team or on the enterprise product delivery team can deliver the outcomes. So if we think about everybody in the organization is there to support that product delivery team, how does that change the conversation? It does take time and it will take time. But this is what we should be striving for if we want to have organizations that are learning in order to improve their results, in order to improve the flow of value to the customers. It's just an ongoing cycle. We continuously move across this cycle. And the way we do that back to how do we get stakeholders to have consensus and come to one achievable outcome or result is that your product management is actually across all of the teams. So they use a corporate planning cadence. You start with your vision, you go to your roadmap planning, to your release planning, and then to your sprints or your iteration planning. But what we see in most agile organizations is when the iterations finish and we deliver, we don't learn. And this is the difference. This is the difference between what agile was meant to be and what agile is now. What agile gives us is an opportunity to manage risk because we have these open operating models and to learn on a regular cadence. And if you don't have the cadence set up, you won't be able to manage risk and you won't be able to learn on a regular, regular opportunities to learn. They won't be there. So it just still becomes like a waterfall situation where people are delivering, but we're not learning. And if we're not learning into what we're delivering, we're really not agile. In my opinion, like that's the whole concept behind it is we can learn, we can learn faster, but what people tend not to do is set up that learning cadence or those learning loops I call them. If you have questions or comments, please put them up. So then what we think about is, so who's responsible to build the right thing? Well, enterprise strategies are responsible to make sure they identify the right thing and product delivery teams are responsible to build the right thing according to what they said. But they need to have that learning loop so they can feed back into the enterprise strategy and they can learn together to build the right thing. So it's this group that needs to work together as a team of teams to make sure they're building the right thing. Who's responsible to build it fast? Well, enterprise strategy is responsible to ensure that they've created a clear vision that people can follow in order to build it fast. And then the enterprise product delivery team is responsible to create flow and to make a way for the delivery team to build it fast. So they're responsible to build it fast. And then who's responsible to build it right? Well, the enterprise product delivery team and the product delivery team are responsible to make sure they're building it right. Meaning they have quality standards. They have all the tooling they need. They have the quality standards across the enterprise. They have their CI CD pipelines. They have all the things that they need. They need to work together to make sure they build it right. Any other questions or comments? I'll keep going if not. So then when you pull it all together, this is what it looks like. Basically, we call this product centric flow, and it means that everybody in the organization owns the product outcomes and the desired results. We have an inclusive approach and it provides a better result. So when we don't listen to the guy in the trench who's in the ditch, then we won't learn. So what we need to understand is that everybody working together will build the best result. So we have your strategic vision. They're looking at the strategic investment, the desired results in alignment, and they establish the results. But then they work across the enterprise strategy to create an enterprise enablement pipeline. So they share that vision down and these leaders align to the strategy, the process, and the measures to create flow. This is so important. This is today's leaders. Today's leaders need to be proactive to create flow, not watching and hoping that the guy in the trench is going to deliver something, but actually making the way for that person to deliver. So there's two key things here. One is we need clear vision. We need to understand exactly what's happening to you and also have the ability to go back and clarify. So get rid of those institutional oppressive barriers and say we don't understand, help us understand. And today a lot of times you see that does not happen because people have internalized that they're oppressed and they'll say I can't ask those questions. So we need a forum in which people can ask I don't understand help people align and they'll create a way for the teams to go forward. And then you see product management here. They're responsible with the leaders to create that enterprise product. So they're responsible to ensure that they're working with those leaders and making sure that their product is able to flow through the system as well. So they the strategic vision team creates that establishes the results. The product management team measures the results. They're responsible to establish those measurements. They create the roadmap, the quality flow measures and outcomes. That's their job to do that and they work with the leaders in order to create that flow and then they work with the delivery team in order to deliver a quality product. Something you know qualities is so important. If you look at lean there's five business drivers. So it's safety. And then quality cost and delivery. We sometimes forget quality and we just want to go fast and anybody that's experienced yes you've gotten something fast but it was not satisfying. That's almost a worst experience, a worst experience. So the idea is that they're partnering. They're all partnering across the organization. They measure those quality delivery outcomes and then that team feeds back into the strategic vision. So this is the most key relationship is this delivery team that delivers the results. They continuously improve, they learn and they feed what they learn back into the strategic vision. They conduct customer centric design. They understand the customer more about what they've delivered and they change their strategy. So this is a digital operating model. This is what it should look like and this is an open model where everybody has a voice. There's not anybody that can't be heard because we create these cadences around these roles and responsibilities. I've talked quite a bit so what I want to do is with the time we have left is there anybody that wants to ask a question or is there anybody that has a thought happy for you guys to share if you want to put your hand up. Harry will help get you on stage so you can share with us. Hi Kelly, I hope you can hear and hear me. At what point do you realize that in your institution operation has been internalized by team members? What are the red flags that tell you that operation has become internalized at this point? That's really a good question. I do shadowing as part of my coaching journey and I was shadowing a team and one of the team members, I was just listening to them and one of the persons said my stomach is already turning thinking about this. I can imagine how other people would feel and I think you know when there's oppression when you feel that tightness in your stomach and you feel like I don't feel like I can talk. I don't feel like I can contribute. So this is so I think most organizations have that institutional oppression and I think we need to start having those conversations with leaders to say you're missing this loop. This deliver results and strategic vision and the only way that we can get that is if we break down those barriers. Right. So the concept of going faster and delivering more doesn't deliver the best value right? Sure. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for asking. That's great. Once again, thanks a lot Terry and this has been an extremely informative and enjoyable session.