 It takes a lot of energy a lot of passion and a lot of work so thank you on behalf of everyone who's here I see a lot of these thank yous coming through in the chat and I would encourage you to reach out and say a nice just a little personal thank you to someone that you come across on the organising committee today it means a lot so I can now share my screen which is brilliant and I will get this going I really like the can you see can you see a normal screen there just want to double check perfect cool um so yes we can see you know we're seeing your speaker notes no worries we can spring that that way that better there we go okay cool all right I'm just moving the camera over here there we are good to go cool thank you for that yeah so I was I was chatting to Rebecca about this a while ago when we were trying to organise this face to face and I know that you guys are really gutted that it's not face-to-face but I'm even more gutted because you know you live there right I would have got to visit you again and I as as Rebecca said I've been involved with SUGSA for a while you know I was um I was lucky enough to speak to you guys back in I think 2013 2014 something like that um and it was awesome and it's just been getting better and better and the I love the theme I love the theme of simplicity and so I was even though I've never done a talk on simplicity before I was inspired to to create a talk on on simplicity simply because I think it's a fantastic thing really really timely given where we are in the world right now and so my goal this morning is to talk to you about a few aspects of simplicity first of all why it's important why it's why it's beneficial indeed I mean it's a competitive advantage if we can get it right but also that it's really quite difficult to get simplicity right and if we get it wrong it can be a little bit dangerous so I'm going to talk about all those things it would be it would be highly unlikely that you hear a talk over the next two days possibly over the next two years that doesn't mention the pandemic so I will touch on that slightly because it has undoubtedly affected all of us and it's affected our ability to optimize our levels of simplicity and I think for me that's that's the one message I want you to take away from this it's not about it's not about simplifying it's not about complicating it's about optimizing your level of simplicity because simplicity is a good thing complication can be a good thing so optimizing your level of simplicity that's that's my aim for you today and I'll give you a few things that hopefully you can do to help with that so how does simplicity help well I think there are a number of different ways I'm going to talk you through my personal experiences so I'll caveat this with this is just Jeff's opinion all right and Jeff's opinion is not always right just ask my wife the the first the first thing I find simplicity really helpful for is is when I'm solving problems now you might have heard of the term Occam's razor and this this is something that it's it's used in all sorts of things but the first time I came across it was when I was watching House the TV show with Hugh Laurie fantastic one of my favorite TV shows and I think it was it was to do with predicting hypotheses and it's been widely used in in medical diagnoses and the basic premise of this is that if you've got a problem and you've got more than one different hypotheses or prediction around it then it's usually the one with the fewest assumptions the simpler explanation is usually the one that's most likely to be correct and so when you're looking at solving a problem it can often help just to strip away some of the hypothesis assumptions that we have and really tied into that is another principle that you'll probably be aware of even if if not by the the the official term then by some of the more sort of colloquial interpretations of it the Pareto principle or the 80-20 rule and when I when I was first taught scrum I was taught now there was there were studies out there that 80 percent of your product's value comes from 20 percent of your product's features this this 80-20 rule 80 percent of the bugs come from 20 percent of the code these types of sort of heuristics and rules of thumb are not just applicable in software but they're in business in society in sport this 80-20 rule seems to be really quite common and we can take advantage of that and focus on the 80 percent there's the stuff that's shining out and it will help us solve a lot of our problems a lot quicker and I think that's going to be an underlying thing for me today is is focus on what you can focus on and then the rest will become a little bit easier I've got a little picture of a Rubik's cube there and now I'm not one of these people who can close their eyes and you know do it in 20 seconds but the fact that there are lots of people out there that can do that tells me that when I first saw a Rubik's cube I thought well that's just crazy and it took me forever to ever get close to solving it but it is possible and it looks really complicated but there are patterns and it doesn't take long for you to google the patterns of solving the Rubik's cube right and once you know that pattern you can pretty much solve anything and not just solve it but solve it in multiple ways you can actually create multiple different types of solution so patterns really really help decomplicate things patterns are simple and patterns have become part of how we do a lot of our agile things the other thing where simplicity really really helps me is getting things done so I'm a so Rebecca very very politely and kindly referred to me as an all-rounder that's a nice way of looking at it I get involved in too many things right so I have very high whip limits quite a lot of the time which is not something I preach you know I try and practice what I preach but at various points in time I think you know what things are getting a little bit crazy I need to simplify and the best thing I do create a list the good old-fashioned back-to-basics list a checklist where there can only be one priority number one and I get that thing done and then I move on to the next thing and when I get back to basics I get so much more done so much more done and so much more fulfillment from getting those things done the other thing that's been a big thing for me certainly over the last 12 months and I wouldn't be surprised if some of you could relate to some of this is is the personal well-being it's so easy to get over complicated with our work with our life and I was interested in looking at whether this was just me and whether there was actually some scientific backing to this but simplification can help lead to a greater level of personal well-being so I was doing a lot of research and that turns out there are a lot of studies I came across this term voluntary simplifiers so a voluntary simplifier is somebody who consciously chooses to live a simpler life right so they sort of opt out of the sort of materialistic sort of buying things type world and just live on simpler and simpler means now I want to stress I'm not encouraging you to do that right I don't want you to go out and live in the bush and throw away all your possessions or anything like that but just looking at some of these studies they were pretty consistent in finding that people who were voluntary simplifiers had higher levels of what they called personal well-being or life satisfaction and there was one study in particular alexander and usher from 2012 which found that 87 percent of people who actually made a conscious move to a simpler life increased their levels of life satisfaction now like I said you don't need to go and throw away all your possessions go and live in the bush and forget about everything but just doing a little bit more simplifying and this going to sound really perhaps overly simple but taking a walk stroking a cat having a conversation with an old friend you know it's we've got loads of technology and technology is amazing right and we make use of it but sometimes just going back to basics really really has a massive boost one topic that some of you who've seen me talk before will have heard me mention before is decision fatigue I think it's a huge thing I find it really interesting area as well because if you actually took time to look and write down all of the decisions you make every day you would be overwhelmed so don't do it right but just deciding whether to have a cup of tea in the morning deciding what clothes to wear in the morning deciding how you're going to you know turn up to work deciding what job you're going to do first every all these things a lot of them they're automatic and that's brilliant because we have these fantastic brains which allow us to automate a lot of the normal and that actually is imperative to allowing us to function but despite that amazing facility that we have there are still a lot of things that we actually spend time spend energy spend stress on making decisions about that we probably don't need to see you've probably heard of Steve Jobs and Barack Obama and all these other people who just don't choose what to wear in the morning yeah their wardrobe is full of the same outfit and they just put on a clean black turtleneck right it's it's not because they don't have any fashion style it's simply because that's one more decision they don't have to make that's one more amount one more ounce of energy that they don't have to spend on a decision that they can then use for something more important so whatever I'm not saying that you should always wear the same clothes every day all right I don't need to stress this but just look at something that you think you know what I don't need to make that decision I'm just going to automate that all right and just free up that energy for something more valuable more important more impactful for you just make it a little bit simpler again Rebecca in her lovely introduction said that my I see myself as a coach first that's where I get most joy that's where I spend most of my time and I like to think I'm pretty good at it however I was talking to talking to my supervisor the other day and it wasn't it wasn't what I went to supervision for but it came up as a result of the conversation about how quite often people come to me and when they've been coaching the country for all sorts of different reasons but quite often they'll describe it as Jeff you know what that that felt a bit like therapy and I said well that's interesting because I'm you know deliberately not a therapist I draw really clear lines where therapy is and where coaching is so yeah but it felt like it said have you ever had therapy so no no but that's what I expected to feel like so talk to them a little bit more about that so well do you know what I just don't think I've ever had anybody actually really really listened to me at work before and just genuinely inquire without being nosy and so that's that's a sign that sometimes I'm doing a good job I think all right but even when I'm doing that I can find myself being pulled towards using a really fancy coaching process or you know a really cool coaching tool or technique you know I get dragged into feeling that now and again I need to earn my stripes as a coach or just do something more and sometimes that's that's brilliant sometimes it works out really really well but more often than not I'm over complicating it and all I need to do as a coach all I need to do all I need to do is just listen to someone and just inquire genuinely the basics go back to basics the basics of coaching just listen and genuinely inquire so that that's just a sort of little reminder that I have a little post in it on my wall just listen and inquire moving slightly away from me and more into the more organisational work that I do one of my favourite quotes that I had I used to use a lot I used to actually share with people a lot was by the author of the book The Little Prince famous book with some of you probably read if you haven't it's a cool book and I'll probably get the pronunciation wrong so please forgive me but Antoine de Saint-Exupéry all right he talks about the difference between simplifying your message and over complicating your message being specific or being visionary so his quote is if you want to build a ship don't drum up people to gather wood divide the work and give orders instead teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea now when when when Quasie was giving her metaphor of the songs and the understanding of the lyrics underneath it they just brought this back to me again because when you want to engage people you don't really detail things you tell them the essence you hook into the essence and then you leave some blanks for them to fill in for themselves you let them personalise the message you let them see themselves in what we're talking about if you over specify something you take up all the space for people to join in so whether that's the corporate narrative whether that's you know a sprint goal or whether that's user stories you know for anyone that's used user stories i'm sure you'll find the best user stories are generally the simpler ones they're not the ones that take up two or three pages of a4 with all the edge cases all the happy and sad parts and you know the details it's this is a user they have this need this is why it's really important to them for this need to be solved and this is why we are in a great place to help them that's it that that gets people going that increases our sense of well-being that increases our sense of engagement so we try not to oversimple over over complicate and then when how do we know we're doing a good job you know this is one of the big never answerable questions really for someone in our in our world it's very difficult to know if we're doing a good job if we're scrum mastering a team if we're coaching a team if we're leading an organisation through a never-ending journey of organisational cultural change how do we know we're making progress and again it's really easy to come up with some complicated metrics and sometimes that's the case that's that's important because actually we are working in a complex and complicated world and there are nuances that we need to take into account but ultimately when it comes down to it the only metrics that matter are is this done or is it not done does it work or does it not work is my customer happy or are they not happy do i feel better or not the really simple metrics are the ones that that really really matter and just stripping it back to that i think is a really big personal and competitive advantage so those are the things that i think where simplicity helps all right so problem solving getting things done engaging people your personal well-being decision fatigue coaching people stories and tracking progress but i don't know i want to know what you think now i'm not going to ask you to to put yourself out there verbally if you feel like adding something into the chat then please do but more importantly i want you to if you've got something that you can write on whether it's digital or even more simple pen and paper i just want you to have a think about yourself so there are two questions on the screen there pick one or the other or both if you want and just think do you know what it would be great if i could simplify my work and here's why it'd be really useful if i could simplify my work because and then whatever that means to you not going to ask you to share that with anybody if you want to share it with other people to inspire them brilliant the other one is is not necessarily work but life so it'd be great if i could simplify my life because what benefit would that give you okay because the benefits it gives me meaningless what would it give you it's the only reason that you would have for doing anything to simplify i'm just going to pause for 10 seconds of simple silence cool unfortunately i didn't install this font on this machine and and that's an example of over complication but unfortunately simplicity just because we've said it's good doesn't mean it's easy and i love this quote from mark twain although whether it was from mark twain or not he's one of those people like benjamin franklin that you find so many quotes attributed him on the internet that most of them aren't but hey you can do your own fact checking so this idea of i didn't have time to write a short letter so i wrote a long one instead you know which on on the face of it is quite paradoxical it's it's quite weird but if you think about it simplifying a message takes time boiling it down to its essence takes time and if we don't take our time we end up waffling we end up over delivering but not necessarily value so why why is simplifying difficult well first of all we're clever so one of the fantastic things that we have about us as a species is our intelligence but unfortunately we're also intelligent and because we're intelligent we feel often unconsciously we need to use it and so there's an element of well this can't be this simple you know i've done all this training i've got all this knowledge i've got to use it there must be more marks available for this question in the exam you know so we tend to over complicate first whether it's to prove ourselves whether it's because we're insecure whether it's simply because we just like to use our intelligence but then once that that complication is out there it's really difficult to unpick and yet agile is telling us start with the simplest thing that would possibly work what's your MVP what's what's the what's the first iteration but that's really difficult for all of us it's a normal thing um we like to future proof we hate the idea of waste i'm not the only person out there that hates the idea of having to do the same thing more than once having to go back and redo something rework waste we hate that and we're always quite demanding as a species and again that's a good thing because that encourages us to progress all right we want more and that is a good thing but we want more now and there's always someone who wants something extra another thing that we tend to have in common as a species is we don't like saying no we can always rationalize why it's a good idea to add that little bit extra in it delays things it over complicates things and every feature that we have not only costs us to deliver it but costs us to support it as well i i have this recollection of the analogy of the magpie going around collecting shiny things but when i started trying to find an image for this slide i really struggled so it got me thinking is that is that a thing or is that just me is that just something i've picked up from my childhood about magpies going around stealing shiny things maybe it's a story heard and it's just not a thing um but so whether or not you you have the same metaphor and analogy as me i really don't know but um regardless of whether you see you're a magpie or not there's probably a good chance that if you you know you go up into your attic or your basement or your you know storage facility you've got a lot of stuff all right we tend to pick things up and collect things and hoard things as we go through life and there's a couple of really valid reasons for that we attach sentimental value to things they evoke memories and memories evoke positive feelings and so on there's also the the the economical effect of the endowment effect which means that once we own something we place a higher than objective value on it so no one is ever going to offer us what we think it's worth to take it away and we can't bring ourselves to throw something away because we see value in it so it's very difficult but not only do we collect and hoard things we also collect and hoard people and projects and commitments and obligations and we find it really hard to let go this idea of a sunk cost fallacy i've put energy and effort and investment sometimes financial sometimes emotional into this this thing this relationship this project this commitment and if i let go now all the effort is wasted this is that sunk cost fallacy we have an obligation factor of well i don't want to let people down yeah i've set myself up as somebody who doesn't doesn't quit all right there are all sorts of reasons why we hold on to things why we hoard things why we store things and they're not bad all right but just as we would tell a product owner yeah they need to ruthlessly prioritise there's no point having 10 000 items on your product backlog we probably need to do a little bit of that ruthless prioritisation ourselves all right and anybody who's actually gone through a little bit of a of a purge with regards to their their old belongings generally speaking the the feelings that i people tell me about are positive it felt good to cleanse some of the things that we don't need anymore to let go but we have that sort of emotional mental barrier to get over we also procrastinate okay another very very common human trait and procrastination is not necessarily a bad thing all right we're actually leaving things to the last responsible moment is a good thing we know this from an agile perspective and sometimes if we don't do something we actually turn out we don't need to do something the the need or the problem disappears but by procrastinating we tend to let things pile up on us now that has a couple of different problems for us because first of all our mind is now not focused on what we're doing but it's also focused on the things that we know we should be doing and want to be doing okay so we have a split focus even if it's in the back of our mind it's just eating away oh i should be doing my homework but you know i'm doing this really important thing really important it's a displacement activity but still it's important so that there's that split focus and that has a negative impact because the more we split our focus the less stuff we get done going back to my list thing it also causes us stress because we start feeling guilty all right and that guilt of not doing the things that we should be doing or seeing that list pile up feeds that cycle and we also start making mistakes because we're not focused which takes means things take longer which means we lead things to pile up even more and it feeds the cycle so it's all very well and good saying let's simplify but if we procrastinate we're just making things harder for ourselves and we do have a tendency to do that but the biggest the number one reason i think simplifying is hard for most people and this is based again just purely on my own personal experience okay i don't have any empirical foolproof data to back this up just from my own personal experience is that most people don't know what their mission is all right now you've probably heard of warren buffett whether or not you agree with how he made his money or whatever and he said something the difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything now having a personal mission knowing what you do and why you do it allows you makes it a lot easier for you to say no it allows you to focus on what's really important and say to the other things do you know what that's great but it's not what i'm aiming for it's not going to get me closer to my mission and again if you think about it we're all agile people right we talk about the importance of vision we talk about the importance of prioritization we talk about these concepts for our work but do we do it for ourselves so i'd ask you do you know why you're doing what you're doing do you know what you stand for another one of my favorite favorite quotes and again you can probably find lots of different people who this quote's attributed to but if you don't stand for something you can fall for anything so maybe i don't know what your mission is right maybe it's to create one great team at a time to help them create one great product at a time maybe it's to coach people to realize the great strengths and potential they have maybe it's to become the to become the most respected agile voice in south africa maybe it's to develop empowerment and resilience in people teams and companies whatever your personal mission is think about what it is and then simplify it because you'll probably write something a bit too long first of all and put it somewhere all right that you can see i'm going to come back to that in a minute but just before i do one good way of simplifying is recap so simplifying is difficult because it's an insult to our intelligence we have a desire to future proof and we always want more we hoard things we collect things whether or not you're a magpie or not and most people don't know what their mission is again that's what i think i don't know about you i'm going to challenge you maybe this will be really easy for you maybe it'll be really difficult i don't know but again i'm not going to ask put anybody on the spot if anybody wants to share their output for this in the chat brilliant okay if not share it with somebody else or just do it for your own personal benefit but i want you to think about what is your mission now it can help to split this out between your professional mission and your personal mission because we are not all our jobs all right not all of us have a job that is also our life's purpose and that's okay but we can have a professional mission and a personal mission so i want you to think about what that is and write that down if you want to do one if you want to do both that's up to you again i'm not going to check on you but again another 10 seconds of simple silence to get your thought process going i also said simplicity is dangerous so while it's very very good it is very difficult but just because something's difficult doesn't mean it can't be achieved and often the things worth achieving are difficult but you should also be aware that trying to simplify comes with risks it would be unprofessional and unethical of me to encourage simplicity without giving you the traditional warning signs so why is simplicity dangerous well we all have cognitive biases now this is very much linked to my my comment earlier on about about the idea that we see things as we are all right we don't see the world as it is unfortunately we see everything through our own lens and our brains like i said earlier our brains are brilliant at simplifying for us okay they allow us to connect patterns they allow us to to automate they allow us to to basically function without getting overwhelmed by the amount of stuff that's going on and we try and filter out stuff well we have to filter out stuff we try and filter out things that are important that we think are important we try and filter out things that are unimportant we try and filter things that if we if we're familiar with then we don't need to pay a lot of cognitive effort to deal with but unfortunately because of all these filters that we have through our own lens we might not always be the best judge of what can or should be simplified so inviting people in to our simplification process can be a really powerful way of mitigating this potential danger but if we're just doing it ourselves we tend to we don't know where our blind spots are another risk is that we choose easy okay now i mentioned about occum's razor earlier on and one of the main criticisms of that as a sort of philosophical tool or a practical tool is that it gets misapplied and that's largely through laziness all right now the main misapplication of occum's razor is that they try and compare two different predictions rather than two hypotheses for the same prediction so we're not comparing different things and looking for the easier option that that's kind of a form of denial if you like but it's quite easy for us to rationalize that or misunderstand things so telling ourselves that we need to simplify could be a good excuse for us to take the easy way and to be honest when things are stressful who doesn't want the easy way now and again now i know i can be very very guilty of oversimplification and i can point to the agile principle of simplicity as a nice get-out all right but really what i'm doing in those times is making an excuse for myself to not be diligent or thorough and i know i can be guilty of that so i'm aware that that's a blind spot which is a starting point so i can involve other people in my process to help me see where that's happening whether that's a coaching supervisor whether that's being part of a collaborative team whether it's just running it by my wife whatever whatever works to help me make sure that i'm not just choosing the easy way all right because simple isn't always easy simple is quite often very hard but it's worth it again i'm talking a lot about my own personal um fallibilities here i'm very guilty of not refactoring often enough i'm a big fan of moving on getting something done and moving on and this i'm sure some of you will have will have come across um so as you also mentioned the term resistance you know we will we will experience all sorts of resistance when trying to help an organization when trying to help a team and then we are trying to help them right we're not trying to impose something on them that's not going to be beneficial we want to offer them something that will be useful to them but one of the concerns and there are many valid concerns about an agile approach one of them is well you're just going to do something barely sufficient and then you'll never go back and make it good enough okay so if you've met somebody who's really conscientious who's you know so probably in a you know a qa type role or something like that whose job is to make sure that you know we do things that work then their concern will be is you're going to strip this right back to something that's barely sufficient and you're never going to add in all the stuff that we need to make sure this is you know satisfies all of the the criteria that we need and i think that's the same for life it is a big risk that we don't move on to the next highest priority feature and we don't go back and make that next thing good enough all right get it done done so that happens at work it happens in our projects but also happens in our life are we disciplined to go back and actually refactor the simple decisions that we've made early on just to get us going if not it's the equivalent of writing some some crappy code and not going back and refactoring now in our projects we have the opportunity for a you know a rewrite project or a technical redesign but in our lives that's a lot more traumatic so making sure that we go back to refactor that that can help now we can put some practice in place to help with that the other thing is we have an amazing ability to cope and I think you know the last 12 months have been a really uh Sean real spotlight on how adaptable we are as a species we have a fantastic ability to build coping mechanisms or workarounds for all of the daily sub-optimizations that we make all right and it's brilliant because it allows us to function allows us to keep going we say all right okay well I can I can deal with that and I'll come back to that later sometimes that's unconscious sometimes we aren't even aware that we've built a coping mechanism or a workaround and it's it's kind of like that metaphorical ostrich sticking their head in the sand because eventually those coping mechanisms won't work anymore but by then it's become such a big thing that it's going to be a huge deal to actually address it whereas if we'd have just done a little bit more continual refactoring continual simplification it would have served us so much better over time so our ability to cope can actually be our undoing and sometimes we need to look at the little things that we put in place to help us cope and say well I probably need to remove that right now okay whatever that might be whether that's a buffer in our system or or so we see the world as we are we choose easy we don't refactor and we cope all reasons why simplification can be dangerous now I've built some flags some triggers and some some positive mechanisms in to try and help me notice when I've oversimplified but that's going to be my next challenge to you and I'm not I'm not expecting you to to solve this straight away but get into the habit of thinking how will I know if I've oversimplified because oversimplification can be as dangerous as over complication are there any triggers that you could set are there any flags that you could look for any signs that you could keep an eye out for that would suggest that perhaps you've oversimplified this is only going to be your first iteration okay these flags these triggers they will emerge and evolve as you reflect as you do and reflect so again 10 seconds just of simple silence for you to think I'll know I've oversimplified if so how is the pandemic affected things I would suggest again only speaking from my own experience here but I've seen quite a lot of people who have reacted to this in very different ways the whole cliche of you know a challenge is an opportunity type thing has actually played itself out in my experience I've seen some people that have taken the challenge that the pandemic has thrown at them as an opportunity to simplify you know something that they know they'd always really wanted to do but they never really found the time for whereas other people have really focused more on the extra challenges and the complications that it's brought up so we've seen more challenges whether it's we've got our kids at home schooling at the same time as us or we haven't got a work set up in our in our house or and we haven't got the bandwidth or the tools we've had to deal with difficult and quite rapidly changing rules for how to operate in society whether that be from lockdowns to social distancing to wearing of masks to washing our hands or whatever that they're changing right and regularly changing we've got to deal with different working environments quite a lot of people now over the course of the last more than 12 months have started new jobs have changed teams trying to get to know people through less than optimum or less than habitual methods and we've all had to get to learn some new tools i i have to be honest that introduction from uh from from the from the succinct team this morning of how to use these tools was brilliant made it so easy to find these different tools and techniques and these sorry not tools and techniques different tools like mirror and zoom breakout rooms and code of conduct all in one place making it so easy for people but we've got to learn all these different things and they're always changing right there's always another new tool that's coming out but if we look at the other side of things we probably have to travel less we've had to commute less that's simplified things we've focused a lot more on what's been going on in our local area and our local bubble and the fact that i don't buy the whole idea that we're all in the same boat here because a lot of us have very very different boats um for for lots of different reasons but we are in a very similar situation so it's been incredibly normalizing to know that pretty much everyone in the world is being affected by the same thing not in the same way not to the same level but to know that this is a very um universal experience that we're going through is it quite a simplest simplifying factor and it has enabled us to focus on the simpler things if we choose to all right being able to to have have your have your lunch time at home with your family maybe being able to to stop work and use the time that you would have been commuting for other things being able to get into more of a habitual routine on some of the hobbies that you've always wanted to do whatever it is it has allowed us if we've made the time and the effort to take advantage of the opportunities a chance for a slightly more simple life so what can you do right my challenge to you is first of all oh that didn't work that didn't work okay my challenge to you the little um target at the top is to create visual reminder of your mission so what the words that should come up at the top there are focused on your mission and i want you to place it somewhere somewhere that you can see all day every day so you're probably going to need multiple places multiple copies of this one behind your monitor one on your fridge one on your notebook stick one on your tablet as a wallpaper whatever it is so that you see it all day every day so that you know that whatever you decision you need to make you can check that against is it getting me closer to my vision my mission or not um the next one is identify your simplification rituals all right one two don't worry don't worry i want you to learn to say no all right i'm going to come back to that in a minute but it's really important don't just do it because warren buffett said it don't just do it because jeff said it just think about do i say yes too much all right and we need to learn to say now i'm going to talk a little bit more about that because that's really important i want you to check in with yourself regularly ask am i okay all right if you're not simplify eat your frog all right what does that mean it's something that you might have seen me tweet about again probably mark twain maybe benjamin franklin who knows when someone said if the first thing you do is eat a live frog then the rest of the day is going to be fine if you can get that one thing out of the way first thing in your day the rest of the day is going to be a hell of a lot simpler and then the other thing i've got is apply the 90% rule again i'm going to talk to you a little bit more about that now so saying no all right it's really important if you're going to simplify that you need to get more comfortable with the word no so you're going to need to practice it doesn't come natural all right and it also can help if you've got a few standard phrases of your sleeve so if nothing else before before you worry about saying if nothing else just do one thing and that is buy yourself a bit of time before answering when somebody asks you can you do this buy yourself a little bit of time all right so maybe having a few standard phrases that could help you say no you know i'm always happy to help you you know that but this isn't one of those situations sorry i don't have the capacity to do that to the standard you deserve yeah let me ask this other senior person if they're happy for me to drop what i'm doing to do this instead i could do that if you could make this other thing disappear for me now i did a that little qr code i created a little tongue-in-cheek jokie blog post about polite ways to say no and it got a lot of attention so it seems like it's a big thing so if you wanted a little bit more on that you can scan that qr code the other thing is i want to look at your calendar so this this idea of the 90% rule so this comes from uh sort of a philosophy of essentialism what they ask you to do is on a scale of 0 to 10 you can do this with your wardrobe as well all right basically on a scale of 0 to 10 basically ask yourself how essential is each thing in my calendar to achieving my mission scale of 0 to 10 so 10 is absolutely it gets me it's imperative to me achieving my mission nor is it probably taking me away from my mission right and the theory of essentialism says if it scores less than nine it's quite fit and quite quite strict your goal is to eliminate it or at least reduce it okay so if you can't eliminate that meeting maybe you could reduce it from 60 minutes to 30 minutes all right so do this for your projects do this for your non-work stuff but don't forget little what we might call fluffy stuff is important now and again and also looking at your calendar think about how you can start your working day so that you eat your frogs early okay so look at your calendar and be really ruthless all right towards your mission and it won't just be you the benefits but other people that benefit so i'm aware that we've still got a little bit of time in my slot for questions although we are slightly overrunning overall i'll let the sub-settine decide what to do about that i'm now open for questions although i am going to open my window because it's getting warm wow thank you thank you so much chef you have no idea that the comments and what was coming through the chat just from a personal level everyone don't worry the keynote speakers uh it is going to be recorded and i'm certainly going to to watch this over and over again they were such amazing pearls of wisdom but um personally the feeling the need to prove prove one's intelligence to choose the complicated route uh resonated with me obviously the saying no i've actually named my personal diary saying no uh and lastly actually collecting projects you know i didn't really think of i'm a hoarder but that i also collect tasks and projects the same way that i collect things so thank you for that um i'm going to share a feedback tool but before uh google form so if you want to give some feedback to jeff please do but i am going to definitely give some time for questions so if you do have a question please pop it in the chat and then we'll address it uh one at a time so yeah please uh put your questions in there now all right i have one here and i'm just trying to go there can you scroll down a bit and now my zoom chat is being silly all right can someone else read the excellent jeff there we go could you give us an example of a simple story where the readers could add in their own personalized spin um so one one exercise that i that i often do is a visualization exercise um and i try and get people to visualize the future and that that can be really really powerful for making change happen both at a professional level and a personal level um but obviously i can't i can't just meet someone and help them visualize their own story and perhaps they might not be comfortable reading out their own story to begin with so i give them an example all right and you mentioned my my pubcast and i um i talked to uh talked to paul about the idea of well we'd often paul godard and i would often end up in a pub at the end of the day a working day and we we'd have a drink and um we'd start talking about our day and we thought at one point do you know what be really good if we just recorded this and because it's we're always talking about work we're really sad we've got no real lives so maybe maybe other people would be interested in it but we were both a bit nervous about it paul was a little bit more nervous about it than me i'm a bit more of a risk taker than he is and he said i don't i don't know about podcasts jeff i'm really not sure um and we did a bit of sort of risk assessment and things and talked about it but then i asked him to close his eyes and so if you fancy it you can close your eyes and um i said just imagine that you're on this country path okay in the middle of the english countryside and you've just finished a 20 minute walk and you're feeling the warm sun on your back and you can hear the birds chirping and you can sort of smell the freshly cut grass and you're feeling a little bit thirsty so he wandered down the road he looked at this this nice greenery on the side of the road and suddenly you come around the corner and you see you see a pub and the signs there the name really nice warm welcoming visual just just looks like one of those classic brilliant pubs that you've had some great times in and see you are brilliant gonna have a drink i deserve a drink i've been walking for ages i'm gonna have a drink you walk up and there are some people outside that give you that classic nod of i recognize you but not really interested in talking to you and and you you go in the pub immediately greeted with that familiar smell of a pub that familiar sound of a pub and probably been a while since you've been in one but i'm sure you can remember that that just that ambiance that noise you know a few people talking glasses clinking maybe little background music people just chilling having a drink having a nice time good news there's nobody at the bar so you walk straight up and you order your usual and it's it's surprisingly cheap you know half the price of what you'd normally pay and and while you're about to to order while you're about to pay an old friend of yours just calls out your name and you turn around surprised but you recognize them wow i haven't spoken to you for ages they beckon you over you have a sit down you have a chat start talking about all the projects you were used to be involved in all the good times all the the the funny failures that you can laugh about now because you know they're in the past and before you know it an hour's gone by and you know it's time to go but you enjoyed it so much that you really want to make another appointment to to see them again anyway i'll cut that short she's a little bit longer but that story did did you notice any of the blanks that i left for you to fill in what was the pub called everyone's going to have a different pub name everyone's going to have a different visual picture of that pub because i told them that what what drink did you order you know what seat did you sit in all right so all of those gaps that i talked about the greenery on the side of the road i didn't specify a blackberry bush or anything like that right i didn't tell you what my pub was called i didn't tell you i ordered quite a beer i'd left those gaps so marx ordered a bit of Guinness right not everyone would have someone would have a gin and tonic right so it's you can personalize that story and make it your own rather than it's my visualization i don't know whether that makes sense and helps people it was really appropriate because there's beautiful birds in the background yes you can it's stunning um we are a quarter past but you you've given us such golden nuggets that i'm going to laugh with just one quick question so there's a constant need to improve everything means my to-do list is infinite any advice um well one of the first first um engagements that i ever had as an agile coach i started working with a product owner who um who said like you know i get this agile thing it seems okay but my my product backlog is is quite big um so i don't really know how i'm going to handle that and i said okay so quite big is a relative term how big is quite big and they said it was probably about five thousand items or something like that never really counted them i said okay that sounds a lot to me but i don't know how many items do your team normally get through you know in a month or something they said like 12 20 on a good month something like that okay so my math isn't very good but that sounds like a lot a number of years before you'll ever finish any of that right and that's assuming that nothing new comes in in the meantime so there's a pretty good chance would you say that a lot of that stuff will never get done yeah so why don't we just delete it so because people want that stuff if i deleted it they'd get annoyed so but they're not going to get it and having that conversation with people just the transparency about well this isn't ever going to happen so is at any point in this being on my list um i'm really simplifying it and saying well what's on today's list so i've got a big list right but i've also got today's list i've got multiple lists right i've got the the home diy list i've got speaking list i've got all these different lists but every day i'll just pull a few things into my today's list um and yeah the list will never end because we're going to carry on right this will only ever end when we end but um it's it's getting into a sustainable manageable pace of managing it thank you thank you everyone um we are two minutes over time so i just wanted to uh remind you that access to all the rooms and and the passwords and the links are on the mirror board i have reshared access to that if you missed it so just look into the chat i've also shared the google form so please do give jeff some feedback um i might be intimidated to intimidate him to give our keynote speaker feedback but i'm sure he invites it just like everyone else um so please do that so grab some tea make a wee yes i thought about that beforehand uh and we'll see you in quarter to quarter to 11 all right so before you go Rebecca the breakout yes this room is now open so if there's any rooms you want to join you can now check your zoom if you're able to actually go to breakout rooms if you're not able to go to breakout rooms that means you do not have the newest version of zoom so you can use the break also to update your zoom and i can always see a lot of collaboration on the mirror board it's amazing it's amazing great yes thanks malena also you just reminded me um breakout rooms are only from this link okay so just remember there the breakout rooms are on the main lobby and the talks are happening in the different tracks that's it remember to simplify your life and uh good luck with the decisions the decisions to choose what you're going to ultimately watch in the next or listen to the next two days thank you everyone bye thank you bye yes perhaps while people are leaving we do have another opening session tomorrow just to share a little bit more information so remember tomorrow morning to also come to this main lobby link