 I guess we wouldn't need it for the crew, I guess. I know for the recording. Yeah, so even if we are maybe not that many, I would be already happy if you take one thing and you carry that on to your team and maybe this way spread the word. And so you are the right people, right? OK, so you might know me from the books that I've written or also from me speaking here or maybe at other places. That's not the only thing that I am doing or have done. I'm also an ecological... I never can say that. Pollution commissioner, ecological pollution commissioner, which I did many years ago. I never really worked in that area, but this is also part of my background next to a few other things. And with that comes also my interest in what do we need to do because the planet is on fire and it's our fault. And there are a few examples also around why this is important to me. One is that the biggest problems we are having or seeing and facing in the earth right now on the planet are based on us destructing the nature. And this is a picture from where I live and the forest is almost completely dead. So this is just a huge damage. My other concern comes with my passion for scuba diving. And as a scuba diver, I'm concerned about this that by 2050 it's expected there will be more plastic in the sea than fish. I see you already kind of, oh my, yeah, I know, right? And another forecast is that already by 2030 all coral reefs will be severely damaged that it's probably not able to repair it. And so I always thought, well, this has to do with politics. This has maybe to do with my private life. How do I work and do stuff? However, what I found out is, meanwhile, there's also a lot on our fingertips as people in the actual space or in IT software space that we can do. And so this is what I want to focus on today. And my agenda is kind of my preferred one, what so what now what? And we start with the what, which is about, well, kind of about coming what we are doing right now, but also which maybe takes a little bit longer about defining what's the understanding of sustainability that I'm using here and with what I'm working so that it can help me in my daily work and therefore hopefully it helps you as well. Then the so what is about connecting the whole thing to actual agility. And the third one is now what can we actually do? And this is also the data related part, although I have already at the beginning something about data. Let's see. So let's look at the definition of sustainability. And if you have already dealt with that, that might be something you know, but let's see. So, oh, so yeah, we start with what? So that's the kind of the first definition that came out about sustainability and it's based on the so-called print land report, which is a report created by the United Nations. And in general, it just says whatever we are doing, but no matter what it is, we should always have in mind that the future generations can do what they need to do for having a good life. Right? So that whatever we do, we have a long-term perspective and not only thinking about ourselves. Then another definition that comes from the United Nation and often we see a lot of posters around that. These are the 17 sustainable development goals. And to be honest, again, I try to use that stuff in my daily work and for the print land definition, it often is too broad for me. And the 17 sustainability development goals, they're often too fine-grained for me because if I read something like, well, even as a scuba diver, something like Life Underwater, let me see, that's number 14 here. In my daily work, I don't have clients doing anything with that necessarily, or while me living in the Western world and then no poverty on zero hunger, it's kind of far from what I do like when I write software, right? And therefore, my preferred definition for sustainability is the one that's based on three pillars, so three different areas. And I just wanna go briefly through those. The first one is focusing on social and people, which means aiming for equity, help, and livability. And now trying to translate this already to software and IT, so there are topics like diversity, inclusion, accessibility, and all, well, diversity and inclusion is maybe something we talked for a few years a bit more than we did in the past, yet accessibility, I think, is still something a lot ignored. And actually, once you start looking out for that, you see a lot of things that are not working well, especially in IT and software, because, well, we don't think about it. And it can be something like that if people need to enter their last name, that it's requested that a specific amount of characters are entered, like three characters is a typical thing, but if you look at people, especially like Vietnam or so, they often have only two characters in their last name, and so they can't access it. And it can be all kinds of things. It's just like one example, right? And often it is we don't think enough about this, that the software we are writing is actually for people who are all kinds of people who are different than we are, different than anyone on our team is, and so on, so we have to think broader here. The second pillar is that, that comes most often at first in mind when we talk about sustainability, which is the environment of the planet, which is about protecting the planet. So the stuff that I said before, like my passion for scuba diving, or that I see that forest dying right in front of my house, more or less. And there we can at least start asking the question, what is actually the carbon footprint of the systems that we are creating, both while we are creating it and while it's operating and it's used, and what can we do about this? So you see I'm trying to connect it already to software and IT going through that definition. And the third pillar is the economic and now called this has changed prosperity to prosperity before it was called profit. So last fall this has been changed and which is about improving the lives of everyone and everywhere. And this might be a little bit harder but I have also seen unfortunately too many examples also in IT where this has not been the case. And sometimes I think maybe it's even a higher risk for asking an agile because in agile we still often focus on on the customer's competitive advantage. That's exactly how it's in the principles of the agile manifesto. However, we seldom look further what is the customer actually doing with that and is this helping the world or not? Is it excluding people or not? Does it do any harm or not? And trying not to go too deep into this but one example that is a good but very bad example is a software called Chef. You probably might have known it or know it. Yeah, Chef, yeah, a cloud software which has been used by the immigration and customs enforcement in the US to run the detention camps at the Mexican border where the kids have been separated from the parents even for stuff like that, software is used. And sometimes we don't know and in this case it was also the people who had written the software it was never their intention that the software will be used for something like that. And so my point here is sometimes we need to look further in order to understand what's really happening. So sustainability is actually kind of that holistic thing where all these three are coming together and these three coming together also, I find important because sometimes it's too easy to focus on one of the pillars at the cost of one of the other ones. And at least where I'm coming from very often whenever people talk about like climate crisis and stuff like that right with it comes like climate or social justice and this is just like one example that if we would focus like on the one pillar it might be very unjust and unfair and would not improve the lives of everyone everywhere. So we really have to take that all together to make the world a better place. Okay, so let me see. All right, you might think that software comes to the rescue like examples for that. You know, we have e-books now instead of real books and other stuff. There's a lot that we can do with software and IT that then gives away the physical thing and it might help in some cases actually in this case it's even not clear. And so, and I'm really saying it the way I know it. So there are various data out there and this is sometimes the difficulty when you start digging into that topic because things are emerging all the time and we keep learning and so we often don't know. So one of the data points that I heard here was that for e-books especially if you're buying an e-book reader then you might have to read 19,000 books in order to level it up to like reading physical books. So the problem here is very often we just, we buy a new hardware and this is it what actually creates that big carbon footprint. So it's not in this case the energy we need for the e-books but it's the e-book reader that creates that problem. And again, there are also other data out there so you cannot take that for granted it's just one data point and there are also other, who? Okay, no input is detected, why? Is this for a while? Do we know? Who? I don't, here is power, okay. Oh, but it, yeah. Now this is my power and it seems there is power. This is not mine, this is connected. What does it say here? Battery is low, so it sounds like it's not loading. Ah, now it should look, no. Yeah, ah, it did. Can you check it now? Yes, yes, yes. Okay, bio setup, thank you. Well, we are not there yet. Well, it's booting here, I see something. So here's stuff going on, see. Yeah, yeah, let's see. And of course, I prepared everything so well, I know. This is cool, it's really where we have been. Wow, okay, it recovered. Okay, so we were at this data point and we are not sure if this is true or not, and if software is coming to the rescue or not, and it does in some cases, actually. The other thing is software also needs energy and it consumes a lot of energy and there are also various forecasts, various points. One is that says by 2030, it's likely that IT consumes about 21% of energy, of the overall energy consumption. And just another data point here because it just comes to my mind. If you think of the internet, if that would be a country, it would be the seventh biggest country in terms of energy consumption. So I hope you get what I mean, like we have a responsibility and we should really do something about that. Yeah, I have something else which is e-waste, electronic waste. So the United Nations brings out a report every five years and the last one was published in 2020, so it looked at the year 2019 and there it said like 53.6 million metric tons have been generated as electronic waste. That's a plus of 21% in five years. And now again, as obviously you can see, I'm coming from the western world and I guess we create way more e-waste than you are doing. However, I also looked at that. So India ranks number five in the world amongst top e-waste producing countries behind US, China, Japan and Germany, so my home country. And the thing is, in India, not the ones creating the most per capita, which is small where Germany would be much higher and US and so on, but recycling is not really happening here. So whatever is there is just going to the land field and so that's another problem. And now you could argue and say, okay, but we are doing IT in terms of software and not hardware. Well, the problem is most often hardware is thrown away because the software is not running properly on it anymore. If you think whenever you throw out your phone, probably it is because the apps are not running fine anymore, maybe the OS is not supported anymore or you don't get any more updates and so on. And the same is actually true with the software we often write for our clients that we expect our clients to have the latest hardware and this creates that problem as well. So we have to do a little bit more about that. I have prepared something where I'm not sure, well, you can try it out, but we can also together take a look at it. Maybe you just go there, I give you the ones who want to go there a bit of a time to go there. And I want to show you this as well. Let me see, can I do this? So this is a small tool and I see you can't read anything. Well, I still think I can tell you kind of how it works. Small tool where we can calculate our own digital carbon footprint. For example, I can say here, well, I do have a mobile internet and move it over there and I do have a laptop and this is that one. Maybe I have as well a tablet and perhaps I, where's my phone actually? I don't see the phone right now. Well, whatever, I have a printer. Perhaps one of you has a smart watch and using some online storage. Online storage, yeah, it's there and oh, let's get really fancy. We also have an eSchool group. So with that tool, you can easily calculate what is your digital carbon footprint. It even allows you to say like, okay, for the laptop, let me see, I have, can you read this also? Not really. I have maybe, come on. I have more than one. I have three, let's just pick something and I use it more like seven hours a day, period of lifetime as maybe only three years. I'm just making that up. And I know you can't really see this well but the idea is that we can also next to kind of our regular carbon footprint where for a long time, I would say our tools out there which say like, I don't know how we live and what food we eat and all of that, there are also calculators there which look at the digital space only. And that's interesting as well to look at that. So this is why I wanted to share that with you. Say it again. Yes, I don't know. Maybe we can do it like this. So I just want to share something and analysis I had done around 2019. So what I had calculated was that you just take an example of a ball pen. So it weighs around six to eight grams around, eight grams, 10 grams. It's made of fully of plastic. And typically I just said, okay, let's see how many ball pens are being used. So I just calculated roughly one school would generate approximately one elephant size weight per year. And within one city, we would have more than 100 schools. Imagine what happens for the whole country. And then I was saying, like, you know, if you want to really control that part of it, plastic is not bad, okay? But instead of using ballpoint pen, which is like throw away, I always recommended use an ink pen. That's it. Just a simple change. And if I were to map this into our software development life, it would be like, you know, adopt a hygiene mindset. Where in, for example, if you have to check in a code, ensure that it's not broken. It's as good as the saying, this is just not hygiene. I'm not doing anything. I'm sustainable in nature. So I just want you to share that. Thank you. This is excellent. Yeah. Often, often the big problem comes with scale. And sometimes it's also stuff where we think they are a solution, but because they're scaling, they're not anymore. And well, just that, well, we have here the e-scooter. I know it's not seeable with the font. But also electric cars. If everyone gets an electric car, oh my God, we are in deep trouble. You know, that it's not scaling for the planet. So that makes it even harder then. Okay. So that was more like, okay, you can also look at stuff like that. Let me see if I can easily go back. Can I? Yeah. This is where we were. Ah, right. And then I wanted to share with you something which is along the same lines and which maybe is already a thing to do. Just today is digital cleanup day. So there has been a world cleanup day for a long time where people clean up plastics or whatever in the parks and so on, neighborhood. But now there's also for a couple of years digital cleanup day, and it's exactly today, March 18th. So, and what you can think of if you really need all these old pictures, photos that you have in the cloud or files. I know I have a lot of, especially files on Google Drive. I haven't looked at for ages. And it's packed up by the cloud and we always feel the cloud is just, it comes for free. Well, it's not, right? So maybe this is also something, yeah. And here is like one of the data points that each year the internet and its supporting system produce more than 900 million tons of CO2. So it is just a lot that's going on here. Okay, so this was defining sustainability. Now I want to connect it to agile. And for doing so, first of all, I believe agile made a promise. And if we look at, for example, Scrum Alliance mission, they say for a long time on a mission to create agile workplaces that are joyful, prosperous and sustainable. The Agile Alliance test in their, well, they had it in their vision and now they have it for attracting members where they say through the last two decades, members like you have helped make work more effective, humane and sustainable by applying the Agile mindset and methods. So it's in the vision and mission of the biggest organizations we have in Agile. And by the way, also Kanban has a statement around sustainability. So even if you are like, okay, I'm not in this field, I'm in a different one, no excuse. So there's a promise and the question is, are we filling living up to that promise or not? So far, well, I guess I feel like we are getting started. So this is good, but a lot has to be done. And about getting started, this is one of the things that are happening within the Agile Alliance. There is now an Agile Sustainability Initiative that is created exactly for increasing the awareness that we do have a responsibility here. So I only wanted to share that with you as well. Okay, so there is something here. Then if we go to now what, and I look at my watch and see what we can do. So for the now what, we have two different ways of taking our responsibility for more sustainability. And one is like sustainability by Agile or IT, which is we are using whatever we have at our fingertips and help to make the world a better place. I have like one example for myself, which was last year, I helped together with a colleague of mine, Steve Holger, who also was one to speak for him. A nonprofit organization in the climate space to come up with a new campaign. And we use stuff like open space, event storming, story mapping, all that that helped them to make their next steps. So we have those tools at hand and can use them. Another example is from Nicole Bellinoz, also a colleague who was in the Scrum area more working. And what she did was form an organization, also a nonprofit organization that's called Hack Your Future, where she acted as a Scrum master and helped a team to, in this case, creating a food saver app. Now Hack Your Future is an organization, I know it has spread, it started in the Netherlands where Nicole is from, but it's now in various countries, but I don't know if it's here. And their idea is to help refugees so that they can show and improve their IT skills in order to get easier at job. So it is kind of helping refugees in the foreign country where they now are. And so this is the thing that she did. Another possibility, so this was sustainability by Agile. Another possibility is sustainability in Agile, which is we are using sustainability as a guidance for what we are doing. So we start asking questions all the time, will this improve sustainability or will this make the world worse? And there's like, I have two examples here. One is in your definition of done, why not also looking at the carbon footprint of the system? So has it changed with the last stories you deployed or not? Another example from what a colleague of mine also has even written up, Marjoleen Pilon, which is she's running a planet as a stakeholder at perspective every once in a while. What this means is like, I'm making this up, let's say every false retrospective also or every second month or something. She says the focus of that retrospective is, what if the planet is also one of our stakeholders? What would change? What would we need to differently? What do we now want to do differently? And with that, but I now heard from several teams, they come up sometimes with easy things like your quick fix actually, but in IT, right? Well, they figured, well, if we do it more like this or that, then we reduce the carbon footprint of our system or we make the system more accessible or anything like that in those three pillars, right? So this is a possibility you can do. Now I wonder, first I thought we will together really gather data, but I also know that there's no official public internet here. That's what I figured later on. And so maybe this is not a good approach. Therefore I thought I just wanna share with you some questions you can use to assess with your team. And I have kind of put them under the various values of actual development which are like the focus on the customer, self-organization, continuous learning, and transparency. And so if we look for constant customer focus, we can start asking like, how did we actually decide on the target audience? And I wanna make this a little bit broader because at least I like to work with personas if I think of target audience because it makes life so much easier and in order to find out whom we are writing all that stuff for and how to prioritize stories and so on. However, what I nowadays do is everyone's in a while saying, well, what if our target persona would be the complete opposite of the one we are focusing on right now. Just in order to find out how inclusive or exclusive the system actually is that we are building here. And just this example, well, I said this already with the last name, that it requires like three characters. Another example which is kind of famous is the one with the also famous means typically bad in that sense, with the one was a soap dispenser that only worked for white skin and not for dark skin. Again, it's software detecting the skin color and then saying like, okay, there's soap that must be pulled out, right? But it didn't work. And I just think, well, I'm not only think, I deeply believe that the teams building stuff like that, they are not doing this on intention. And I'm 100% sure that the teams I've worked with, we also have ignored a lot of like outer groups of which we made outer groups, by the way we built the system. So it's not intentional. And therefore what we can do is at least question at times if our target personas maybe are in a way that they exclude a lot of other people which still might not be in our target frame, but we wanna have an inclusive system, right? So that would be one thing about how did we decide in our target audience. Another question to assess if we think about self-organizing now during product creation, we can start asking how are the offices actually fueled? We are creating that product in. So is it fossil fuel? Is it wind, solar, whatever? And most often when we start asking that question, how do anyone knows the answer? But that's the good thing now we start asking and with asking and then requesting transparency, things might change, right? Oh, maybe I add something to the energy part which is about data centers and the cloud we are using because this is also, that's actually the biggest chunk of this 21% that you saw before that's projected in 2030, IT will consume 21% of the overall energy consumption. And most of it comes from cloud infrastructure and data centers and some of them, if not most at the moment claiming they're on a good path and they're working on like, yeah, being at least climate neutral and all kinds of stuff. However, none of them so far have made their data public about that. So there's no transparency at all and we can just believe their story or not. And again, if we would keep asking when we make the decision which data center we are going with, maybe over time the more people are asking for that, the more likely it is that they will make it transparent. Okay, then the next one, continuous learning. I picked here, how can we ensure the product provides the best possible performance with the least amount of resources across devices and platforms? You can even think of, can we provide settings for the user so that less resources are used? Is this configurable? Most of the time we just don't care. And I think we should stop to care about that. Then transparency, what data are we collecting from users and do we need to collect all of this data? And maybe I wanna add, does the user know we collect all this data? So this is more the part of the social pillar and you see this all goes together and we shouldn't ignore the one for the other. So what we have done is we came up with quite some statements or questions like that and created an assessment. And this is kind of what I thought we are doing but again, because of the internet is not really there and also the font is not really that well. However, I still will give you the link so you can go with that assessment and try it with your team or first try it yourself and see how it's working for you. And what I would like to try here in, we will see how readable it is with the font and wanna share with you a report from another group that I made with going through that assessment. So you get a little bit of a feel how this can look alike. I need to go here and there and I guess it's not visible at all. What do you, can you read anything? In the first row, you can read anything. Let me see, does this go better or worse? Okay, so this is like the outcome on the highest level, if you will, for different areas, sorry, I'm diving here. And the four areas, you see, well, first the three pillars we have been talking about, like social environmental economic and then there's the fourth one which is holistic, really taking it all together. And then here it is like, see, I can hardly see it. I think this is there's two and up there it says four and the highest would be a five. So the five would say like, yes, we do that for all those statements where it's like zero, probably we don't know and one is no, we don't do it. So just so you know kind of what we are looking at. And if we look at, well, let's first go for something. Oh, this is better readable, right? Maybe at least for me. So social there, the average was 3.56 which is higher than everything else. Let's go in here. And you can't read, so you have to rely on me. So what I see here, is this readable? Also not, you see your data set. In the very first row you can read it. So I read it out. This one is the highest score with 3.31, 4.31 and it says the team implements policies to ensure the balance of great user experience with protecting privacy. So that was the social part I was diving into, right? And this is something I see quite often and which also gives me hope because I believe 10 years back we started talking about privacy and security but not much has happened but now things have changed. And so in this area whenever we talk about privacy, security of the system for the users, the values are much higher than for other things. Let's go look for one that's much lower. So this would be this one, that's at 2.67 which was that group, how they rated it. It says the team monitors the product, service, impacts, benefits and harms on individuals, communities and societies. So if it's so low it means this is not monitored at all but kind of affect the product has on individuals, communities, societies. Maybe one more in this area and then we perhaps look at, I don't know, one other place. This is a 383 and it says company x fairly to all stakeholders. Well maybe here it says well whatever that means we don't know but it's kind of, it's higher up at least and yeah so this is at least something then. Oh let me see, can I go back, yeah. Let's go to the environment and see if we find something interesting here. Let's go for the highest. I believe that's the highest 378 here the group says the company monitors and productively seeks to reduce waste products. That's also a tendency that we see over time that people look more after what waste is created really. Then we have the lowest that's 132, the team monitors the calm footprint of the system. That's a completely new concept for most of people. So that's also not a surprise to see this here. And so the thing is with this assessment there are all these statements. So you now just heard like four examples or so, right? And where people say in a team is this true for us or is it false for us? And then you see overall what is it? Where do we stand? The assessment even says then something like are we all agreeing or are we completely dispersed on that? So because the average value might not really telling if we have two people saying one and three say five or so then we are somewhere in the middle, but nobody was there. So you can also look at this like that. And what I find helpful with that is that this topic is so overwhelming. It's so big that we often feel helpless. We see the planet is on fire. We see all the floods and fires and all of the pandemic if you will. So all kinds of things. But then the question is what can we do? And for me with this assessment it helps us to just come up even if it's a tiny little step that we can do and then we can also measure it again and see did we make any progress or not? And now that you think well now I advertised it so much so it has been published under Creative Commons. So you can use it for free and however there are some limitations with like configurations. So for free is like the whole package but if you want to reduce it you have to pay this is interesting. Normally it's the other way around. And however for members of the Scrum Alliance it should be all in the whole package. So this is the main thing that I wanted to share with you and let me see we are here. And for me actually the key thing is what we can do is that we need to change our conversations. So we need to ask different questions than we did so far and this way increase sustainability. So that's for me at least where we are right now kind of the next step. And for closing this is the last slide and actually this one is where you find that assessment the full feature thing which is the Creative Commons and right. See I thought I still have two minutes but I don't but maybe we can run two more minutes for any questions comments but I'm also around. First and the third questions are kind of together for me so which is also one of my learnings and I might learn more and then would answer differently right. So this is where I'm right now but my learning is if we focus on sustainability the software actually becomes more efficient and more performant because we try to make the footprint smaller and this is really the general footprint and if we make that smaller also the carbon footprint gets smaller. So this is kind of a win-win to focus on this and I wasn't aware of that. So this is I think a good thing and the other thing is well some people even think if we start looking at sustainability it is against agile because agile has this short term thinking which I never bought into actually for me always a sprint for something that we are measuring in order to know where are we really wanna going are we on the right track is this where we wanna go so still the long term thinking I believe is important and should be supported more now with sustainability so for me it's kind of the opposite. So more and more tools are coming out on this aspect so it's really there's a lot going on if one good source is the Green Software Foundation they have created quite some tools which are also be able to be used in open source then speaking of open source several open source products are now coming with their carbon footprint which doesn't mean like all right we are starting here and things are changing but this does exist there is more out there now than there was like three months ago and I guess in a month you again would see more so there are metrics out there really that help you to measure that. Yeah. Yes. Sorry. Right, right. It's a big topic and I don't have a good answer so greenwashing just in general. First of all I also have a positive answer to that and my positive answer is over the course of my professional life I learned whenever something is used for washing actually it is kind of successful because we all to see this with Agile who claims all to be Agile and it's not right? So this means also it has gained some traction and it's important enough that people do that so that's kind of my positive answer well I'm trying to be an optimist and the other thing is and it's both are not real answers but the other thing is a client of mine said like we really want to do it because if we claim to do something on sustainability but then people find out we don't then it's worse than if we wouldn't have said it in the first place. So that this hopefully also enforces it and also well another statement I have with that is sometimes we also are looking for perfection especially there and this doesn't exist and we shouldn't do it. You know you can also argue well you're great you are here but you have been flying here so what is it why are you talking about sustainability? You should have not come or whatever right? And so this is true for a lot of things and people and companies and so on. So my point here is we all should try the best we can and I have my rational when I say okay when I come here and I talk about that topic and I find here that many people and if only maybe three of them are doing something then maybe I have made a difference that's big enough next to well of course I compensate the flight but this is not really helping but it's just one thing. Exactly yeah but my point is more often when we think somebody talks about that or also company they have to be perfect but that's the wrong goal. Everyone just tries whatever they can try and I think yeah right exactly that's kind of yeah what I hope for I see they've also gone longer. Okay so but I also feel like we should close in so that we can all be ready for the next session. Thank you so much for your interest and let me know if you find something that you do that you did what it did for you and I would be happy to hear feedback. You find me on LinkedIn for example. I will upload it it's not there yet. Actually I have changed it to the last minute because I saw with the internet and so on that this was a problem. Yeah I will upload it. Thank you, thank you. Thank you yeah I think it's the most important topic that exactly you know agile doesn't matter if you are not working on this topic it doesn't matter. Oh that's also a high energy consumption field. Yeah yeah and still it could also help. We don't know yet yeah yeah right yeah. So I'm packing here and yeah and.