 Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Agile podcast. This is one of our specials, what we call in the prestigious point series. And this episode, we got to speak to another world famous legendary Agile, Sandy Marmely from New Zealand, the other side of the world. And Sandy's been leading the charge of Agile over in that part of the world for a long time, one of our most respected Agile coaches over there. And we spent a good good hour talking about how her experience from different countries, different cultures has played out in the Agile world, as well as the pandemic, and how things like animals, and language are a massive part in culture and teamwork. And she's also an Olympian, a former Olympian. She's represented her country at Handball. What a great claim to fame. If ever there was a pubs, a story worthy of a pub. It's that. So we even talked about that as well. So we hope you enjoy it. We hope you're subscribed wherever you are in these these times. It's good to be always good to be subscribed to a podcast. Maybe let us know maybe tweet us and tell us where do you listen to your to our podcast? Maybe you're in the office. Maybe you're enjoying a coffee or having a sandwich for lunch. Maybe you're out on a run. Are you stravering it? What's your personal best? But we hope you're enjoying it anyway, hoping it we hope we hope it gets to you to wherever you need to be. But that's enough of us rambling on after a drink. So let's let's play the jingle. There we go. Back in the virtual pub of the Hogany bar. We can dream we can we can but dream of a virtual place of a real kind of wooden setting. I've got a nice keg of beer here. Do you think one day you you could own a bar and work and you know, live in a bar. I've always fantasized about it. Probably be the death of me. My granddad had my granddad used to own a pub. He drank the profits. Yeah, that's that's the publicans lifestyle isn't it? I one of my best friends, parents ran a pub and drinking pretty much every night. I think you I mean, you've got this rude not to isn't it? If you're the landlord or landlady drinking with your regulars. So exactly. Yeah, that's the same. I've got I've got my I'm still drinking Christmas cider, Jeff. I'm still drinking orchard pig. You haven't got through that yet. One of my damaged cans. Did I did I tell the story about about my yeah, I don't know whether you told the pubcast. Yeah, probably shouldn't in case orchard pig ended up sponsoring this. But orchard pink sent me 12 cans of pink cider, which turned up damaged. So I did a good thing and use Twitter to my advantage and gave them some feedback. They were very apologetic sent 12 more. They turned up still damaged ended up with 24 cans of pink cider. Did the good thing tweet tweeted them. They were very apologetic sent 12 more. They were okay. But I still then had 36 cans of pink side this drink. The side is not pink, right? It's just the canvas pink. No, the side is pink. Let me show you. Yeah, it's it's a blush cider. Can you see that? Oh, there you go. Okay. Yeah. So it's it's like a rosé like a rosé cider. So I assume it's just red apples. It's nice. It's it's like very sweet. Very sweet. Indeed. Well, I'm drinking something very cool for me. I think it's cool. You probably wouldn't cool as a mini as in trendy. Yeah, but it's also cold. I'm waking the condensation. I've got a mini keg, a five liter mini keg from the Wild Beer Company, who we've done a pubcast from a Wild Beer Company venue, but it is no more. Yes, it's it's the premise is shut down because I guess I think you shut down before COVID actually the actual place in Cheltenham. They have other bars, but they're still going well online. And so I've got this shipped shipped out to me a mini keg. And this is one of their IPAs called Misadventure. Give me a cool little disc. So you know, if you go into a bar, you put that over there. Obviously, if you had like a what do they call it? A pump? Yeah, you can put it on the pump. It's quite cool. So yeah, it's six and a half percent. And it's smells very fruity. And it's quite a little shot. I've got the I've got it in a wild beer glass as well. Drink wildly different. So they sent the glass with the keg, did they? No, I already had a glass, but I did get another glass. There's another story behind it in that I'm going to a tasting session tomorrow for another of their new release beers, where they send out some you can buy the beer. It's just released. And they'll send you a packet of the hops and they'll teach you how to smell the hops and things. And other people who like the beers are just going to be online at the same time and have a tasting session with complete strangers. I'm sorry, I didn't give you any tasting notes, did I? I see it's quite sharp but not sour. Sort of feeling on the front to the middle of your tongue rather than the back. It's nice. I'll say a little bit more grapefruity than grapefruit is a citrus fruit, but not not not like a lemon or an orange or a bit more of a grapefruit sour grapefruity taste, maybe? Mmm, I like it. I'm impressed. Your tasting notes are so much more thorough than mine. Well, I have slightly more complex drinks to drink than you do. Very quiet history. I'm a very simple man, Geoff. So yeah, just keep it simple. Very good. How was your day? How was my day? It was almost a day off actually because it was my son's birthday today. So we were playing with pepper pigs and Thomas the Tank engines and whatever he wanted to do basically, he was two today. So we were, yeah, there was no no words going on. Hang on a minute, he's not two years old today. I know, I know. Two? Oh my days. I know people say that a lot when they hear kids age. I think oh, he's growing up so fast, but my god, he was only more than half of his life. He's been in lockdown. That's crazy, isn't it? Poor little boy. He doesn't realise it, but well, do you think he does realise it? Do you think he knows? Do you think he knows things are different or or things are? I don't think so. Is his is his normal difference to what are you know? Definitely. What it used to be like. But then my normal is different to my parents' normal. Yeah, I suppose. There you go. Two years old, eh? Well, happy birthday. I'll drink to him. If you can drink to a cheer you on. Cheers, Grayson. Cheers, buddy. Well, you always used to say wet the baby's head, didn't you? It's a tradition when a baby's born, you go out and get drunk. Yeah. And the excuse is you're wetting the baby's head. I'm quite sure where that that tradition comes from. I used to I'll confess, I used to think it actually meant literally you wet your baby's head. Like a baptism. Yeah, like you pour water on him or her. Hmm. Pour beer. Get the baby drunk. Don't throw that at home, kids. No, we're not condoning out. So, this is another, yeah, let's get let's get to work. So, this is another of our prestigious pints. Yes. Recaps. Yes. And yeah, we we got to chat too. So, this is the beauty of distributed stuff. Yeah. Where things have changed over the last 20 years, we wouldn't have been able to have this kind of conversation in real time with someone in New Zealand. Mm hmm. 15, 20 years ago, we could barely speak to someone in London. Very true. But yeah, we we we caught up with Sandy Marmoli. I've always caught a Sandy Momoli, but apparently it's Marmoli. I'm pretty sure I apologize. Name wrong. Yeah. Yeah. See, it's Sandy someone I've. Yeah, go on. No, she said she was coming live at the time from literally the other side of the world, wasn't she? Literally. Yeah. Auckland. Sunny Auckland. New Zealand. Sunny not locked down Auckland. So, not only are they not locked down, they've got gorgeous weather. In many respects, it was painful for her to tell us how normal things were. Lovely. Shame. There we go. But I, yeah, I don't, I don't begrudge them if, yeah, they why not? Good, good, good for them. Good for them. Not jealous at all. But what were you going to say? You're going to say where you knew her from? Yeah, well, it was one of those where we've known each other for a long time, but we couldn't really, we've never actually physically met. I mean, even before the pandemic, we, all of our sort of engagements have been remote anyway. So, we were on virtual teams, on things like conference tracks, and things like that. So, you never actually met at any of the conferences then? I don't think so. But it's not to say that we haven't. It's, and you've just forgotten. Well, and, and Sandy, to be honest, because I think we're the kind of people that if we had met at, we'd probably been drunk anyway, having never met her by that time of the night. Yeah. But no, I don't think we have met up in the same, although we would probably have been at the same conferences at times. So, no, it was good to, and she's someone that for, as long as I can remember, I've always, what's the word, I've recommended her to people. Yeah. Yeah. If anybody's wanted work in that part of the world, and many a time, people said, Australia, and I said, yeah, Sandy's just down the road. Before I'm told that that's like 10 hours away, Jack. Yeah, it's quite, it's, I think it's like six hours. It's a long way. It's a long, It's just like England and Wales to me. Exactly. Just jumping the cards. It's like going from London to Dublin. It's one of those, really. But commute, you can probably commute from Melbourne to Auckland, I imagine. You can commute. But yeah, she's a good egg. She's a good egg. Yeah. And yeah, she's been, she's been pushing that, pushing that rock uphill in, in, in Tiberdea for, for quite a while. And not just there, it turns out. She's, she's been around the, the world. Yeah, well travelled. She's, I think so. She certainly mentioned that she started in Denmark, what there's, there's some kind of history in Denmark. But then she mentioned a few other countries, Scandinavia, Austria, various different places. So yeah, I think she's, she's certainly, and that came up quite a lot during the chat. So it'd be nice to just, we should probably go through some of the, the highlights. And what we normally do with these is share some of our, the highlights and, and play a couple of clips. We've got some clips here to play. I mean, the first, the first thing that I was keen to, so we started off as, as you do with any normal conversation, really. It's a bit of small talk, isn't it? How are you? You know, lockdown's horrible here, but you're having a lovely time. We hate you, but we love you, that kind of thing. And it just naturally evolved into the, the conversation. And the first thing that, that sprang up for me was, well, culturally, you've seen lots of different things. And, you know, culturally, New Zealand is very, very different to other places. Is that, is that similar from an agile perspective, having that sort of, you and I have never lived in any other country, right? We're just born in the UK, lived in the UK. So she's got that experience. And it was interesting to hear her views on the sort of relative nature of, of country culture. Let's play the clip. I think my original work culture is Danish. And if you take that as a baseline, then New Zealand is quite hierarchical. And I know that it's not compared to other countries, but compared to Scandinavia, it is. So we, you and I would typically think of, let's say the Dutch has been very direct, yeah. But the Dutch probably aren't very direct if you compare them to another type of culture. And it's all, I think that, that's probably something I've been guilty of in the past. And that's where stereotypes come in in a way, I suppose, isn't it? But having that exposure culturally, I think, is really, really useful to have in an agile coach's toolkit. We're just knowing, yeah, I agree. And just knowing how people's responses could be different. And I think it just gives you more awareness of how people may react differently. And almost, yeah, it wouldn't surprise you as much. This came up on a, I was doing a class today and it came up, we were talking about body language and how even sometimes body language, whilst human body language, parts of it is quite universal, but culturally, body language can be quite different. So that's being aware of that and certainly tuned into that and having those experiences behind you, I think is going to make not just agile coaches, but any type of people role, it's going to make that a better experience. Well, especially if your team is going to be a lot more globally diverse, they're understanding cultural differences and interpretations. And she was telling us about how language is the same words mean very different things. To achieve the same outcome, you would say a different thing. Yeah, let's play that clip. There's a clip of that. That goes down to like everyday language, where I translate, I speak to a friend in Austria, a Denmark in a town, hey, I want to leave, see ya. If I do this in New Zealand, I go, I let you go. It means the same thing, but you're said in a very different way. I let you go versus I want to leave. And while I'm not necessarily... My first instinct there is, as well as that being very, very interesting, just from an anthropological point of view, is when mapping that to an agile perspective, when I'm talking about, well, I don't necessarily talk so much about agile to a leadership anymore. It's more, it's almost leadership of talking to me about agile, and I'm kind of saying to them, well, hold on a minute, before you go too far, is that what you mean? And that's a whole kind of words maybe we'll come back to in a minute. So where am I going with this? I'm thinking, well, I can experience, so we've experienced a really, we've experienced BT. Yeah. Yeah. And BT had a culture. Yeah. And until we'd experienced anything else, that's all we had. So we were comparing BT's culture to, you know, what we were hearing from scrum trainers, or we were hearing or reading about in the new prod development game or whatever. And then we got to experience other different kinds of cultures, and we were comparing BT then to me, them. An investment bank or a pharmaceutical company or a publishing company, or, and that's all within the UK. So we've still got the UK culture, but even then you've got different industries and different companies and domains within that have different cultures. And being able to say, well, I've been in this situation and that felt really command and control at the time, but now I'm here. It obviously wasn't all the other way around. You know, you can appreciate the spectrum and I think that's quite helpful. And even, so I've had, I won't name clients and whatever, but I've had industries or courses within certain industries that I thought I knew. I suppose I'd made an assumption that the culture would be similar. They're still, they're still inherently software companies, but it's a different industry. So it's the video games industry, which I also assume would be a similar thing. But I think in many respects it's not. It's a much more creative culture and it's a much more, appears to be a much more hierarchical one. An act of surprise meant it caught me out. And it just reminds me again as well. So I did a course this week and one of the attendees on it was from Chile. Okay. And she was, she was, her first language was Spanish, I believe, I think. So she was asking me, she was getting a little bit mixed up with some of the scrum terms. And this is where I think the scrum terms have kind of helped because the idea is that with a vocabulary like the scrum framework, we should all, at least even if we disagree culturally, we should be able to agree what part of that framework is. And she was looking, she was trying to, the virtual look like translate and she was like, so luckily there is a Spanish version of the of the scrum guide. And we were, we were looking up some of the terms and whether there'd be the same terms in English as they were in Spanish, but apparently they're not. I thought they would be, but they're not. Do you know what product backlog is in Spanish, Jeff? Have I, yes. What would you say? Well, I should be able to tell you this because my scrum mastery is currently being translated into Spanish. Oh, okay. But no, I can't, off the top of my head, offhand, I can't tell you what product backlog is in Spanish. I think it was from memory, it was pila de prodotto. All right, which sounds, I like the accent. Yeah. But so she was, and I said that to her, I looked it up during a break, I said that to her, and she went, oh, she laughed. And it basically means pile of product. So it's like, and in some places I've worked, it is a pile of product. But she said literally that literal translation is like a laundry, it would be a laundry pile. That's what she refers to. That's a pila, so a laundry pile. So it's interesting how even the literal, the translation of some of the terms doesn't necessarily equate to the same understanding. I thought that was quite interesting. No, I have, yeah, it is interesting. And so I've had my books translated into German and no Spanish and Italian to come and things. And I don't speak any of them. So I'm completely oblivious as to whether what they've written is any good. So the only way that I can do that is by basically testing it with speakers. And interestingly, I've got, so you say about Chile. So the people that are doing my Spanish translation, I've got one who's in Ecuador and one who is in actually Germany, but is from continental Spain. And South American Spanish and Spanish, Spanish, quite different in many ways. So you've got lots of sort of informalities and nuances that by working together, they've managed to come up with something that works. And yeah, they said, there actually isn't a translation for what you've got here. Oh, really? I said, okay. So what do you suggest? I can't make a decision here. As a product owner, I can't make a decision. It's obviously, you're the people who would be reading this book. So write what you would want to read. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that was good. One of the other things that took about culture was we slightly had it, we hit a lovely pivot. What happened during the chat was we, Sandy, had to move or relocate her laptop where she was speaking to us because the connection wasn't great. And she said she was worried that the dog might bark. And just that little hook there, that little offer, led us down a path on pets. And she told us about her dog and we started talking about dogs. So it got onto a conversation around how you made a link between how maybe our pets and culture in some way linked. And I thought that was an interesting conversation. Let's play the clip on that one. I wouldn't see dogs in the office in Austria. Maybe in the start-up. But I'd really sometimes see them in New Zealand. That smaller companies could have dogs in the office and I see lots of animals on Zoom calls. We talked about whether we see, I see a lot of, we see a lot of into people's homes on Zoom calls now and remote working. So you are seeing more of people's home life, more pets, certainly seeing a lot more pets, wandering across the screen and more people who are willing to ask and share and say, can you put your dog in front of the camera? Can we see your dog? There was a... I think we're getting a democratization is probably isn't the right word. But the only other word that came to mind was dilution. I didn't like that either. But almost a democratization of cultures in a way because of this working from home. And then so my point was around the dogs thing. I've worked in offices in the UK where dogs have just been wandering around the office and the dog is a very part of the British culture. But you wouldn't get, you wouldn't really get that in other countries. And we were talking about certain countries that wouldn't do that. But now you're seeing someone in the UK that has a dog that's normal. It's just here or someone who's cat sitting on the keyboard and typing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And another country or someone who's in another country where they wouldn't be normal, they're seeing that as normal and then it's accepted. And it sort of might just bleed into that culture if you like. And that morphing, that meshing of cultures is coming through maybe. Yeah, definitely. And but I think it's, I think it's given what I've noticed from the calls that I've had very recently. It's an opportunity for small talk. It's a, and this is the thing that we talked about this a lot before that people are finding it harder and harder because the small talk is slowly ebbing away from their meetings and their team working. And I spoke to a coach today who's struggling with that, with that remoteness and she's unfortunately, she's only 12 months into her role and only spent three months of a 12 month role actually in the office. So, and Sandy spoke about this, about the difficulty that it is of trying to coach and build relationships whilst being an agile coach whilst working from home. I think we've got a clip on that somewhere. Working from home is harder. I think especially as an agile coach where you actually get to observe people, you get to overhear conversations and where it's all about, I find it hard to build relationships because everything has to be a meeting. And that must, that must be, we're all people, people, but especially when your role is about building relationships. Is it possible? I mean, can you, can you do it? I mean, it is possible and it's something that I don't know how much you've done but I know, I mean, I was coaching remotely before the pandemic because I've had people, I've had clients all around the world anyway. It is harder to start a relationship, but... Do you feel you would have made further leaps or maybe the client made, have made further leaps if you'd have been in the same room together? Yeah, I would say so. But then it's similar, so I was asked in the past, well, you would have been as well many, many times and I'm sure we've spoken about this before about distributed agile and we were saying in the past can scrums, can scrum work distributed? So, yeah, yeah, of course it can, but it doesn't mean that it's necessarily a good thing. But equally doesn't necessarily mean that it can't work, but given given the choice we would be co-located but if we can't be co-located then agile gives us the best chance of mitigating that kind of extra risk and extra inefficiencies and effectiveness that we get. And I've lost my thread. Sorry, don't worry, but I had an interesting conversation just today about this and I think this perhaps dawned on me while I was having the conversation with another coach about this today. About how much I think coaching remotely for me, maybe this is an assumption I'll test this with you. Has coaching remotely become more of a push? So, I'm talking now from the perspective of an internal coach. Rather than you're not an internal coach you're an external coach. There you are, you're embedded within an organization and you are there your duty is to help. And would you find this client I was talking to certainly has found that it's harder to she doesn't have many people coming to see her or it's harder to just tap on the shoulder or meet over a coffee and all of a sudden the conversation starts. It's much more deliberate it's much more of a push. She's having to have people and coach to them rather than having people or teams coming to her. Well, it's an interesting way of looking at it. And Sandy used the phrase it's difficult because everything is a meeting. Now, I spent a long time my most recent client I spent a long time there and it was even in the office it was still mostly meetings. So we had regular one-to-one sessions and we had regular team coaching sessions but they were always booked in advance. Even when I was physically there it wasn't a case of just bump into them in the corridor that's going to chat. It was always scheduled. I mean these people had incredibly busy calendars as members of the leadership team. So the only chance of a kind of informal thing would have been trying to grab a point after work. That would have been the only chance for that. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. So I get the whole conversation corridor thing. I get the whole picking things up as you're just observing things absolutely but that wasn't how I was working before the pandemic anyway. I wonder if that's more leadership coaching whether that is a bit more formal. I'm wondering whether team based one-to-one developer based coaching is a bit more... That's a fair point. So something that we've almost blown people's minds with you and I on one of our more advanced training courses is around this idea of contracting. So talking to screw masters, talking to coaches, professional leaders, managers, whoever about just having a conversation about what are you expecting of one another. What is our almost terms of engagement here? And having that in place well should we have this informal thing? Should we have an informal thing? And that I think is a really important conversation to have even more so now maybe it's less important now because actually you don't really have as much of a choice but where I was... I just remember where I was going before if you could be together do it but if you can't then make the best of it. And it's a sense to me of well if it's a choice between having the right coach but in the wrong place or the wrong coach in the right place or rather the right coach in the wrong place and the right coach who doesn't have optimum circumstances is going to do a lot more good than the wrong coach in the optimum circumstances is my view. I can see the logic there. I think it's and I'm going to pay a little tribute to our good friend having a wee Jeff maybe I won't edit that out but Jeff hasn't gone to the toilet against the bar in the pub he's pouring himself another drink I'll just make another time on that one No but whereas our good friend and product owner of the Scrum Alliance Howard Stubbler so this is something I remember Howard doing and this may have been to do with the start of the pandemic back in March last year and the Scrum Alliance made some announcements about how things were going to change and obviously we're all yourself who are involved from that point of view Howard made himself available and something he did and he put times in his diary and said I'm going to be on this call and if you want to come and join me even if you just want to chat you want to just have a coffee just stop by and it's my virtual office door and basically he was opening his virtual office door because of the time zone difference as well he was dealing with guides and trainers all over the world he set it up at various times throughout his day or a couple of times on different time zones so I don't think that was a nice touch that was a way of this pull when this this pull coaching so if you need help if you need support here I am I'm here and it's difficult for me to put that on you but if you need it I'm always here for you which is which and it's a nice thing to do and I think maybe some of that has been lost in the in the 12 10 12 months of mayhem since then not just in the strong alliance but probably in many many other companies because meetings have become the timetable I think now has become the priority because it's the only way like Sandy says everything has become a bit of a meeting I would agree with that statement yeah it doesn't have to be a bad thing I don't know maybe maybe that's just a mindset thing but hmm I mean the other thing that I thought was really interesting from Sandy's perspective and it's something that again I don't really have you kind of have an idea you've been to New Zealand I haven't even been there but you just you get the impression that it's on a smaller scale I mean there are a lot fewer people there even in the UK right so it is a smaller scale but we're talking about scaling and she had a funny comment about that yeah this is funny thing about New Zealand is when like sometimes I go to companies and they say well we need to scale and we want to do safe and I go okay so how many teams do you have and you go well three so there's a lot of companies thinking they're big because they're big by New Zealand standards and it did maybe chuckle that you think that's scaling that's not scaling at all it's like that's kind of have you seen crocodile dungee Jeff have you seen that film I know the I know the line you're going to quote you call that a knife I know that but I don't think I that's a knife yeah so yeah do you want to scale how many teams? three teams that's not really scaling though and wanting to be part of all agile movement and wanting to try these new frameworks when in reality that's probably over egging the pudding if that's still a phrase yeah it was interesting and yeah I can believe that from having been to New Zealand and you go to New Zealand and you would drive just to give you an idea of the population the difference in population density the sheer number of people is radically different more sheep than people yeah there are more sheep than people I don't know if that's an urban myth or whether that's actually true but yeah you would drive on a road in South Island of New Zealand and you wouldn't see another car for two hours and that's typical and I can imagine a lot of companies not to their detriment but just because there's probably less less people less jobs, smaller companies I mean they're still doing big business but I imagine they're just doing it with less people that's not always a bad thing less is more that's it isn't it I think that's that's something that I'm having quite a few conversations about I sort of started opening that kind of worms earlier on which is that in the context of the whole 20 years of agile and manifesto and so on now I'm not getting companies I'm not getting leaders saying talk to me about how to get better what's this agile thing that everyone's talking about leaders that are asking for agile then they know the buzzwords they know that agile is probably something they need to be thinking even if they don't know the details so it's not about me coming to them and saying what's this thing called agile? none of them they have but actually is agile what they want or need is the other question and so we had a bit of a conversation about with Sandy it's not about creating an agile organization it's about creating a coherent organization, a resilient organization and New Zealand has that resilience being part of the New Zealand culture and how they are very they have a lot of bounce back ability don't they as a nation don't you say? let's play that clip, yeah let's play the clip because it's a good one I think so probably I think what was different was that this felt more like it was affecting everyone whereas Earthquakes and Peter were a lot more affected than others in Auckland I wasn't affected by an earthquake in Christchurch that much but this felt like we had this messaging of a team of 5 million and there was social cohesion that I think helped with that resilience and she raised an interesting point that I hadn't looked at it like this until she flipped it around and said maybe that could be a bad thing the fact that they haven't experienced the severity I suppose of the lockdowns and of the resilience that might not have been built up because they haven't had it quite so tough so I think that's an interesting point is that sometimes the harder or the more stressful the more you build that resilience or to fight back harder I agree that was something that perhaps I was a little bit too zealous about a while 10-15 years ago this idea that actually you need to feel pain to need change so my first big it was at the time I was hesitating before saying the word transformation because it's not something I encourage now but at the time that's what it was it was an agile transformation it was an investment bank and for many reasons in many ways they did need to be more agile but they were still incredibly profitable incredibly profitable so they didn't from a short to medium-term perspective they were seeing why do we need to change what we're doing is making us money we don't need to do anything differently and that's what Dave Snowden would call the apex predator theory you optimize the current conditions and then you become the most fragile to change because you aren't resilient anymore you are so efficient at doing one thing the right way and so blinked to everything else that's going on around you that you haven't got any kind of disaster recovery plan in place you haven't got any alternative ways of working you haven't got any flexibility and so you become extinct the codec moment yeah I agree on a slight aside sorry mate why are you a volunteer I don't know that's just having worked with you for a long time that was Paul's way of saying and moving on Geoff no yeah it was and I have to apologize because I was distracted because I was distracted by something someone else had said to me this week and then when I was just too many things going on my head I wasn't active listening and I apologize for that I was purely cosmeticly listening bad Paul but I wanted to run this past you so this came up this week we were talking about it is linked but it's slightly different we were talking about how organizations have responded to the pandemic so we were talking on the course that I was with with a few students this week about how some teams or some organizations have completely reacted keeping their agile principles and say ok this covid shit's happened we need to reorganize work from home laptops, VPNs make it happen self-organize but other companies have kind of regressed slightly and gone back to slightly more command and control we need to take control of the situation that came up which we've talked about before something called the parasite stress theory came up have you heard about that I'm going to say no at the time I said no as well because someone clearly a lot more clever shall I guess can I guess the more stressed you are the more susceptible you are to parasites possibly the lady on the call was talking about it in terms of the way that an experiment or a social society theory the way that your organizations will react is correlates to the number of pandemics or epidemics sorry that your country has experienced so if for instance in Europe who have reacted who have had succumbed to a lot of disaster recovery and epidemics and put those kind of moments where the apparently in Europe yes where the government steps in and basically takes control of the situation that her theory was that that transcends into so for instance UK companies who would tend to react in the same way countries that have experienced less of those issues would tend not to suffer she said it's something called parasite stress theory I just thought it was interesting I wondered if you come across it before that theory before that your company reacts based on your country and how many epidemics your government has experienced you're now googling it aren't you I can tell so the rise of authoritarianism parasites and diseases encounter where she shaped the development differences is what leads to the difference in biological mate value it was a bit too clever it was a bit too clever for Paul I'll be honest with you I was kind of blinded by it but yeah it was fluctuating asymmetry it was an interesting example while you were talking there because I don't that term didn't resonate with me so I was thinking perhaps at an unconscious level but perhaps even quite consciously I was sort of trying to think well okay does this link to anything that I already got a frame of reference to and to my shame I can't remember something that I really should be able to remember which is what the law is called but there is a law around basically your organisational culture and your organisational structure is indefinite definitely linked yes and I think there has got to play into the fact that your societal culture is linked as well and also to a degree how I react as a leader is going to be determined a lot on how I grew up and the people that I look to and respected how they acted I can believe it absolutely and if you are conforming to what a higher power the government are saying then it is going to have an impact on how you address the same issue within your organisation or within your company surely so Sandy was she was saying how she was quite very strong personality and I think that something that really stood her in good stead in terms of being counter culture and that sense of being able to say do you know what I am going to come along with me on this I am not going along with the norm because that does not sit well with me and that is something I really really took a long time to get comfortable with that sense of if you do not want to do this that is alright because I am alright with that and I spent a long time I remember doing a talk at I think it might have been your gathering in London where somebody asked me a question what is the difference you have been doing this for a while how have you changed the main reason, the main way I have changed is that I do not care as much and I think they meant I did not have so much passion but that is not what I meant I was a little bit more I was a little bit less zealous I am just more comfortable with how things turn it does not have to be my way I think that is what I am trying to say and Sandy seemed to be quite she had that a lot earlier than I did and she seems a lot calmer for it did you get that I did absolutely she is very chilled out but you would think especially with a big step like moving from Europe to New Zealand that would if anything, I think for me that would probably put more stress on me to make to justify to myself that I have made the right decision if people do not want to do this stuff maybe the whole decision was a bad one from my perspective so I think incredible kind of confidence and a laid back approach to taking that and rolling with the punches absolutely I think we need another conversation with her because you hinted at it you alluded to it earlier on the network was not great and that is one thing that keeps me going because New Zealand has got so much going for it hasn't got great internet going for it and if we would have had a better connection I think we would have stayed a little bit longer and the one thing I would have asked that would have been about some of our listeners have probably read her book around self selection and this effectively a case study of basically saying to 200 people organise yourselves and how she was quite scared when she did that but it worked out well and coming back to something you said earlier on about coaching remotely how important was it that they were together could you imagine doing that remotely where you hadn't actually worked together and everybody was in their own home maybe this is just maybe just silly maybe I'm over skeptical about that I think it's very possible and she alluded to this now that I think coming out of this everyone's a lot more proficient with tooling and the remote element to their work so people if we need to have a call one of us will just start up a zoom or a team it's at the touch of a button these days but it'll happen relatively quickly and people are becoming a lot more comfortable with that but back to 200 people and I was speaking to one of our former students today Alistair Alistair he said he listens to the pubcast I'm sure he'll be listening to this and he was saying one of his meetings I asked him how it went today and he said oh it was awful and he said the only way I can really describe that Paul is the word shit show that's how he described it but I think that's a large scale planning event and it's always going to be harder and it's always going to be more scary if you can't the planning that must have to go into that large scale meeting online must be incredible it's extremely stressful I mean it's stressful when you're doing it in person for different reasons but relying on technology to get you through it we've had our fair share of technology letting us down over the last 10 months or so over the last 24 hours we were supposed to have a call last night and I cancelled it and that's my fault but yeah it's just trying to get cameras working but yeah we're quite lucky to do it on a big scale but it must be scary fair play to them you know Sunday's she's a good ag and she's been doing a lot of good for a large community even though the numbers of people are low lower than the UK it's a wide area we call this series the prestigious points because the people that we're speaking to had a huge impact and there's no denying the impact she's had in that part of the world and beyond and if you're interested in hearing the full interview where you'll hear about how she was not just an awesome agile coach but also a famous Olympian represented her country the Olympic Games and other things and a little bit more about her dog and all sorts then get on over to the patreon website www.patreon.com time everybody come on thank you right are we done we are say goodbye goodbye cheers