 Hi and welcome to the first of a new series of episodes that we're doing that we're calling prestigious pints We've decided to invite Famous faces special guests heroes of ours perhaps on for a little bit of a chat and see where it goes Over a drink as normal And our standard podcast listeners will get to hear the summary of what we talked about Because these chats tend to last longer than our normal episode length, but you are wonderful gorgeous Fantastic patrons you will get access to the whole unedited Compensation video and all So that's cool, right? We hope you like it and we've got some really interesting guests already lined up including Esther Derby Lisa Radkins Roman Pickler And if you've got any ideas of who you would like us to invite on then let us know We'll try and get them involved, but we've gone big to start with We've gone for one of the heavyweights of agile one of our own personal Agile heroes the great Mike Cone in this episode We talked to Mike about how he's had to adapt to more online training like a lot of us and the way that's affected him physically mentally and Particular to do with his what some might find surprising Fact that he is introverted by nature and has to sort of ref himself up before a course We learned some random facts about him including who his favorite Batman is Classic pub conversation. I'm sure you'll agree and why he's encouraging people to break the rules of scrum during lockdown Given that February sees the 20th anniversary of the agile manifesto being written Mike tells us why he thinks the agile manifesto is better off because he wasn't in the room We also talked to Mike about his heavy involvement in the setting up and leading of the agile alliance and the scrum alliance And why he argued against the inclusion of the sprint retrospective in the first version of scrum It was a truly fascinating and insightful conversation We learned What he would change if he could go back in time what his views for the future were and also why his dad Caused him to be so Interested in playing pranks on April Fool's Day We really hope you enjoy the episode. So let us know what you think. Hey, Mike In a while It has I think this whole covert thing shut everybody down from staying in touch in person. So has a long time Yeah, yeah, we'd normally have crossed paths a gathering or a conference somewhere. Yep Yeah, but yeah, well, well, you're in you're in Colorado So we're not we're not expecting you to be joining us with our with our alcoholic beverages today But we'll then we'll just introduce what we're talking what we're drinking today I've gone for something quite left field Paul. Okay got a stout Well, nice can hmm. They are stout. It's called all right mate question mark So, yeah, it's gonna be nice and dark I hear Guinness Yeah, but it's Seven and a half percent so It's been a good sound to it You have you got a protein shake there Mike or something I am doing Icelandic water, so Icelandic water taste just like regular water It was the it was the only water I could get delivered I've been avoiding grocery stores And so I went on to a delivery service and like would give me bottled water and The only place that the only one that was available. So it's like I guess we're running out of water now, too What's that? What's that water that's sort of trendy? There's a Feet Fuji water or Fiji water. Oh Fiji water. Yeah Mike my daughter swears that that tastes much better than regular water But maybe my taste buds have just been dulled from really I've done a taste test I've done a taste test where I had my daughter pour me like three or four and I couldn't tell which was which as I had Like a brand I liked and what I liked was basically that the the bottle it came in was better kind of like your pretty Hand there and yeah, the taste test I couldn't tell the difference So that almost looks like a liquid meal Jeff. It's like it's like it's probably got a hundred Well, probably like 250 calories in it just in that one point I'm gonna say it's a lot more than 250 calories that tastes quite sweet and nutty. Oh lovely It's who is it from oh It's from it's from where I live, of course. It's got pecans in it apparently Pecan nuts not actual pecans. They'll be a bit chewy, but Yeah, it's nice. It's very nutty. I would say chocolatey although it doesn't say anything about chocolatey here maple syrup apparently Nice, what are you up? Well, you're gonna be disappointed Jeff Maybe Mike will as well because then You can tell it's probably trying to tell me something but my wife went to the supermarket this week to buy various drinks And she brought me back alcohol-free cider Deliberately, I think it was deliberate she said, you know, perhaps after Christmas you should kind of you know Have one a few of these now and either that's a dig at my weight. I'm gaining weight or just drinking too much generally Or maybe both who knows? So I've got it's copperberg though. It's I've not had a copperberg for a long time So fruity cider but alcohol-free mixed fruit cider. Isn't that just apple juice? Well, I assume it's not I assume it's red rather than them Okay Yeah, it's like ribena Does look like squash. Hmm It's just basically yeah, it's I think it's gonna be like fizzy Black current juice or that kind of flavor raspberry juice in them in a cider-shaped bottle. I think yeah Yeah, it just tastes like fizzy fizzy berries. No, you're happy. It's very disappointing What's what's your drink of choice Mike if you do go to a bar I Don't drink I used to and I I never liked the taste of it I liked the feeling after a while Yeah, but just something with my taste buds It really bothered me and I had a I think I turned 40 and a doctor told me you have to have red wine at dinner And so I'd go out to dinner. I'd try to drink a glass of red wine. I hated it It just tasted horrible. I'd order better and better wines still tasted horrible my goal was to like chug the wine before the meal got there so it ruined the meal and I go back for my next annual physical and my doctor's like well if you hate it that bad stop So it was like some people's taste buds. I guess just respond strangely to alcohol and it's like oh, it just tastes horrible to me It's like you hear that was cilantro. Some people think cilantro tastes like soap and I don't know just alcohol Just bothers my taste buds enjoyed the feeling but never the actual drinking. Yeah Would you ever like a soft drink or glass of water? I'm mostly a water guy. Yeah, so Water sparkling water. Yeah, I don't I wish I could say I did it as a health choice. It's more just like it's it's what I like so It is it is a good a nice pint of cold water It is a really nice thing. It's brilliant So yeah, it's good. What do you've been up to my recently I do what have I been doing just um What of the kind of training doing some coaching online with with companies kind of trying to phase out a little bit of the zoom out of my life I feel like I've been on zoom on zoom way too much and so kind of trying to cut back a little bit on that do a Little bit more writing with that time So I don't think I get I don't get too much of the zoom fatigue during the day But after weeks or months of it, it's like, okay, I'm tired of being on video so long and yeah Something I read about that was that the thing with it is that we're looking at each other's eyes all the time And even in a you know, like a person to person conversation We're not looking at each other's eyes all the time, right? You know, there's scenery or we look around the room and you know now with zoom It's like we'll just kind of stare, you know on a you might be on a zoom call with 20 people's eyes staring back at you There's something about the eyes being the part that was kind of draining for people So I've been kind of cut back a little bit to a little bit more writing. Yeah You you kind of used to having a lot of eyes on you, but it's not as much in your face, right? You may well have 50 people in a room, but they're a fair distance away Yeah, it's um You know, it's very different from the in person stuff and you know, I love what I do I don't know if I sound like I'm complaining about it, but I'm a total introvert and Whenever I would teach a class in person I'd kind of have to psych myself up for the first day because I you know, I'd walk around and I'd introduce myself to You know 40 or 50 new people and that's hard as an introvert and I love it once I do it But it's like, you know, I normally be in like my hotel room. Okay. I got to go meet 50 new people, right and It's a little bit different with zoom We do we have like a little website where people introduce themselves and so, you know, I learned little Little things about people before I actually meet them, which is kind of nice because when I go to meet them I know that like one guy met recently was a master fermenter You know, I met somebody who was on Jeopardy the tv show, you know, and they put all these little things a little bios And so it's kind of nice meeting people when you already know I mean just like three facts about I'm like, where do they live and one strange thing and I don't know it's been it's been fun meeting people that way and having a little bit different relationships with people that way It's been fun stayed in touch with a few people that I've met in our in our zoom training that way I can't resist asking you then. What are your three fun things and weird You know, I guess when I talk think about that when when we do these introductions Like I was play along too, right? We go on this little website. We all introduce ourselves and I kind of rotate which one That I use I think the three that I rotate. It's not a formal thing. It's just like, oh, what should I say this time? One is that I'm obsessed with hot sauce, which is actually how I meant JJ the fermenter But I'm obsessed with hot sauce. I literally will go through five or six bottles of hot sauce in a week And you know, if we want to do a a podcast where we each drink a bottle of hot sauce. I'm your guy So I'm obsessed with hot sauces. I have this feeling that I want to find the one best in the world And so I'm like literally trying every hot sauce I can find Like hot sauce of the month clubs and things like that the other one I'll mention when people ask my weird fact is that I'm just obsessed with my dog I normally have a little button I could push right now and it brings up a picture of my dog behind me Um, so I just I love my I got two little puppies um And then I think the third one I ever mentioned is that I used to compete at weightlifting as I did a lot of powerlifting So there's like my my weird three facts that I'll rotate through and I'm in groups introducing ourselves that way And that Mike so the elements of the zoom thing and I know I'm much the same as you is that That zooms a very different way of working and training But are there elements of it that you think you prefer to to being in person? Um Just the ease of it and it's been nice like with doing classes that we can meet You know I can have people in classes that might not have been able to make it to one of my classes Somewhere else. I I used the in-person world. I used to train a lot. I would train fairly frequently But um, I'm kind of a creature habit and I want to go back to the same city Stay at the same hotel have the same three restaurants that I go to and so I don't do a lot of like I'm just gonna boom pick a city and go there and I know a lot of trainers will do that And it's probably a better way to live. It's like they'll pick someplace fun and go there and Um, I just want to go the same place same hotel staff and you know, just repeat myself And so it's been nice having the opportunity to have people in courses That might not have had a chance to take a course from me in another world We've been using another a number of other trainers inside our company And so it's been nice to get a little bit deeper relationship there and to experiment with some of the just some of the material that we teach in class And find new ways to to cover some of it. And so that's that's been kind of fun because it's uh It seems a little bit faster paced and so we're kind of doing a lot more exercises in the classes And it's been fun to kind of iterate through those Do you always because we always get people asking these questions in the break, you know All kinds of quick just a quick question To get a break, but I found it a little bit easier when you're online to just I'm just gonna go for a coffee Um You know, I when I was teaching in person it was it was tough because people would come up during the exercises and they'd want to ask me kind of a private question not not private like personal, but it's like you know private to my team and It's always kind of annoying because like I want you to do the exercises or reason I put this exercise in the class And your table is not benefiting from you being there go back to your table And um, I like that because again you kind of being an introvert It was a chance to I mean, I would just a lot of times I'd walk through tables, but other times I would just sit there if I needed to and just Right and just breathe and it's like okay. Nobody's talking at me. I'm not having to lecture for a minute and just kind of Many recharge means like a three minute recharge was enough and the way we do our zoom classes is we have You know the typical zoom breakout rooms and what I do is like bounce into the breakout rooms I'm going to one breakout room and talk to them for two or three minutes and go to another breakout room And maybe I don't say anything if they're doing well with the exercise I'm just going to listen in for a minute or two and I go to another breakout room And so I don't get those little mini recharges in there again I notice like I'm complaining about it But it's been one of the differences and then the actual lunch break that we take Like between two big zoom sessions I do try to make sure I get the lunch break I might hang around for 15 minutes and just ask extra quest answer extra questions But then I do get a good lunch break and that's always really nice And then what I do to make up for any time that I didn't have answering those like you know run up to me during a class I would stay after our class in our classes and just Do kind of one You know one at a time random questions from anybody who has something that they maybe didn't want to bring up in class Or that they knew was really in depth and they'd have to give me like five minutes of backstory before getting to the question And that to me is always the most fun part. I love the kind of rapid Q&A part at the end of those And I've done those for I mean I've stayed after class for two hours on our zoom calls before which is nice because The timing for my classes is such that if I finish I have to go help my wife cook dinner and You know, it's like so I literally tell people it's like stay on ask me questions if you have no questions, I don't have to cook tonight and So far my wife hasn't heard me say that in one of their classes because I kind of do them from our basement where she can't hear me But it gets me out of having to have any help cook that night. So I just do the dishes those nights Nice the thing that um Struck me actually this weekend and I was talking to to my family about it is that um I don't know if you've noticed this as well, Mike, but it's it's the it's the lack of movement Now, I don't know. I was going to ask you how do you? Do you when you teach do you stand as do you sit do you move? Do you have multiple cameras because that's the thing I've noticed that I'd normally be pacing a classroom or be you know walking around the tables and You burn a lot of energy like that and that's the firing itself But I found if anything I'm aching more when I finish the day because I'm sat I'm stationary Have you found that as well? I I have um the The when I was doing like this the stand-up classes a hotel or something same thing It'd be moving around a lot It was always kind of fun to look at my my watch and see how many steps I'd done You know and I'd never gone more than 30 feet from like home base, but it's like whoa 8 000 steps I just stayed right here Yeah, it was a lot of steps from just being in one room But I have this weird foot injury where There's supposed to be like a nerve on the side of your big toe and over years My nerve is like rotated to be under my big toe So every step hurts and When I would teach all day I'd get to the end of the day and I'm just like oh man It hurts and the first thing I do after classes go soak my foot in a bucket of ice I was literally traveling with like these inflatable foot bath buckets and I I'd get mad if I stayed at a hotel that didn't have ice like some hotels don't have ice and I was like I have an injury and then they'd panic or the hotel would think I broke something and it was their fault But that part's been nice not having to worry about my foot And it's been interesting to see if I can get my foot kind of healed better over all this But I know exactly what you mean because I try to stay I try to stay fairly stationary During the class I do have two cameras on me So I can kind of turn and look at one or I can kind of face my main one and I do that a little bit in there But I try to stay fairly stationary because I know if I move all of a sudden out of the frame or Things like that or if I move too much my hands get in or out of focus and so I just try to just sit there and stay but Probably been good in the sense that I'm uh my background is a program And I think I sit like a typical programmer like when I'm just you know writing email slouch way down in my chair and leaning back And you know probably horrible for my posture and like right now. I'm sitting up, you know very straight and aimed right at the camera and It's uh, I think it's better for my posture for the benefit of the camera all correcting our posture now just to try and Try to sit straight Jeff. Jeff straight your back Yeah, so I think that part's been tough But it's like I know like one of the women I work with she has a what's called a PTZ camera Pantel zoom which is actually set to follow her as she moves around the room So she can move to uh, you know, I'll think she moves very far It's just like, you know, a typical, you know, it's probably a spare bedroom But if she moves four feet away the camera turns stays focused on her and I've thought about that But I don't know for now. I enjoy this like I just get to sit there thing But the moving camera has been intriguing Yeah I was I was tempted to I've been I don't know if you have done I've been contacted quite a few times recently about this. Um, the fact that it's coming up to 20 years at the Agile Manifesto and asking to be involved in a lot of Events and things. Yeah, it's hard to believe it's been 20 years, but it is crazy, isn't it? Yeah And uh, Nigel Nigel sent me a picture of me when I was I attended my CSM That was and um, it's it's it's amazing how time has flown And the one of the questions people are asking a lot is, you know, what's changed and obviously this last 12 months has been a massive change But if you take that out of the equation Yeah and What's what's changed? in your opinion Well, one of the things that I that's a great question is one of the things I find interesting about that is the You know, the Agile Manifesto is the four value statements and then the 12 principles I always think of those as being like printed on the back, right? But it's like the the 12 principles and one of those is about face-to-face communication And one of the things I'll often talk to people when we're you know doing coaching or training Is whether this being on zoom counts as face-to-face, right? And now I'm pretty sure that the 17 authors of the manifesto In 2001 we're not thinking about zoom, right? Didn't I don't think zoom existed in 01 um, certainly other Video conferencing software existed, but I don't think they were thinking about zoom as counting as face-to-face But uh, I think what has changed in the 20 years since then is I do think it counts, right? I do think getting um, you know, if we think about, you know, the best communications face-to-face Um, I do think it counts. It's not as good as being, you know in the same room with somebody But it's a whole lot better than a phone call. It's a whole lot better than an email And I think in many ways it is good enough um That that we can count it as being face-to-face when we're on a zoom call And you know, we talked about the you know, seeing each other's eyes and things like that And so I do think that's one of the things that's changed is how we would define face-to-face is a little bit different these days That's true. That's true. I do I do feel Yeah, I find it a real challenge sometimes because when I'm talking about the manifesto in training It's like And a lot of people say you almost like you you should be trying to tell people to that the face-to-face is good But we can't be even training. We can't be face-to-face. So I know a lot of a lot of scrum masters that I've worked with and coached that are just not I wouldn't say desperate They're really keen. They just miss their people people and they just miss being their social We are social animals and we just miss closeness to people and I do agree you can kind of You know get there in a roundabout way with the zoom and it's great to see obviously we haven't seen you for years But when you're working with people day to day that you're used to working with day to day I think when you take that away. I think that's a huge gap I think what we lose there paul is the spontaneity of it Yeah, I I read something a while back that said as companies grow. They're really kind of two inflection points And one was around 15 people right and when a company and it was talking about, you know I can small company but we could we could think of this as a as a work group or a team But when a group gets bigger than 15, you no longer Um interact with everybody on the team every day, right? If you think about a five person team, you know odds are you're going to interact with each other every day I'm again thinking a little bit more in the in-person world, you know, but even now I'm you know If I'm a five person team, I'm going to slack or email my other four people Then it's so when you get to 15, you no longer interact every day and then um kind of had a little bit to do I think with with dunbar's number, but it was around a hundred It said you no longer even recognize everybody on your team And so I think we miss that spontaneity that would happen with the 15 person team And so one of the things that like you know, we talk about what's been fun about the the recent world is one of the things I've really enjoyed I mentioned like, you know our little thing where people have to introduce themselves and share a fun fact and stuff like that I've been really pushing teams to violate a rule they get nervous about which is the 15 minute daily scrum rule And I'll tell him like look we're doing five minutes of small talk, right just random small talk And then we're going to do the 15 minute meeting because we don't have we don't have that small talk And so one of the things I found really helpful with this is like, you know, I wanted to do this I go, okay. What questions do I ask and I'm not that creative? So I don't know that many good questions to ask people for small talk And so I just started kind of searching around on the web and I came across websites That were things like 40 good questions to ask on a first date And and those are awesome questions to get to know your teammates, right? And, you know, again, I'll kind of bring my wife into this. I'm worried she'll never do this But I'm worried some nations going to search my browser history Oh, yeah Why are you searching for what to ask on a first date, right? It's like it's for teams really really, right? So so maybe I'm saying this right now just as a support in case you ever finds my But they really do work as great questions I mean, they're the they're the silly things like, you know, what animal would you be or what super power Which, you know favorite pizza toppings something like that But it's just things that randomly help us know our teammates in better ways And we don't do it every day and we don't do it forever But it's just like I'll just toss them out there, right? You know, who's your favorite Batman actor, right? You know, you know Mine's the Lego Batman. I thought he was the best. Oh, he was good. He was good. Yeah, it was great And so, you know, it's just be silly things like that and we miss that We missed that trivial level of connection and I think we missed the spontaneity That's you're absolutely right and it's that you because when you've got a zoom that starts at 12 and ends at one There's no time is there for that for that that five minutes that you've got when you're waiting for people to turn up When you're drinking you're finishing your coffee or whatever it might be You don't have the incidental interactions that you would do walking around the office I just came across because I've been wanting to do this for a while. I just came across a website I can't remember the name of it but it It sends food to people and it's not like, you know, send me your your meal or something But what you do is you go on there and you can buy like a 30 dollar 20 pound gift certificate Send that out to your teammates and then your teammates can all Order 20 pounds of food to have delivered to them I think like 20 is the public like the minimum is, you know, they're not going to eat 20 pounds of snacks or 20 Yeah, 20 pounds of snacks during one meeting But that's I think the limit this place has to ship and but you know, you can order drinks You can order, you know chips whatever you want on there healthier stuff And so I just asked my assistant to schedule. We have a team big team meeting coming up I just asked her to do that So I'm curious how that's going to go because part of it that I've done for years Is encourage people to like leave their cameras on at lunchtime And so like I might be having lunch when you guys are, you know, having a pint at the end of the day or something As one of the things I like with your idea and probably why it's been popular is, you know, you're just the casual Let's say let's just have a drink together But I think teams, you know, we're not like breaking bread in the traditional sense of passing things around a table But having a meal together I think is something that that teams have missed and so So I was really excited about this site that'll just send each of my team members. I think 20 dollars of food What is a timeless form of vulnerability, isn't it? And there's nothing more in common that we have with each other And we all need to eat. Yeah And we like to eat as well. It's a pleasure not just a function Well, if you think back to Yeah, that's a really good point if you think back to like Meals that you can remember, right? You know, I've had, you know, I multiply my age by three or four or something How many meals have I had? But if I think about the ones that for me were really memorable A couple of them were the really good food. I can think of one or two where I what I'm remembering is the food But for the most part I'm remembering the people that were there or something that happened And so I you know one that as soon as I said that I flashed back on it's like My dad turned 80 about a year ago and it was really inconvenient to go there for his 80th birthday Just it was like just it was between other things. It was like, uh, you know, I'm gonna see I'm like a month later or something He lives at you know, a thousand miles away from me And but I flew there for his birthday. I go, okay, I'm gonna fit it in and I went there I was only there for like, you know on the ground for like 36 hours But it was for his birthday and I had my you know His grandkids come over all that could and stuff like that went into a restaurant And I have no clue what I what I had for dinner But I can remember exactly where I sat. I can remember this the positions around the table I can remember a few of the conversations. I get only a year and a half ago But you know It would take me a couple seconds to remember what I had for dinner last night. I'm honestly trying to remember and I Not sure. I'm not sure what I had for dinner last I could I could you know, stop talking and just think for a second But it's the it's the social aspects of it, right? We miss that. Absolutely happy times, yeah I think the other thing that's changed for me or I don't know if it's changed, but it's um, you know people keep talking about like, oh the manifesto should be rewritten and I don't really think so. It's like I think it did a really good job of being um An artifact that in that created change and you know, you have something in a like manifesto It's obviously meant to to you know, insight change and I'm not really one of those that wants to change it But I do think about something that if I had been at the meeting where it was written One of the things I would have argued against so I'm not proud of this But one of the things I would have argued against is I feel like they double dipped on the The collaboration aspect again. I'm not proud of it, right? But the individual interactions over process and tools Okay, so we're talking about teamwork Then we also have customer customer collaboration over contracts negotiation, right? And so I know that I would have been in that meeting going hey guys We're saying this twice. Do we you know, do we really need to and again not proud of that? Because I think it's a good thing that they double dipped on it because it's probably the most important thing about agile but You know interesting to look back on that and see that they kind of double dipped on teamwork collaboration And then worked out as a good thing Yeah Yeah I mean it could well have been and this is something that came up in the scramble guide recently actually The idea of the customer being some sort of separate entity from the team and trying to to build those bridges So it's more one team, but I think back then it really was that yeah, simply wasn't it? It was there was such a contractual relationship back then I think and and what they can't predict they got to write it as it is there, right? I mean it's there it is It is interesting though that something like contracts made it into the manifesto because like there's a lot of projects They're not done with contracts But I've always been a believer that even if we don't have an official contract, right? You know somebody in a company building something that their boss asked for there's a contract there, right? The boss says I won't yell if you give it to me by that day, right? And so there always is kind of that informal contract So I've always kind of liked that that was there and my company got started doing contract development So I respected that being in there, but I think your point about the the one team nature has been a a trend over probably the last 30 years or so or 35 years and if we go back to I kind of like you know the late 80s When I when I started working kind of mid 80s started my career You would not have had programmers and testers on the same team They were on the project, but they were not on the same team And that's what started to change with that first the new new product development game Of putting people on a team together And I was thrilled to see that we're kind of continuing in that that direction of one teamness I'm a I'm opposed to anything that kind of creates an us them divide and the Even in language, right the more we can do to avoid language That creates us them divides. I think the better and so I think you know referring to people as developers if they develop a solution Doesn't mean software. I actually wrote that my my very first book was not an agile book. It was a book on C++ programming and I had a little like one page Diatribe in there where I went off on how throughout this book I'm using the term developer to mean anybody on the development team and I wasn't using it to say programmer and I still get that in classes, right? You know somebody would be saying developer and you know, they're thinking programmer And I'm thinking anybody developing right and that's a tester and analyst a designer dba anything And so I like kind of shifting to that type of language where it's a person developing a solution not a programmer Anybody on that side of the equation. Is that something that you influenced ken and jeff or nor was that something? Um, I don't think directly. I mean ken and I had those conversations going back 18 years 19 years so What's that? How did you come across each other? um We met when the um, uh, the agile alliance was getting founded So the manifesto was written In february 01 and I had a project. I was running where we brought in ward cunningham as a consultant and ward Did the manifesto and he emailed me like the next day He'd been on our project a couple times and he emailed me the next day and said look what I did the last couple days And sent me, you know sent me the the page, right? He'd put up the initial page, right? It hasn't changed in 20 years. Yeah, and he sent me that initial page and I said, oh great. This is you know, as you know, this is what we're doing here, too because he'd been on our project and um, I said, how do I get involved and that was when I met mary poppendick and mary and I Were the ones to kind of file some of the paperwork to get the agile line started and stuff like that There are a lot of other people involved. We just did the you know the the paperwork stuff and um, then Met met ken through that. I was certainly aware of him and aware of jeff because a lot of scrum was talked about in comp.wang.smalltalk on the old use net and so I'd interacted with a few of them in that uh, that old use net forum So how did the scrum alliance come about? The agile alliance was there. This is all history, which maybe not everybody who listens is going to be interested in But we we know we've known you since you know, you ester and ken were running the scrum alliance Yeah, well, there's actually um, you know, some people talk about how ken Um ken schweber ester derby and I started the scrum alliance and i'm okay with that But it's not really true. Okay Here's what really happened. So ken and I were um, I think he was the chair and I was like assistant chair of the scrum of the agile alliance and the agile alliance had a Had various programs like one program put on the conference Another one scoured the internet for good agile articles, right? Because Well, google didn't exist and you couldn't find good our agile articles by searching at the time anyway So we would kind of manually find them post a repository And agile alliance had another program that was started by a guy named brian zarnett Called the scrum alliance and so brian started it and he quickly emailed Ken and me and said hey, you guys should be involved in this and we're like, yeah, awesome great And so technically brian started it and then ken and I joined I don't know like literally days later And it started as a subset of the agile alliance. It was called a program in the in the agile alliance And what we realized is that we wanted to collect money in the scrum alliance Not, you know to make a profit but more to like put on our own events And we were not a legal entity, right? The scrum alliance was this like paperwork thing inside of the agile alliance And so we realized we needed to set ourselves up as a real entity And so that's when the scrum alliance kind of moved out of the agile alliance became its own kind of separate thing And so that was uh, that was largely my wife I hate paperwork and so my wife did all the paperwork Literally on our dining room table to get it started. That's kind of why the the scrum alliance is still headquartered and based in colorado And it's just we did the we did the paperwork here to to get it started So Um, we just needed to be how to you know be able to set up a bank account There was no expectation that thing was ever going to be huge But it's like we wanted to put out our own event We've talked about doing something called a gathering at the beginning We wanted to gather scrum people but we couldn't do it within the agile alliance because We weren't a legal entity that could open a bank account Do you remember how many people were at the first scrum gathering Mike? Is it a small affair? The bolderado, wasn't it? I was there. Yeah, that that's actually was the second scrum gathering What happened the very first scrum gathering? I wasn't at either Um, it was something that boris gloger put together in vienna and um, I think it was vienna and see he's uh, I think he's german and I think I think it was in vienna But he organized the first one and it was very small. I think it was like seven or eight people and um, Then we put on the one that was at the bolderado and what do you think that was about was like 40 people or so Jeff you knew that wouldn't you? Yeah, I'd say about 40 50 maybe 40 50 people. Jeff. Yeah. Yeah, it was very small. Um, It was uh, you know invitation only back then if you remember right and you had to have been doing scrum and But it was small enough. They well sat around in a circle at least for the first couple gatherings We're able to do that. So I think it was about yeah 40 to 50 people It's an incredible thing What it is I can't remember what it was at the last count of the last face-to-face gathering, but it was a lot certainly a lot more than that Well, well, here's here's what I remember paul. I remember this was it would have been in december I don't know the year but I went to a basketball game and the basketball stadium held 20,000 people and um, Actually, let me back up from there when ken and I first started this And we we co-topped the first csm and I remember going out to dinner that night and we were saying, you know We're successful if we ever see a company advertise Must be a csm, right? And then it was like a year or two later I was in this basketball stadium in one december and looked around and there were you know, 20,000 people in the seats and I thought wow, we've trained 20,000 people I wonder if we'll ever fill up a football stadium, right? Well, we ever get to like around 100,000 You're relatively estimating again, aren't you? I guess I was right. I guess I was I was looking at you know, uh, you know, maybe the uh, you know, the the school arena to the the professional basketball to professional football and um, you know, this is amazingly how quickly we even went beyond that in terms of um This people interested in this I was kind of pausing back to the the question about what's changed in the 20 years is that I think that agile is like it's just such an established approach now And back then it was very strange and you had to convince people you weren't off the rails Wanting to work this way. You like being strange, is it? Well, you know, you know, wait well I I know I understand their question. Here's here's where I was at with that So first of all, I don't really mind if I'm doing something different But here's what was going on in the late 90s. I worked at a company I was the VP of technology and we were doing scrum and we were we're this company was great It's coming call to access help this company was doing great and we were buying other health care companies We typically were buying about two companies a year and then I would be assigned to run their technology groups and um, I'd introduced them to scrum and one of the one of the companies that we bought had These like massive documentation and all of this stuff and they were they were doing the unified process And when we buy these companies I always had these little doubts in the back of my mind It's like we're super successful But wow look at all this nice process documentation because there's a part of that that could appeal to me deep down in my in my beam And I'd always wonder it's like I wonder if we should do what they're doing because the whole world was talking about unified process if you didn't do unified processes you were on your own And so I'd wonder should we do this and um, fortunately, we were always too busy to ever try unified process And then I finally realized it's like wow, we're the ones buying them, right? They're not buying us. We're buying them. We must be doing something right And when I got that email from warden cutting ward cutting him saying hey, look what I did over the last couple days That was so nice because All the doubt in my mind went away, right? I had been an agile believer But with this bit of doubt in my mind up until then and when the thing I think having that doubt, isn't it? I think it has been I think it has been right And that's actually been kind of a theme of my work is, you know getting people to question deeply held beliefs I just wrote a little I sent out like a weekly email to subscribers and I just wrote one yesterday About an old song by the birds. I don't know if you guys remember this song It was an old song called so you want to be a rock and roll star and this was a a big hit in 1967 by a band called the birds and the the guy that wrote it Played with the band rem you probably know them. He played with the band rem 17 years later after the song was a hit The guitarist in rem had played the song wrong He just changed one chord because that's what he thought he heard on the record And so he's playing it wrong the guy that wrote it heard that and said wow, that's better And he changed and from and ever since 84. He's been playing it that way now, right? And so I love questioning, you know, do you really know the best way to do things and It gets so frustrating. You talked about the the scrum guide people talking about it doesn't say you have to answer three questions anymore And and people are upset over that right It doesn't say you can't right? Yeah, you know, but everybody just gets so tight into their views and doesn't want to ever let go Yeah Yeah, that's my that It was maybe maybe five years ago. I don't know terrible with timings But the favorite thing that you've ever written from my perspective It was it was something that wasn't even out there for the public. It was just for the blue on your newsletter list, which is Yeah, maybe I'm wrong Yeah, yeah, just just always think I might be wrong But just your benefit but for everybody's benefit Yeah, that was and that's that's tied in with this theme and that's why I mean, you know, and You know, I wrote that and I did a couple keynote toxic conferences around this idea of you know What go of your certainty might be wrong about something You know and admit it when you're wrong and you know always thinking my wife is probably looking at that going You know, you never admit when you're wrong I may maybe I'm bad at that in my personal life but I think I'm pretty good at it in the professional sense of Of you know, looking at things that have changed and you know, tell me about stuff that's changed over the years Um, a lot of people look at like the sprint retrospective was one of the fundamental things in scrum And it's not right or it wasn't right. It was not there at the beginning. I do think it's important I don't want to misspeak but it wasn't there at the beginning and that's like, okay oversight. We didn't think about it Well, I remember and I think ken was the same way I remember being actively opposed to adding a retrospective into scrum. Really? Yeah. I know it's shocking, right? It's like who would be opposed to this? Well, here's the logic. Here's the logic Um, why should I wait until the end of the sprint to tell my team how to get better? If I notice a way to get better, I should tell them that day it should come up in the in the daily scrum, right? And I think there's a lot of merit to that argument, right? In a kind of a theoretical level But what happens is I come up with a way to get from my team to get better. We're too busy I don't mention it at the daily scrum and then I forget about it and it never comes up, right? And so I wasn't opposed to getting better, but it was like, why wait until the end? How ridiculous is that, right? You know, just, you know, convene a retrospective in the minute where you discover one's needed. It's like, well, in theory, that is great, but it doesn't happen because we're all so busy. And so having that dedicated time, and this was to Esther Derby's credit. She's the one that pushed for it. Having that dedicated time, absolutely essential to scrum, but it was something that early scrum people didn't put in there. And at least myself, and I think Ken as well, we're opposed to, I don't want to misspeak for him, but I think in the very early days we're like, no, you know, just do it whenever you notice it. Don't wait till the end. Yeah, because it just ended with a sprint review, wasn't it? That was pretty much it sprint review. And then that move on just back to planning. That was, that was kind of, Yeah, it was right, it was right back to planning, right? And, you know, what, you know, if, of course talk about getting better, but let's not dedicate a time for it. Well, I don't want more meeting, just do it whenever you need to. Bad idea, bad idea. But again, I was opposed to adding that at the beginning. So it's, you know, just, I mean, so many things that I can look at and say I was wrong about this. And it just gets frustrating with others are like, you know, so holding so tight to a belief. Yeah. You see, Mike, you said, right at the beginning, you said you're looking to get, to do some more writing. And I have to admit, I was a bit of a, I had some time today, and I went back to my bookshelf. And I've still got, and I looked at this, right? So I'm holding up now. I'm jealous of making a planning for it. People can't see it. But I went, I flicked through this. And I, I look back and I thought, how much of this stuff was influenced me at the time when I, when I first read it, but I'm still, I'm still kind of quoting from it now. I'm still using the material. So I just wanted to thank you for that. This is probably, probably the B book of all of yours that's most influenced my journey from that kind of early 2000s to where I am now. So I want firstly to thank you for that, because that's still very much a reference for me now. But what you mentioned, you were writing more now, where, where's your current thought process going with the writer? Well, first off, thanks for the comments of the book. But to me, that, you know, that book is just another example of something where I've changed my mind about things. I still love the core premise of that book. But one of the things I did in that book is I didn't want to come down firmly on the side of story points. And so I talked to equally about story points or time. And just having worked with teams in the 15 years since that book, I'm just much more adamant about story points being a better way to estimate because of the ability for people to agree who work at different speeds, right? If we work at different speeds, we can't agree on days, but we could agree that this is twice as big as that. What I've been doing with writing more is, I like doing books. I like that I've done a number of books, three agile, I think four programming books before that, is that you don't really get a lot of feedback on the books. And one of the things I've been doing is shifting a lot more to kind of recorded videos on demand video courses. And so one of the things I like is an example, I do have a video course on estimating, and I can get data on that. And I can look at the data on a particular topic, let's say, you know, what are story points? And if people are rewinding, I can see that. If people are skipping a section, I can see that in the video data. I don't get that in a book. I don't get what, what, what did people reread? What page do they go back to? And I get that with videos. And so I shifted a lot of my creativity towards creating video courses, where I can get that type of feedback. And then what I'll do is I'll incorporate that, right? And this whole agile thing, right? If people are skipping a section, it must not be needed, or I was boring, right? And I might try re-recording it, I might cut it out of the video. If they're replaying a section, it's like, okay, that must have been important, and I didn't explain it well, right? So I still have to take a guess as to why people are behaving a certain way. But at least I have the data to act on, where with a book I don't. And both of my, my first two books, User Stories, was my first in the estimating book right afterwards. The publishers talked about, oh, maybe we should do a second edition or something like that. But then it kind of comes down to it. They don't really, they don't want to go to the cost of like, you know, re-type setting the book and printing it. And so, you know, there's things now that I'd love to change, but they don't. And they just kind of winger. Whereas in a video, I can just come down here in my basement, turn on the camera, record something. I got an editor I work with, have him edit, put it up, and I can have a change up in a day if I needed to. But, you know, more typically a few days. Whereas the book kind of stays static. So a lot of my creativity has gone towards making those video courses instead. So if you were, not everything makes the cut, this is fine. So this might just be my peculiar curiosity here, as someone who's self-published rather than gone through a publisher. If you were self-published, do you think you would have changed your books over time? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. That's one of the things in being self-published, is that you can do that. I mean, have you gone back and changed some of yours? Well, I'm about to. And I mean, I have little bits here and there, but nothing absolutely core. So I'm going back to Scrum Mastery now and, you know, adding, because a lot's changed in seven years, right? The Scrum Mastery challenge is a little bit different and we know a little bit more. So. Well, and you've learned new advice, right? You know, oh, I want to go in there and I want to recommend this or, you know, I want to give two more options here. And I mean, there's still a burden to, I think it's higher in a book than a video oddly, you know, into publishing the book. You know, you got to edit it. That's no big deal. You know, write it, edit it, put it in there, but then you got to the PDFs, get them into places, generating ebooks isn't always the most straightforward process. And so, you know, you're not going to go in there like, oh, I noticed a typo. Let me go fix that. Every time you find a typo, you go fix it. I've got a few authors whose books I've bought and then I, you know, I get updates when they, when they change things. And it's like, oh, I better look at what they changed. And it's like, you know, they're sending me one a month or something. It's like, I'm not going to read your book monthly, right? And so you want to, you want to kind of batch some of those things. But I do think it's still, it's still a burden, but at least you as a self-published author, you have that option, right? And I think that's one of the great things about self-publishing, you get to decide if you, if you want to make the change. Yeah. Yeah. I was about to say something then, I think it was, how would I answer that? I guess it was, so when, when I get asked about these, this Agile 20, manifested 20 year thing, my initial response is to think about how things have got better and things have got better, you know, technology's advanced and our understanding's advanced and it's become more accepted and normal and we don't have to battle as much as we used to, or at least we're battling different things. But also there's that, that balanced side of me that thinks, well, if some things got worse, you know, is there anything that we miss from what, you know, maybe it's just getting older, the good old days. I'm starting to think of, you know, rose tinted glasses. Is there anything that you miss about 20 years ago, apart from your bench press PBs? I think, you know, I think I think about that in terms of, I do miss, let me change how I would say that. I remember being part of a startup that grew very quickly from 100 people to 1200 people. And while that was happening, and then we had our IPO owners, it's just this amazing time in my career. And I was always too busy to just kind of take an hour someday and just like appreciate the good fortune that I had and what we were doing with that company. And so these days when I meet somebody who's part of a company that's growing that quickly, I give them that old kind of, you know, grandfatherly advice of like, just appreciate what you're in, you're going to work at one or two of these type of companies in your career. And just take a moment and just appreciate the magic of being at this company while it's going through the period you're at right now. And I think I would go back and look at the growth that was going to come about from Agile and be able to go back and do it with a little bit more appreciation of where it was going to go and just what we were doing, right? And, you know, how, you know, promoting scrum and Agile values has really kind of in some ways rocked the world, not the whole world, but a small part of the world and the effect that we've had on how products are developed, not just even software. And, you know, think about, you know, how far we've gone beyond my standing in a basketball arena and going, wow, we've trained 20,000 people, right? And I don't know what the scrum lines trains now, but that's probably a month or a quarter, right? And, you know, to appreciate the impact that we're having on the world, because now it's, you know, it's big and it's already had a lot of that impact. And I hope it has more, but just go back and think about it, the revolution that was starting with that and appreciate it a little bit more. That's, I miss a little bit of being on the start of that again, where we were 20 years ago. Yeah, I think that sort of start that mentality type thing. I like that. I'm a starter, rather than a complete finisher in many ways. I like that challenging the status quo and being a little bit weird and being a little bit naughty. And that certainly motivated me a lot when I was at BT and one of the first scrum masters there. I think, Jeff, just to come in on that, I think Mike's right. I think we're quite happy to admit to it now that we were warned that, not worn down is the wrong word, but there was a lot of resistance in the early days at BT, especially early 2000s. We felt like we were pushing hard against it, you know, a very, a tide of skepticism. But if now, if you can take that energy that's like you said, might have been created now since then, it's like it would just completely, you know, kind of roll over a lot of companies that, well, this is, this is the way we do things. This is the way the industry has evolved. Get, get with it and just go with it. A lot of that energy initially was exhausting because you're just fighting against a culture that which wasn't ready for it. But with that perspective that you're talking about, Mike, it's a little bit easier. If you can get that advice over to those people and they have the capacity for that perspective, then that enjoyment of the actual journey rather than the actual destination is huge, right? That's a good point. That's, you know, if I think back on, you know, like being part of that company that went from 100 to 1200 and the IPO, you know, thinking about that, it was like, we're focused on an end instead of enjoying the ride. And there's a lot to enjoy when you're part of something that's changing how people build software, or, you know, growing a company that gets to an IPO level, you know, and to enjoy some of that journey instead of just be focused on the end, I think is huge. And, you know, I didn't appreciate that enough. I'm not that type of person. I get very goal oriented and I just get focused on the goal. And I don't take the time back to appreciate things. And I think if I could go back, that would be something I would like to go back in time and just enjoy what we were doing at the time a little bit more. Yeah. This is the point of the pubcast where we start getting a little philosophical because we're sort of a pint and a half in. But if we did go back and we were appreciating the journey, we have actually had the energy to actually make the change that we did because we would have just been sitting back and enjoying ourselves so much. I wondered that as I said that, but I mean, would that enjoyment have created more energy, right? You know, would we have been more appreciative of the journey and that focused even harder on achieving the goal? Or maybe we can't work any harder to achieve a goal of, you know, promoting Scrum around the world. But would our appreciation turned into enthusiasm and that been infectious and other people got excited about it, right? And they wouldn't have had to fight as hard. And, you know, I think today we're not fighting against, though my company does waterfall or no process at all, but we're fighting against really bad agile in places, right? And so people that come in and want to do it well, they're having to fight against bosses who think they're agile because they have stand-ups, right? And so how do we create the energy to help them fight those battles, right? Because there's always going to be these change resistance people, right? People who are opposed to that and how do we get past them no matter what their current process is? Yeah. So what's the focus of your current writing right now? Are you allowed to say or not? I don't know. I'm kind of all over the board on stuff that I'm doing. I'm just trying to collect my thoughts on, I think I have like 50 different topics that I would love to kind of create courses on or something like that. And so I'm just kind of across all of those, all of those things right now. And I'll get that figured out next month. I normally would have done this like in December, figured out my focus for the coming year, but I had some, you know, just kind of extra hassles during 2020 at the end. And so I'll probably get it figured out by next month and figure out what I want to do, you know, my goals for the year, because I normally set up annual and quarterly goals for the business. And so I'll get that, I'll get that organized. I just haven't done it yet. Are you at a point now where you can sort of focus on what Mike enjoys? Because I know, I mean, I don't know you that well, but I know you a bit for a while. Yeah. You've done a lot. You've worked very hard, Mike. When Paul and I were at BT, we used to say, how the hell does Mike have the time to reply to all of these forum questions at like three in the morning? It's like, he must be asleep. How is he doing this? You know, you sort of, I think for a while, you put, certainly the impression was you put your energies into what the community wanted you to put your energies into. Is that still the case? Or are you focusing on what you enjoy and what you think is important now? I think I always have. I mean, I, you know, to me, it was about, you know, creating this, this movement and it was remembering the era when, you know, there were a dozen people in the world who were doing scrum, right? There was Jeff's other one with his easel group in the, in the middle eight nineties. I was doing this with a company in California, the one I mentioned that grew from 100 to 1200. And, you know, we all would have fit in one room easily. Everybody doing scrum would have fit in one room. And so when people started to kind of pick up on this, it was just an excitement of being able to spread what we were doing. And again, that tied back to that manifesto when I, like all the doubt went away. I knew what we were doing was working, but I was always, you know, was there a better way? Would be better, would unified process be better? And all those doubts when we were in the manifesto came out and I could see many other people doing the same thing. And so I think my energy always went into doing what, what I have enjoyed. I remember the, the last day I had a real job. I was working at a company and our, I was a VP attack and our boss CEO came in as I was talking to Ken Rubin, who's another scrum trainer. And she put in place a policy that each one of her VPs had to stay away one night a week just so that employees would see us staying late. And so like, I got to stay on Monday, Ken Rubin asked to stay on Tuesday night or something like that. And she left the room and we both looked at each other. And I don't know who said it, but one of us said, we're too old to work with people we don't like and respect. And, you know, I quit the company, I think like a week later, and he quit shortly after that. And, you know, never look back. And so, you know, I think I did hit that point in my 30s where it's like, if I'm not having fun, I'm not going to do this. And so I do think I spend my time on, on what I enjoy rather than, you know, and that's why I would be able to do things like work long hours or do stuff like that, because it was a passion for me to try to be able to, you know, to, I never had goals of like change the world, but it was like, you know, to introduce us to more teams, right? That was always the goal for me. And so it's always been about being passionate about this. Yeah. What do you think about the future? For me, I want Hedgel to go away. I know that sounds bad. But I wanted to, I wanted us to stop talking about it, right? I want to get to the point where we don't have to do this. And I know that, you know, kind of the hot thing the last handful years have been functional programming, but I still think about object oriented programming. And objects basically won, right? Objects had to come in object oriented, programming to come in and fight against structured programming and objects won. And then we stopped talking about it for years. And so as an example, nobody says, oh, I got to go to the object oriented design meeting, right? We don't talk about it that way. It's just, it's one, it's what we do. And object orientation, kind of a good thing. And I kind of want it to be the same way where we stop talking about scrum, we stop talking about being agile. And it's just like, well, of course, we're this way. It's just what we do. And, you know, we just go about doing projects. And we're arguing about practices and techniques and stuff like that, but we're not having a big kind of methodology wars. And we're not talking about agile versus ad hoc development or agile versus planned or agile versus. I don't know. You know, I think, I think that happens in kind of work generations. And so, you know, we've still got a lot of senior leaders and organizations that have come up in a very non agile way. And I'm kind of that way. I mean, I started my work career was agile was not the thing. And had a lot of success running projects in a more disciplined manner, create the Gantt chart stuff like that. And so somebody who's had a lot of success like that is going to have a hard time ever wanting to really change. And so we read about things like, you know, holocracy or more recently, humanocracy, and, you know, very shared leadership and things like that. And I think that's really hard for management. And I very much would be in that category that didn't start that way. But what is it going to be like when, you know, kind of the 20 somethings of today start to run the world and those type of things. And if somebody asked me a question, I can give a very agile answer, I really can. But if somebody just shouts at me a question, it says, quick, give me an answer. There's a chance that my answer would be non agile, right? Because that's why I started my career. And those thoughts are still sometimes in my head, because that's how I worked for years until learning about agile and wanting to be agile. And but what about somebody who's 20 something and has never worked in any other way, right? They're agile to the core at that point. They're going to get better answers on some of those things. So we might be still at a level where we need kind of another layer of management to die off. Retire would be a better way to die off. But but another layer of management. I remember Craig Larmann saying that. Craig Larmann said, we need that level of management to just die off in the nicest possible way. So is there anything else other than time that we can do? I don't think so. I mean, you know, there's obviously, you know, make better arguments, refine our approaches, refine how we argue in favor of those approaches, get more data as evidence of those approaches, things like that. But I think we're going to be looking at some big changes over the next, you know, 15 to 20 years in terms of how organizations work. And one of the, you know, yes, about, you know, kind of like predictions or where are we going? One of the things that really worries me is are we at the end of the era of teams? And I think of the era of teamwork having started in about 1990. And Scrum accelerated that the new product development game article in 95 talking about cross functional teams. And so we've had this era of teams over the last 30 years or so. And it might have another 10 years or so to go where teamwork is the big thing. And then after that, there's some evidence that we're headed towards a world of what's called hyper specialization or micro specialization. And in that type of world, an example I would give would be something like I need a login screen coded for my new SAS application. I hire the world's best login screen programmer, right? And that person is a hyper specialized expert in that and they know how to write login screens. And so, you know, we've gone through the component revolution where people wrote components, but we need another level of that. And I'm a little bit worried about it being hyper specialization where we get this loose conglomeration of people that come together, do certain skills, then go away. And so we have, I'm going to call it a project manager because it may not still be a Scrum master, but we have a project manager who coordinates all of that work and get something done and then the person goes away. And so we might have a core team of five and another 50 people who touch that project, but never more than a week or two at a time. And that could even be, I assume, all remote as well. With the age of high bandwidth communication, you could have developers all over the world at various different time zones just for minutes at a time, maybe, I don't know. Absolutely. And I think that's part of what's going to lead to that type of a trend is we're going to see that type of hyper specialization because of the ease of doing these type of things remotely. And I think the last year has kind of accelerated the trend towards that. So, and I can look at that and say, okay, this might be a better way to build products, but that's also where I look at it and hold on a little bit too much to the history. I was like, but I like working in teams, right? And, you know, and it's what, you know, the three of us have spent a lot of our career on. I enjoy teamwork. I enjoy that collaboration. And now there's still going to be a team, but there'd be all these people that come and go as part of the team. Sorry about that dog going nuts up there. No, I can hear it's great. What kind of dog is it? He is a Havanese. They're from Havana, Cuba, where the breed is originally from in there. Fairly small. They were trained as circus dogs initially. So, unlike a lot of small dogs, they're fairly smart. So trained, easily trainable, but you've got to do any tricks. Was that you're going to do any tricks yet? He can do the things like stand up, spin around and stuff like that. The one I had before this guy, I trained him to jump up on like a big Swiss ball, one of those big inflatable balls at the gym. And he could kind of move the ball around. But he was also, you know, because of the circus dog, he would jump. And so I came home one day and he's like on the stove, eating some brownies. So bit of a problem with these, these kind of ex circus dog breeds. So, but he thinks he's a big dog. So he barks like crazy. He's not very ferocious. He just, he barks at somebody to get attention. Yeah. The whole future thing's an interesting one. I mean, I get the specialization side of things. And I think this is where, you know, I also, I'm going to link back to your previous comment about, you know, I want Agile to go away because it's just a way of working and it wins. Well, it does in the right circumstances, right? There are still some circumstances where actually things are quite predictable, quite repeatable. And, and Agile might not be the right answer. But now people have the choice. They have the knowledge to say, okay, well, in this context, this, this makes sense. In this context, this makes sense. So I don't need to worry about scrum or, or camber and or waterfall, whatever fight there is, I just know that this is appropriate. And so there may be some circumstances actually where, you know, we do want the specialized skills because that is a repeatable thing that we want done really efficiently. But when there is still uncertainty, when there's still novelty, when there's still rapid change, then we still want that rapid feedback of collaborative, self-organizing cross-functional teams to work something out. I don't think that need will go away. I don't think it will at all. And I don't think that, you know, we often get that, you know, where's, where's Agile good, where's waterfall good? You know, if we go back to just like the core principles, like the manifesto value statements as principles, I'm hard pressed to think of a project where those things are not in place, right? I mean, I always want to respond to change. I might be able to do a Gantt chart on a certain type of project and that'd be the right way to go, but I still want to respond to change when it happens. And so I think at a value level, I think every project benefits from those values. Well, I remember, I remember doing a work at a consultancy, which for legal reasons will remain nameless, but they said, well, when I was talking to them about Agile, they said, really? Responding to change for a customer's competitive, I'd lose money. We make money out of our customers getting their requirements wrong. So contracts can get in the way of that. I worked at one of the big consultancies early in my career and my boss would take me to bunches with clients and then I'd end up kind of being the kind of the client liaison on these projects. And he literally told me at one point that my job was to get in there and expand the scope and scale of the project, make it bigger and make it touch more things. And I said, it's not to deliver the project successfully. He's like, who cares, expand the scope and the scale of the project, right? That's your role. And so basically get into a client and sell more work. And that was another company where I think I quit my job a month later. So it's like, you know, this is not for me. This is not ethical. That's not going to be my job. My initial response, when I asked you the question of what needs to change other than time, in my head, I was thinking about market forces. I mean, I'm a trained account and economist that I've been brought up to believe that market forces will work eventually. And, you know, that was effective in our response to this consultancy, which was, okay, that'll work in the short term, but eventually your competitors will offer something else and your customers will go somewhere else. But that consultancy is still just as successful as it was 10 years ago. And so I'm wondering whether that's the case. But I think, you know, enough companies, and I think the corona pandemic really, really squeezed these organizations, the ones that were really truly agile in the way that they thought about things, not just the way that they did things that were serious about agile engineering practices, for example, and doing things right. Then they took to agile and forced remote working, almost like a duct of water, because it was just fine, you know, we can cope with this kind of stuff. We're resilient. But the other organizations that had some practices in place, but didn't have the principles in place, they absolutely struggled and went back to their default of, okay, there's a problem, I'm going to tell you what to do. I think that ties with a prediction that Ken Schwaber made years ago, which was that there'll be fewer companies doing software. I don't think he ever thought there'd be fewer people doing software, but it'd be fewer companies, right? And so the companies that understood how to build products would get bigger, they'd have more people doing this, be consultancies, whatever they would be, but they would then farm out that work to other companies. And I think about that with companies like, you know, doing payroll, you know, and I think back to, you know, what I've heard about things like in the, in the 50s or 60s, 1950s, 60s, a company had a payroll clerk, they had somebody that wrote the checks to people. And, you know, by the time, you know, any of us were really working, most of that had already been outsourced to firms that would like, we'll take over all your payroll, right? Just tell us how much to pay. People will comply with all the laws. And so payroll had gone from something that was a skill in every company to being consolidated. And I think we're going to see the same thing, I agree with him on this, where we're going to see that same type of thing, where we're going to have fewer companies building software, but they'll be the ones that are really good at it. You know, just as an example, like, you know, a bank, right? Should a bank really be building software, right? It's not what they're doing, right? They're a bank. And are they better off if they could get a good team somewhere else from a company that knows how to build software? And so I do think we're going to see that type of a, of a trend. So yeah, some banks will say it's competitive advantage. We got to build our own, but I think a lot of them will kind of go the same way that they've done with payroll clerks. It'll get consolidated. Yeah, my sense. So you're generally optimistic about the future? You know, one of the things that I think about most people that go into technologies, I do think we're optimists, right? You know, we look at the, the amazing changes that technology has brought to the world, you know, over, you know, over the last hundred years or more. And, you know, how can you not be optimistic when we look at what we've done in the world? And so, yeah, I am optimistic about the future. You know, I look at certain things and I think, am I personally looking forward to that change? Am I looking forward to a change where it's not as much about teamwork? It's about managing a lot of external resources? Not necessarily sure. I'm excited about that as, you know, as the fun part of a job, but I'm optimistic about where, you know, the problems that technology is going to solve and how we're going to be able to, to do, you know, more and better things, right? So I am optimistic from that perspective. I often wonder, you said, Mike, about this whole agile thing will go away. I wonder if there is a day in the future where the agilemanifesta.org is taken down? Because I assume somebody somewhere is paying for that, that hosted that has been hosting it. Is it wrong? Has he been paying for that for that long? It must be costing him a fortune, but it's never been redesigned, it's never been changed. But I wonder if there's a day when if we all just know it well enough, they'll just switch it off and nobody will notice. You know, I wonder about that with, you know, with certain, you know, websites and how long do they last, you know, and is the internet there forever, right? You know, you know, I think it's more likely that we get to a point where browsers don't render HTML anymore, right? I mean, that's not, well, that's just not that hard to imagine, right? I mean, you know, we're, you know, we're 50 years down the road, right? And everything is video and it's a different language for display. And, you know, you probably got a few old legacy browsers you can use to look at those pages. But, you know, what are you going to do now if you want to look at a flash website? Exactly. Right? You know, I, none of my browsers, I've got four or five installed right in front of me, none of them display flash. I'd have to go find some old copy of something that would bring up a flash website for me. And one of the places I can't remember where it was, but it was a, on my travels, it was a place I'd order pizza. And it was a flash website. It would, you know, pop up with pizzas spinning around and then a flash thing to see the menu. And I don't know if they've updated because I haven't gone anywhere in a year and a half, but I think that's more likely than that somebody stops paying for a website. Somebody will pay, I mean, I'll pay for, somebody will pay to keep the Agile Manifesto site up if it ever starts to go down. Just one of those things that I was always wondering, someone's paying for that somewhere, someone's hosting that. I wonder if they realize that they are hosting it, but there we are. But that's where Nigel got a photo of me. He was from the Wayback Machine, wasn't it? Archive. Yeah, the archive.com. Yeah, .org. Yeah. And yeah. All right. That thing's updated. We put up a website years ago called Waterfall 2006. It went up in 2006. And it was a joke website about a mythical waterfall conference. And it was funny at the time. It's still there. Waterfall 2006, I think.org. But I remember when we did it, about a month or two after we put it up, there's an April Fool's Day joke. Somebody emailed me. I didn't save his name, but he emailed me and said, hey, this is so great. If you ever want to take it down, let me know and I'll pay for the hosting, right? And so, you know, that's the same thing, right? You're just like, I'll pay for the hosting for Agile Manifesto if it starts to go away. Again, some of your finest work, Mike, I think it's the April Fool's. You've done a few good ones, haven't you? Try to do something fun. That's just, I became a big fan of April Fool's Day in part because of my dad. When I was a little kid, I was probably like eight years old. I lived near Disneyland in California. Yeah. And my dad said, hey, do you want to go to Disneyland today? To me and my sister, she's two years younger. And we said, yes, yes, yes. And he said, you know, if you wash my car, wax my car, I'll take you to Disneyland. And so we washed and waxed his car, get all done with it. And I'm like, we're ready to go to Disneyland, dad. You know, it's like noon or something. He's like April Fool's. Oh, that is cruel. That was cruel. Yeah. And so, I don't know, ever since then, I've always appreciated April Fool's Day jokes. So we tried to do something most years. That was cool. We just sent him a scrum master. Making out with that for my point too. It was, it was, it was pretty mean, but you know, my dad, he's always had a great sense of humor. So I appreciated it. I'm sure I was devastated as an eight-year-old who didn't get to go to Disneyland, but you know, my dad got his car washed. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Brilliant, brilliant. Mike, Mike, we're going to let you go. I mean, we would stay here chatting forever. Yeah. Thanks, thanks for having me on. It was good talking to you. I enjoyed it. You can, you can go and cook dinner. Yeah. It's not even lunchtime yet here. So I'm, I'm still good. So thanks guys. Appreciate being on. Bye.