 Good day, folks. I am Shane Hasty. I'm the director of agile learning programs for the international consortium fragile and author of the co-author with Evan Laborn, who is the one of the keynote speakers of the book has no projects, but we're not talking about projects. We're talking about culture. I asked earlier on for a definition of culture, a one line definition, and it was, well, I gave the Johanna Rothman's definition, the way things get done here, and what did you say, behaviors that reflects values, and both of those really do sort of distill down, but it's great to know that, but so what? So when we think about culture, one of the things that I tried to do when coming up with this was think what are the, what are the aspects, the, the different facets of culture, like a diamond. So I've got a little thing image that will build. And by the way, these slides will all be available, available from the conference organizers. So you're welcome to them. A vision and the more clear and compelling the vision, the more people can align with that vision. It needs to be something that really makes sense to the people in the organization. And I'm sorry, return value to shareholders does not. Think about, and this is the vision that I see agile has our mission is to advance the state of agile learning globally. We're a global organization supporting over 100,000 certification holders, 110 plus member organizations who teach and deliver certification classes. And we're a small team where the core team is only eight people, the extended team gets up to about 20. We are spread across many time zones, our customers are spread literally all around the world, every single time zone. I'm based out of New Zealand. Many of my colleagues are in North America, some in Central America. We have a couple of people in Europe that provide a part of that extended team and some in Australia and moving up into Southeast Asia. So we all align with this mission. And that's a really important thing we self selected. One of the reasons we work for the organization is because we care about that mission and that that really helps. Values. So if you look at these two pictures, which one is right. The end of the meal, which one feels correct. The left side. So you're like me. I grew up, my parents came through the end of the Second World War and periods of rationing. I grew up being told finish what's on your plate. Frequently I was told to eat your cabbage. There are children in Africa who would who really would want that cabbage. One time I did say please send it to them. It was not was not a wise move. On the other hand, in the Middle East in China. That is your generosity is appreciated. I was in Qatar and my wife and I were together. We were we were with our hosts. We come from this culture. We finished our plates. They piled another load on. We finished our plates. They piled another load on. I also have a bit of a problem not eating as you can see, but it really is important to understand that those individual some of it is cultural. There's there's tools like this is actually a thing called the culture GPS that looks at national culture. It comes from the work of Hofsteder and he his initial sample set was 140,000 people who worked at IBM. Where he was trying to look at the five elements of culture and I will leave you to explore that because we don't have a lot of time. Respect hugely important and respect for everyone. This is a picture of the daily stand up at Menlo Innovations. There are 70 people actually around this room. They achieve the collaborative outcome of the daily stand up, which is to identify blockers and support each other where there is dependencies. They have this daily stand up with 70 plus people and it finishes in less than 15 minutes and they achieve the outcome they were looking for. Which is about building that collaborative relationships and support. Respect for people is at the core. One of the reasons so many implementations of the Toyota production system fail is because people copy the process. They copy the rules. They don't get to that deep underlying understanding of the it's that people who matter and that the people in the system are the ones who actually own the system in the process. So we have to create an environment where the people do genuinely matter. Practices. Yeah, practices do help. And Frieda, I was thrilled to hear about your 10% time. It makes a huge difference. Put aside space for learning, give people the opportunity, the space, the time to find new things and to experiment. Tim Brown, the organization's best equipped to thrive are the ones most able to generate and embrace and execute new ideas. The narrative. What are your organization's stories? Share your stories. Find the stories. What are the compelling things that entice people that bring them along on the journey with you? Places and spaces. The physical environment does impact your culture. If we're putting people in different spaces, if you're more than 10 feet apart, three meters, collaboration starts to drop. And at about 30 meters, the likelihood of collaboration. This was a study of academic collaboration at 30 meters. At 30 meters, our desks are 30 meters apart. The likelihood of collaboration drops to less than 1%. It's ridiculous. So if you have space, if you are physically in the same space, make sure that you are physically in the same space. If, like us, you're a virtual organization, make sure that you are virtually in the same space. We actually use virtual presence tools that I see agile to allow us to feel as if we're in that shared space. And it was quite eye-opening for us. We were using the free version of this tool and they stopped giving a free version. So we said, oh, that's fine. We don't need it. Within a week, we were all clamoring for this presence tool to come back. And now we pay for the professional version, the actual paid version, because it did make such a difference because we had that feeling, despite being virtual, of presence. The lowest common denominator of the behavior you will accept is the behavior that your organization will have. As a leader, your responsibility is to create a space of aligned autonomy. Have people aligned around what we're trying to achieve, but allow them to figure out the way to do it so that that bounded reality, the boundaries are leadership's responsibility within those boundaries. It's the work of the people on the ground, the empowered people to make the decisions to figure out the best way to do things. And safety and trust and psychological safety, hugely important. And the fund, I'm not going to go deep into this one, but there's a lot of research that's published by Google and it was looking at what happens at Google. But the single most important factor for successful teams at Google was this thing they called psychological safety, the feeling that my colleagues have got my back. I can take a risk and if it goes wrong, I will be cared about, I will be supported, I will not be attacked. And in Google's case, that single factor accounted for a 40% differential in measured productivity and where they measured it was in real dollars. Huge difference. So those are the aspects, the facets of my diamond of culture. But so what? Now culture sits around everything and this is an image that our founder, Ahmed Sidki, uses a lot. Leadership, strategy, structure, process, people, these are all the things that make us up. And culture sits as an elastic band around it. If you want to change culture, you can't, and this is something we see a lot, implement agile. So we go here and we bring in the scrum process or another agile process and we push that piece out, but we don't move anything else and fairly rapidly the elastic band snaps back. Or maybe we change the strategy, some of the reward system, some of the goals, we do that, but we don't move anything else. Culture snaps it back. If you're going to make change, we need to make change across all of these elements simultaneously. One, maybe one thin slice at a time, move it and that will then have enough momentum to move the whole thing. It's hard. So what have we done? As our organization and we're small but we're growing and we're seeing massive growth in terms of the take up of our certifications and certificate holders. So year and a half ago, the core team, we sat down and said, who do we want to be? And we decided we would write a culture book. We brainstormed and we came up with these four broad things, who we are, how we work with each other, how we serve the community and how we celebrate. These are four key things to us and we look at these and we hold ourselves to accountable with them. So we're a small team of fearless leaders. We like to punch above our weight class. We're competing against, here we say, the Scrum Alliance, the 800 pound gorilla. We view failing as an important muscle for our growth and we hold ourselves accountable without placing blame on others when we fail. Now, we've written this down and we all have a copy of this and the supporting stuff. And if we ever get into a conversation where it feels like we're starting to place blame, we can actually refer to this and say, hey, wait a minute, that is not what we agreed to. Because we're all human. We naturally fall back on those behaviors. Likewise, how we work, we'll find ways to make sure our daily impact is felt. This is especially important because we're a distributed team. We value and welcome feedback and trust that it comes with good intentions. So that also means if I feel like it doesn't, I have to turn around and say, yes, it does. If I'm feeling, you know, I got up, I'm having a bad day. Well, that's probably what's causing me to feel unhappy about the communication I got from Shannon or somebody. We debate, we don't discourage, we create fun and laugh together to exercise our creative muscles and to strengthen our relationships. We have dance parties over Slack and SoCoCo. We don't record them. But it's fun. We serve, we listen and learn from our community to advance the state of agile learning. And a really important one for us is we deliver value service, not valet service. Because we're such a small team supporting such a large community, we can't tailor our product and our services to every individual. So, but we do do, we try to deliver really good value service. And we celebrate, our bar is high, we reward the extraordinary, we celebrate the failures. Now we crafted this over a two days session. There was a reasonable amount of alcohol involved and a lot of good conversation. Here's some of the stuff that we were doing and we supported that. Each one of those four elements has a page with, this is one page of the who we are. I think there's about seven items altogether that goes a little bit deeper. The questions, what we wrote, what does this look like? So taking those aspirational statements and going deeper. So, we can't just think it, we have to act it. We put that together, we wrote it, but now we hold ourselves to account. Every one of us has it, printed somewhere in our workspace. And we refer to it constantly. They're not just words on a page, they are things that we aspire to. We make mistakes, we fall over, but we support each other. We challenge each other and we create that opportunity to explore and challenge. So here's a slide that comes from Pat Reid that talks about the five factors you need to have in place. If you are managing some sort of complex change, it's no good not to have a vision. You end up with confusion. If you don't have the skills in place, people get anxious. If you don't have the incentive structure modified to support the new outcome, you get gradual change. If you don't have the resources, we don't give people the time, the money to support the change, you get frustration. And if we don't have a clear action plan, you get lots and lots of false starts. If you want successful change, you need all five of those things nicely into woven. So it really comes down to enact the change and be the change that you want to see in the world. Wow, just on time. Thank you, folks. Any questions? Yep, yep. And yes, I wrote that book. I would say that the competencies that exist around project management are necessary in environments where we are delivering projects. A lot of the VUCA world systems and environments don't actually lend themselves to projects being that temporary beginning and end defined process. But there are situations where it's an entirely appropriate delivery model. Irrespective of whether you use projects, there are still things that people need to do in terms of the coordination and the activities. So those competencies have not gone away. What we do see in the agile world is that a lot of those competencies don't need to be embodied in a single individual. The self-organizing, self-managing teams that Doug was talking about, for instance, they will do a lot of that work themselves. You still need to do some sort of a plan, even if it's a one-day cycle that you're working on. You still need to do to identify external dependencies. You still need to do risk management. If you're working in continuous delivery of products, you still have to do that stuff. But who's doing it is probably going to change. And then there is a whole lot of overhead stuff that you shouldn't be doing anyway. That particular one I used because I'd been doing a lot of work in Saudi Arabia, and the thing that really blew me apart was the difference in power distance. New Zealand is one of the lowest power distance societies in the world. Saudi is one of the highest. Not so much in Saudi, but in Hong Kong when I went and did some work there, I made a huge mistake not recognizing the power distance, the status, the importance of status, and the loss of face thing in that culture. And the ultimate result was a million-dollar project failure. Yeah, spend time getting to know them, helping them to get to know you. Use tools like Hofstadter's model to say, okay, here are the differences between us. What does this mean in practicality? So when I was doing some work in Saudi, I did actually sit down with a couple of the people there and said, here is going to be my natural behavior. What is that going to do? How do we then adapt? And we chose, and it was a conscious conversation about, okay, this is how I will adapt my way of interacting and how you will adapt yours. And we met somewhere in the middle. But what was really important, it was we're to greet it ourselves. So the first thing we did was looked at those sort of models and say, how are we different? What does this mean? What are the most important and most valuable ways of doing that? Go and share food. Spend time together eating and then talk about, even better, prepare food for each other. There's nothing better in terms of creating collaborative community and teams than actually cooking food for each other. I am self-hacking. Yes, Pia Maria knows my Reese profile. The food one is my strongest motivator. Thank you. Beautiful. Thank you so much.