 I am going to run this as a workshop style. So, there is going to be lot of exercises you as participants will do. So, I would call this workshop as successful if we can achieve these two things. These are the minimum expectations to make this workshop successful and feel free to ask questions as we go along. So, we are going to run through set of slides and followed by set of exercises. Quick introduction, my name is Ratina. I am the agile transformation leader for Intuit. I am responsible for helping the organization, improving their agile maturity across the enterprise. That is why I call myself as an organizational agilist and I am passionate about helping the teams to get freedom and joy in their work. So, that is a big topic you would have heard lot about joy. So, let let move on. Here is the definition of agility, ability to both create and respond to change in order to profit in a turbulent business environment which is common and lot of people use agility in this sense. Now, what is enterprise agility? So, forget about this definition when somebody says enterprise agility what comes to your mind or what you think enterprise agility is? Adaptability of what? Purpose of the role, support function and the leadership, nimble organizations, m power teams, fast and flexible. Scaling from team level to what do you want to scale from team level to organization level? So, there are two sets of you know themes. One is many of you have pointed out the characteristics of an enterprise which is agility at organizational level. So, that is why you said fast, flexible, nimble so on and so forth. The other aspect is people talk about scaling from the team level to the organizational level. So, there is an underlying assumptions in this case where you say that teams are nimble, teams are agile, organization is not or we have to make the teams agile first and then expand or scale it to an organizational that is an assumption which we talked, but is that the way things happen? That is a big question right. So, I will talk about what is enterprise agility from my perspective in my organization perspective. Have you ever wondered about these questions in your mind? Have you ever seen these questions being asked by anybody in your organization? You might even ask yourself how many of you have actually used an agile board or a Kanban board at an executive level or have seen executives using? Does it look like the same way that teams are using? To some extent. Anybody else has seen agile practices being used at a different organizational level not at a team level? Thank you some example. So, when you ask these questions, when you are trying to find answers to these type of questions, we are talking about agility at enterprise level. So, from our organization, so I am going to narrate a story of how my organization has gone into agile and where we stand today. Into it as all of you know it is a product company and we have started agile like any other company with scrum adoption. We started getting all the teams in my organizations to get trained on agile on scrum and then they started working on scrum. But as we started getting into a scrum adoption more and more teams started becoming agile. We started realizing that only the teams at the engineering teams at the lower level are very agile. The rest of the organization remained the same. And we started looking at why we are not able to take the agile beyond these teams. And when we looked at the levels of agility, I would call it as there are at least three levels of agility. The same principles, same philosophy, same practices can be adopt to suit at different levels. So, most of us are familiar at the operational level of agility where the teams involved in the day to day work use agile practices. And the top one is a strategic agility. Looking at the organization strategy as an opportunity to do agile and respond with agility. So, that is at a strategic level typically at the very high level of the organization which is mostly deciding how the organization road map is into the future. But in between there is also another layer of portfolio. How many of you have large teams where you have more than 50 people working? So, you might have seen challenges in getting agile into such a large teams. So, that is the level. So, we looked at all these options and we asked the question, what is enterprise agile here? And do we call ourselves agile at enterprise level if we are agile at all three levels? So, here is the answer from my perspective, from our organization perspective. We need to be agile wherever it makes sense. It could be at all three levels or it could be at level one and two. It does not matter that you need to be at all three levels. It depends on your organization. It depends on the requirements of your customer that helps you to decide whether you want to be agile at all three levels. But if you are agile at all the levels that you need to be you are already moving towards enterprise agility. So, even an organization which is operationally agile and they think that we do not need to be agile at the next two levels or at this point of time they are fine with that. But at some other point of time as the market evolves, as the new things come in they may have to be agile at a different level. So, that is the whole idea. So, how many of you are here having understood this idea? How many of you here deal with the enterprise agility situation in your work? What are the typical challenge or the biggest challenge that you think that you face in enterprise agile? Change in the mindset. So, I am going to we are going to discuss all these questions which is easier top down or bottom up or is there any other way to address the enterprise agile and so on. But if you ask me think think think a bit how many of you have been in a situation where the teams try to do agile, but manager stands in the middle. And there are implicit messages getting across to the teams that agile does not matter to me. So, team understands agile is important, but the team also realizes agile does not matter to the manager. So, they decide how they have to behave. So, what is causing this trouble? Is it a top down? So, the word manager that I am talking about is that I used mostly from an organization where people work together as a team in agile mode, but they are responsible to deliver what they are delivering, but there are people who are at the higher level who are working on deciding the strategy, deciding the portfolio and so on and so forth. So, if those people are not agile. So, he said an example. The marketing people are not agile. They do not believe in agile. So, what happens? Can we afford to leave a particular part of our organization non agile? That is another question. I will give you one example. In my organization there is a procurement team. And for a long time we never interacted with the team, whereas most of the organizations have already moved into agile. So, one of the procurement person came to me and said hey can I join the agile training that is being organized? I said why not, but we will speak a lot of engineering stuff, but you may find something useful. And this guy attended the session and he said he was able to understand some of it and he wants to apply few of the things. This session we had about a year back. And then slowly this guy spoke to some of his colleagues and said hey we need to talk to Ratina and figure out how we can bring in agile as concepts are great, but most of them are tuned towards engineering teams not for us, but we can do something about it. Then we got together and we picked up just three concepts. Work in progress limits for example, having a con bon board for example. It is applicable to the procurement as well. Why can we do that? And they were not doing it by the way. And we brought in those simple simple things and we never called them agile by way. And we never asked them to go through a formal skill master training or agile and that team does not have a skill master by the way. At the end of the one year they are in a much much better place in terms of how they are agile and how they are responding to their own challenges. So that is a classical example. Let me give you two pictures. The question is in the world that we live which picture represents the way your organization is dealing with your challenges. The second one the first one is popularly called as calm waters you know everything is still you are sailing through no problem everything is fine. The second one is white water rafting is more challenging you do not know what will happen in the next minute. The course is changing water the speed is changing the skills are tested every second you are on the right. So when the organizations are actually facing situations like or going through situations like white water rafting organizational agility becomes very very important that is one of the reasons why I talk about organizational agility. Maybe couple of decades before this may not be a most important thing to do but today it is the only thing that is more that is important for any organizations to survive. Here the top three messages that I want to give at this point of time and then we can jump into the some of the exercises and some of the examples that we need to discuss achieving enterprise agility is a journey that is the first concept that we kind of realize it is not something that we plan it over a quarter and get it done in the next quarter it does not happen that way and there are many mine stones there are many stops across as you go in the journey and the journey never ends because as the market evolves as your customers evolve your enterprise journey looks different to just down the line. I look back three years into the organization intuitive is already agile it was agile three years back but are we agile today yes but we are intuitive three years before into it today or the same organization or the agile is the same no it has evolved a lot right there was a time when we wanted scrum master in each and every team but today it is not mandatory that every team should have a scrum master but how did this happen because anyone anyone in the in the team can play the role of scrum master there is no one designated person maybe somebody can volunteer and say hey I will do the following things hey at the end of the day who is a scrum master he or she is expected to do certain things that is it right if anybody can play the role of scrum master in the team the scrum master does not exist but the role is being played a lot of people have asked I think three years back I was speaking in another conference in Chennai and I remember the topic was what happens to managers when your organization becomes agile and that is a project management conference a lot of project managers a lot of certified program managers who are the participants at one slide just like what he said I said managers does not exist in agile world and you can imagine what would have happened half the people were up in the arms and they were raising slogans and say hey come on stop three years back not very far I just need to tell them that managers as a person will exist right they are not saying that they will be thrown out but they will not be doing what they are doing today that's a bottom line they may have to evolve themselves a lot of people talk about different types of organizations today you might heard the terms like liquid organization teal organization have you heard about teal organization liquid organization right so there is a certain set of responsibilities some people play you may not call them as managers but they operate at the organizational boundaries they operate at the verticals and horizontal where the information flow happens because that is not defined in the agile world right so the roles exist but it may not be called managers and they may not be doing the same things that they are doing today that's the perspective and the second thing is the journey is all about bringing in a desired culture and mindset in the organization so that's the journey that we are talking about and the journey is riddled with complexity why I called it as complexity why the journey is so complex any guesses ok ok so it's our own kind right if you don't understand our own kind what else can become more complex it's about change ok ok so we are now hitting the rock this is the question that I am trying to answer now why this enterprise agile journey is so difficult people who raise the hands who said we are doing enterprise agile how many years we have been working on that how many of you have been working on more than two years on enterprise agile four five people how many of you are working on more than three four years we are at it for four years now from where we have started right and we still see there are a lot of things that we can improve we can do we want to do so here is the question I want to do a quick table exercise identify top three reasons that make this journey very very difficult or complex just talk to your team members and then identify the top three reasons because understanding answers to this question is what makes the second part of our discussion interesting right and the strategy is again a long term at least a year long or even more but how do I make it short ok long term ok ok ok I do not have one silver bullet for the whole company ok anything else ok ok ok the the the current state I would call it as a current state you you call it as bureaucracy you call it political scenarios in the organization or the current dynamics of the organization so from here how do we go to the future that's another key challenge ok yeah yeah so let's say these are all connected yeah where does the team come in here where does the agile practices come in here they are not the blockers right they are not making it difficult so what exactly makes it difficult so I am going to give you a couple of slides from my perspective and that's going to take us to the second part of the workshop where we want we will do some hands on exercises use some techniques to answer some of these challenges this is how we look at how the organizational cultural we call that as organizational cultural rubber band what is cultural rubber band there are bunch of components that you see here which are tied together using a rubber band and that rubber band is nothing but organizational culture what are the things that are tied together there is leadership strategy structure process people all of them and all of them are tied together using a rubber band called organizational culture now I am going to ask you a question let's say if I look at some of the answers you have given what is in it for me or where is the future state so on and so forth let's talk about the strategy let's say you want to change the strategy so that your organizations can become more agile so you are going to expand the strategy portion what happens to the rubber band the rubber band is elastic right just expand the strategy it gets pushed on both sides the rubber band expands what happens to the rest of the components yeah so once the rubber band expands the other components actually will not stick together now the other components should also react to that change take the example of people so you want to change the people's mindset we talked about mindset right as the first challenge so you want to change the mindset of the people so you work on the mindset of the people and people mindset expands or changes the way we want what happens the rubber band the rubber band expands but what happens the rest of the items exactly they are not stable that's it the rubber band expands one item makes the rubber band expand the rest of the items become unstable so that's the bottom line if you change organization if you if you change anything people process see most of the time we have addressed enterprise agility as a process thing in many organization we have brought in new processors we have brought in new way of looking at things so we basically expanded the process component and the rubber band has expanded at that level but what happens the rest of the components people they are not expanding process has expanded strategy hasn't expanded so the rubber band becomes not a component that glues all of them together so lot of things become not stable so that's one of the challenges and that is one of the reasons why the organizational agility is become a big big problem okay now I will give you one example of I take people as an example so typically when we look at organizational agility in our organization one of the things that we always do first is describe the describe the future state that's the first point from this team right so how does the future look like that's the first thing we will do whenever you want to do anything at organizational level okay we want to improve but after improvement how does this look like that has to be clear right we are going to do an exercise on this immediately after that but how do we know after the change what's going to happen it's not based on promise from the agile leader of the company I go and tell my VPE and say that hey if we do these things our organization will become agile and we can respond to the change faster productivity goes up people are going to be engaged motivated it's all fine right but how does the future look like and how long it's going to take to go there that's a big question so what it means is you need to know where you are today in the first time that's the first question and you need to draw a picture of what the future look like once you have done that that's your organizational agility shift so now look at from the organizational perspective if the organization makes the shift the rubber band is actually making the shift now I'm going to restrict my discussion only to the people aspects currently people are doing something in the organization right and what happens to them when the future state arrives will they do the same thing will they do the different thing or they do the same thing differently do they have the same skill sets or do do they need to get new skill sets here is the challenge what happens to the people so people are in the current state organization is actually pushing its way to the future state people are transitioning and then they are reaching the future state now here is the deal this organizational aspect is one transition from current state to future state whereas for the people involved there are multiple transitions because every individual goes to the transition and every individual's mindset is different every individual's buy in towards the future state is different so what happens the organizational movement from the current state to future state or the journey let's say the journey is from here I want to go to the next step right say for example I give a simple example organization decides to become more agile by using continuous integration and continuous deployment CI CD so the current state no CI CD in the organization the future state that I visualize is every team is through CI CD now the organization is pushing the CI CD now what happens to the people who are working the teams none of them know anything about CI CD or they haven't used it but they have to buy into the future state and they individually need to go into the future state then this becomes successful and it's another complexity right there are individual pieces in the organizations that needs to first move on so essentially this is possible when all these people reach the future state and this is an example only for people aspect so I go back to this slide now you look at this we just discussed about people now organization defines a future state for their process today we follow the following processes we are using these things and future I want to do the following things there is a future description of the process now is that the only process that is impacted there may be many processes which are interacting or integrated all of them need to go to the future states the same treatment or the same description applies to each layer here now you know how why this becomes so complex why it becomes so difficult because you you see there are multiple components and each component inside each component there are individuals there are individual processes there are loose ends at all levels so that's that is the reason why we find it very very difficult now I am moving on to the second part of the discussion where how do I get so one answer to this whole question is if we can bring the agility into the DNA of the organization we are done am I right what is the DNA of an organization culture ok can you go little more granular people people is the DNA of organization ok set of values ok so that's another level of granularity because people have certain values yes why the organization exists there is a purpose which is set that is an important part of the DNA so the enterprise agility objective should fit into that definition first of all right this is how I define the DNA of the organization this is the building block right philosophy which is exactly what you said what's the purpose of the organization values what values the organization stand for and then the mindset the mindset is if I believe in certain values my mindset becomes that right actually values are typically written down but what is the value of having values if people don't follow it so it is being demonstrated through the mindsets and habits and then the principles every organization have some is a you your committed to deliver something and your team realizes that they are not going to make it how are you going to handle the situation some people may actually do extended hours to complete that some people will just call up and say we are not going to make it right so everything comes from here values mindset habits and so on and so forth so in other words my answers to the whole complex problem is if we can bring in the exercise of envisioning the future for the organization will people understand may be or may not be because I don't know what is the language of the organization every organization has a way in which the communication flows and there is a language that we do so what how do we do this blueprint for the future so this is what we are going to do yeah so this conversation the future print conversation should happen at a level where so I will come back to answer this question because the exercise will give you the insights okay okay so this what we want to do think about what is the current scenario organization organization where the organization is not agile or what is the future scenario so basically define what is the current scenario what is the future scenario and then write a one liner that defines or that explains this shift from current to future I will give you an example the current scenario I am just giving a real-life example the current scenario when an engineer moves from a team in Bangalore to another team in San Francisco that person is in for a big surprise or a shock that's a current scenario because people use different way of doing a job so for example here in Bangalore people are exposed to let's say they do daily stand-up and all those things but when they actually go to San Francisco their team actually more into peer programming which is not very popular in Bangalore so what what happens to this individual is that a scenario where the organizational agility can improve so the one liner that I will write so I am defining the future state so this exercise is little bit difficult because we are thinking before something that we have seen right so here is a one liner if I ask one of the engineer to move to another team in a different location in some other part of the world in the company there is no shocks or surprises in the way the products are built in that team as well so what are we talking about here consistency of building a product across the organization is that a worthy goal is that this is not the complete future state that we have defined but we have defined a one piece piece of the future state where the consistency is taking care right so here this is what we want to do actually there are two parts to the exercise the first part is very easy you identify current state and imagine the future state and come up with one liner that depicts the future state right that is easy the second part is what you are going to do that is a more difficult part that is the language that you have to use from your organization right can you can you as a table probably you can join as a group and then pick one current state and define a future state and write a one liner yes that defines a future state leader you have the architect you have the product management VP product you know owner of a particular product line get an engineer all of them together and let's start doing this exercise imagine that and the discussion can be technical this can be non-technical it doesn't matter right take one aspect of current state and imagine the future state so have you defined the current state future state liner I'm coming across the table to help you the next step is as a team here is an interesting part as a team you have to draw is it easy difficult that's exactly where the people start thinking people start going into the belief system of what is a future state when they actually finish drawing it they believe in it okay so now I have defined a one liner for this team so this team can think how do you picture becomes a language of communication across the organization okay I'll go to that picture okay hold on let me figure out okay okay okay okay can you can you think a little better and draw a better picture so this doesn't give me the energy of the future state that I'm looking at right okay so sorry you have some picture okay so I think we are running short of time so I would suggest you go ahead and paste the picture right there on the wall but I'll give you some examples what people have done so far for example what is your future state or what is the one liner okay guys listen listen here let's hear their one liner okay so what they are saying is I hire the best talent for the organization not for the the opening that I have locally right so that's one way of defining so that's going to actually lead to a future state and that will define how the organization will move the process of hiring is going to change a lot okay that team had a very interesting one liner just just read wonderful wonderful so we actually discussed one more thing in the in the previous example right so when somebody writes a piece of code they should they should remember or they should know who's who is going to smile in the real world so basically they understand what is the purpose of their work so the current state what they have defined is I don't know why I am doing this work what's the purpose of my work the future state is so that you have drawn that as well wonderful so can you paste those pictures right there so we are done so that's a beautiful exercise it is not an easy exercise okay and especially if you want to get a diverse set of audience into this exercise it's going to take time but the first time it's going to be difficult the second time third time it's going to become much much easier okay let's move on to the second one this I call as value narratives okay in in where does where do you find values of your organization where do you find the values of your organization where you should find is another question okay if you find in people wonderful right so I am going to ask you if I come to your organization where can I see value of the organization okay so it is either in the poster it is on the wall or it is somewhere it is being depicted wonderful but do we really see in people people doing the or exhibiting those values so that's a hard question and some organization they do now here is exercise I am going to describe what we are going to do this is again a little bit of group exercise we can't write it alone so each table need to define three organizational values assume that you come from the same organization I know you are from different organization so write down three values quickly what are the three values of your organization maybe you can take your own organization value so my organization values be courageous win together and let's say integrity all these are the three values for my organization and be courageous is one value that I am focusing on the role that I am picking is a scrum master this is an exercise that you do with the teams okay so I am picking the role of a scrum master and the narrative that I give is this the team is consistently not performing very well I as a scrum master believe the team can perform much better and I call for and ad hoc retrospective meeting which is not at the end of the sprint and I say that we need to have this meeting now because we have the potential to become high performance team but we are not we are doing injustice to that that's a scenario and that's the behavior that I exhibit that's a narrative is this narrative give you a picture of how the scrum master leaves the value of be courageous do you see that so now you have to define one scenario or write one narrative to do that pick any role in a team so what actually happens in this exercise is at the end of the exercise so the conversation we had is values are common say for example one of the values they picked is be ethical so why we need to pick a role and then describe a narrative or a scenario because let's say for example be ethical is a common value there is no doubt about it but what is being ethical mean to me in my role if I am a customer executive versus I am a procurement person what is being ethical mean to me so if you can actually nail down that scenario for as many roles as possible and then you print these narratives a short passage of five lines or so into small cards and leave the cards all over the place in your organization so when people walk in so I am a developer there is a card for me I take I pick up the card and I read the narrative I get the value then I start leaving so that is the purpose of this exercise the more your passage or your narrative is powerful the easier it gets across to the people. Now let's move on to the third one this is about mapping the mindset of people this exercise is very very easy there is nothing much involved say for example I am going to give you five mindset that we want our deliver value continuously learn and adapt and number three keep things simple and number four believe in conversation rather than emails and number five technical excellence these are the five values that that we want to get the mindsets of people into let's keep this five yeah so the number one deliver value continuously number two learn and adapt and number three keep it simple number four believe in conversations and number five technical excellence right now as a team assume that you are working in a particular team and you are you have an assessment of your own teams mindset towards these five items right these five mindset decide one thing assume that it's an imagination now at this point of time for our exercise but in real life every team can identify two things right what is the mindset they are comfortable exhibiting say for example I am number in a scale of one to five I am number five in technical excellence I am number one in say face to face conversation get the idea so every team has they know every team has an assessment okay so these are the mindset we exhibit from the teams we expect from the team and every team assesses themselves where they stand across these five mind you know mindset so you can define as many mindset as you want now each team each team pick one and then what happens let's say this team picks technical excellence as their low point let's say one and this team picks technical excellence as their high point number five what's the next step to do get the teams come together and talk about it and imagine now expand the exercise across hundreds of teams so who is going to teach mindset who is going to get the mindset across to the teams or across to the people that's one way to do and that's what we do in our organization there's a board which has all the mindset listed they have we have listed all the teams in one one side who are doing good and there's another team which is waiting for somebody to teach them those values and there's no more conversation happens they come look at the board and they say oh this team is already number five in this value who is the point of contact let me call this guy and I go to my team and say I have somebody to talk to can you join me so this team gets an appointment to talk to them and that's what happens so now the mindset is being brought to the teams in a much nicer way so that's one example so it's about the teams assessment of how they are doing in that mindset right it's a self assessment if you feel that you are number five five means I have mastered that mindset and all the people in my team exhibits that mindset you can call yourself number five one means we don't know how to do that or we are not exhibiting the value it's your own assessment I am very particular nobody comes in assessors it is your own assessment that team assessors because that's where the power of self organizing comes in right and then when somebody says I am five what's going to happen next five more teams are going to walk up to this team and start asking questions right if they just code five for the sake of making it five imagine what's going to happen it's actually a much embarrassing situation for the team so it doesn't happen this exercise is very very simple very very powerful at the same time it's there on the wall every day anybody can come and update they are going to say hey this team sucks that's all no there is nothing like that as a team we have to assess not as an individuals right so if everybody is if two people say five two people say one we are going to say one go with the lowest number ok we will keep the conversation offline there is a signal that time up so I am going to skip this exercise I can talk about this later this exercise is all about giving feedback how many of you comfortable giving feedback to your manager or your director or to your VP ok if you are comfortable that it's great this exercise you don't need this exercise if you are not comfortable you need this exercise we will do it offline ok cool so this is my summary right it's a journey it's all about bringing desired culture and mindset it's riddled with complexities to succeed in this journey it calls for an adaptive leadership leadership competency this is my bottom line it actually calls for a new skill sets in people and that's a leadership competency some of us have some of us are learning some of us will have to pick it up it's not going to come on its own ok here is the question here is the final slide can we call this section have you learned what we set out to learn these are the two things I these are two conditions I have set in the beginning to call this workshop is a value for your time if yes I am happy thank you very much have fun