 Welcome to Agile to Agility podcast with Milan Bayej. The very first value we wrote is individuals and interactions. Let's take this to another level. All right, let's get started. It's 115 Eastern. Thank you very much for those of you that joined. I know. You probably have other things and other priorities, but you decided to be here. So thank you. For this session, we have Jeff Watts, Stephanie Ockerman, Ockerman, and Ryan Ripley to just talk about some of the questions that you might have for them. Some of the questions I might have for them and I don't know, maybe Stephanie, we can start with you, Ryan and then Jeff, just maybe quickly introduce yourself. Maybe just click 30 second intros if you want. You can also pass totally up to you or just tell us maybe allow yourself maybe currently what you're working on or anything. And we'll dive into after that. All right. So my name is Stephanie Ockerman and I am the co founder, trainer, chief writer, all the things at agile socks.com. So many of you might know me from the articles, blogs, videos that I put out into the world as well as the book mastering professional scrum. But I really focus on training and coaching for agility and enablement so professional scrum trainer. So I kind of really hone in on the leveraging professional scrum and then one of the things that I've been more passionate about over the past few years is really helping from masters go into those deeper levels of skills and leadership. That's that are actually needed to kind of actually leverage from and take that service leadership approach more effectively. Great. Sorry, I just look. Ryan, I think I said you go next and then. Sure. Yeah, so thanks for having me. This is a truly neat to get to be on a panel with Stephanie and Jeff, probably two of my favorite Agilis aside from Todd. So my name is Ryan Ripley. I'm a co founder of Agil for humans with Todd Miller. We also collectively wrote fixing your scrum practical solutions to common scrum problems. Probably most people on here know us from the YouTube channel. So we have we've developed a pretty large offering on YouTube with a bunch of playlists on the framework on evidence based management. We do a daily show called your daily scrum. And so every day we post a video answering scrum questions and so this particular panel should be pretty comfortable if not I'm in trouble. But also a professional scrum trainer like Stephanie with scrum.org. And so we both teach a lot of the courses that are in the catalog with scrum.org and we are both committed to Ken's vision and mission and try to put good work into the world. He's amazing on the coaching side and my focus is more on the management leadership side and fortunately Todd my business partner and fellow professionals scrum trainers more on the product owner side and so between a lot of us we cover a lot of bases and just try to put a lot of good work into the world and work with great people like Stephanie and Jeff and others and just try to have a little fun along the way to great. Thank you Ryan and Jeff. Yeah, Jeff Watts based in the UK. I'm not a professional scrum trainer. I've written a few things spoken about a few things. And I've worked at a few places all trying to help people as I finally managed to succeed and explains my kids or my job was, I help people get better at what they do, whatever that is. So, yeah, I don't, I don't really have a better explanation of who I am than that. Mostly in the agile space but not always. Great. Thank you. So let's dive into it we have just a little less than an hour 55 minutes so let's dive into so it's going to be mixture between my questions and questions that people have posted. Ryan and Stephanie we're talking about their reviews and earlier so I thought you know maybe I mentioned to them we can start with this one so it's a pretty common one where people or teams say our reviews are not effective we don't we don't get a lot of feedback. What are your thoughts on that maybe we can start with Stephanie. Yeah, I think there's a lot of different ways this challenge can manifest and the one kind of looking visually on the screen around, you know, we're talking to our stakeholders regularly and very short updates you know we show them stuff as we build it maybe we're even doing continuous delivery. So that's kind of the scenario and painting with this question. So, you know, like, why, why, we don't get a lot in the sprint review because we're already in touch with them well in that type of scenario. My initial thoughts are that like, you know, our purpose here we are inspecting the increment right recognizing some of your stakeholders may have seen parts of that increment but maybe not all of them have seen the big picture so there is some opportunity here for some bigger picture level setting and you know inspecting the increment and our progress toward the product goal. So this is a little bit of an opportunity to kind of come kind of come up a little bit to and look at that bigger picture. So how we form questions how we asked for feedback really matters and so versus just showing people something and saying what feedback you have, like we want to be intentional around, what do we need, and every scrum team is going to be a little bit different, based on how they already engage what their product is their different types of stakeholders. Right so I encourage people to kind of maybe break out of, oh I've seen it done this way before or I read a blog post that said here's a good facilitation technique. You're still going to have to figure out what works best in your context and what needs you have right so so in this scenario maybe thinking of the bigger picture and then how do I get the information we need to make decisions about what's coming next. Yeah, I think Stephanie is focused on the increment, and then the actions to take it's really good. Right I think delivery and then focused on the end increment or the one of the increments there could be many at a sprint is really smart. I just have a lot of questions based off of this question right. So, are they are they regularly in exchanges because we're constantly stuck in status update meetings. Right. And are we is our calendar full of we're going to talk to these two stakeholders and those two stakeholders. Mike, I think a big question here would be if you were to set all the stakeholders to down together. Would they give a consistent coherent narrative about how the products going and the feedback and and the value being delivered and an assumption I would make here is the answer would be no. And so I think part of this could be a lot of extra meetings happening it could be. There's a disconnect between stakeholders but I also wonder if the stakeholders understand the purpose of the sprint review. They're supposed to be coming back with not just their own opinions but market opinions and budget updates and there's so many more things that could be happening here that. I just wonder if there's just kind of misunderstandings here if there's disconnections here, and just a lot of extra meetings taking place that don't need to. So on top of Stephanie is great response to focus on the increment focus on delivery. I think there's some really good questions to ask here as well. Also, I mean like do you have the right people. A lot of times that people are not, you know, there. So, what are your thoughts on this. So I've, I've attempted to answer around the question. Because there's there's lots of different things it could be around safety it could be around is the feedback are we actually any good at giving good feedback and so on but that's not, that's not the context of this question. So I think the main context of the question has been covered the one aspect that I think I probably pull out is, you have the opportunity here. Well, first of all, it says thinking about maybe we'll cancel the 15 minutes I think you'd probably keep that if that's working, if that's making the review and effective you keep that and lose the review and we don't have to stick to everything. But before you do, think about how you might be able to use that differently. So maybe those stakeholders don't need to come to the review that have been speaking to you every day, but other stakeholders do. So if the stakeholders come but instead of looking backwards you use a sprint review to look forwards, which I know sounds paradoxical, given the word review but you know a good part of that is thinking well where's this product going next. So, you could reuse the review for a different purpose, or with different stakeholders. So if you're here or if you have any follow up question or somebody else has a follow up question on this topic that would like to or if you want to share your thoughts. I'll open it up to others if they want to chime in briefly keep it short. Hi, I just thought maybe if you don't have a lot of participation to do a mini retro at the end of the review. But I like to kind of let my team know what the expectation is during let's say a retro so I kind of read the scoring system at the beginning so I like Chris stone I don't know if anybody knows him but I like his questions about rating the review because it's the onus on the participants to really drive the, the direction and the efficacy of the meeting if nobody's participating that isn't the person's fault necessarily who's facilitating it's dependent on wide participation so I think. Maybe it might help to change the expectation of what the meeting is for and what you want to see out of it, perhaps. And just an interesting question I think they're using the word stakeholders, it would be important to really, you know, kind of think through are these the right stakeholders are why, or really do a proper analysis of the stakeholders why would somebody not provide. Is it because the feedback is not there or is it because people do not really as much care so again it will go back to are we really building the valuable thing for the customers. And is it really valuable for the organization. Just to add in here, like what I'm picking up on from a number of people and I think Jeff mentioned this as well it's like, let's talk to our product owner, like how are we, how are we getting input from stakeholders, how are we managing their expectations. Are we establishing relationships with them because if the only time a product owner ever talks to ever the majority of stakeholders is at a sprint review. It's the point of maybe they don't feel comfortable or maybe there isn't a level of trust yet to give feedback right like so, you know I think an underlying theme of a lot of what we're talking about is like we need to kind of partner with our product owners and start to dig in, because there could be a lot of different things that play here so I just want to kind of emphasize like involve your product donors and in helping understand what's really happening and what's really needed here. And a lot of times what I see is like things don't have strong definition of done or like what they're actually showing is very hard to provide feedback for stakeholders so that could be another aspect to validate and check, you know, make sure that you have the right people but you're actually having stuff that people can react to, you know, or it could just be that this team might be using Bob or ensemble programming and perhaps they have found a way that they can deliver value quickly and they're just winning. Yeah, this could be a very positive and probably still good implementation of scrum and and it maybe this is just good. Hi, this is Jenny. I noticed the last sentence said, since two weeks sprints is too much too long to wait for feedback. You could order one week's front work and then you just have a weekly sprint review with that be a compromise that you've reduced the meetings but you're still getting the value. I just wondered why two weeks is too long to wait isn't it that's an interesting subject in its own right. Yeah, Jenny I think that's a great call out. It's, I think there's a misconception that you have to wait until the review to talk to a stakeholder. I'm so wrong. Like I love the fact that this team is talking regularly with stakeholders I mean that's that's that's why I kind of came around on this one after listening to the, some of these other comments where maybe this is just great. They have great stakeholder engagement, maybe the developers are working with them directly it looks like they are. If I read into this question a little bit, maybe it's just good. And, but yeah, regardless of whether you follow this pattern or professional scrum. The idea that you have to wait till the end to get stakeholder feedback is just wrong. You can still you can talk to stakeholders as often as necessary to make sure you're aligned and working towards your sprint goal correctly and that the increments going to be awesome. Right, that's that's encouraged. Great. So Jeff, would you like to comment on this I know Marco and Anna want to ask questions so we'll go Jeff Marco and Anna and then we'll move on to the next question. Jeff totally optional if you have anything else. Anything else. So you're talking to me yeah. Yeah, so anything else to add to what's already been said. I think it's a pretty good summary. Okay. Marco. I think Ryan actually mentioned quite a lot of good things just at the end there before after I raised my hand which is about our guys about bringing us closer to customers and users. So with this regular meeting, if this is helping with the conversation of going towards the sprint goal, making sure we're on track and that is actually is of value, the value that we're generating is actually valuable to our customers. Then that's great. And I think what the, our experts actually mentioned which is the product goal. If this is not what we're going to be inspecting necessarily during these collaboration meetings that we're doing during the actual two weeks. So this will be a good time for the review to look forward. So yeah, I totally agree with all that. Great. Sorry, go ahead. I'm just going to say like I think what we're all actually saying is like with this tiny bit of context, it could be like a thousand different things that are going on so it's like, I know it's the favorite answer. I'm joking that we give in a training class as well it depends. And so it's like these are like, there's so many great divergent kind of like, hey, it could be this it could be that it could be that and it's like, you need to be like a scientist in your world right and like start uncovering like start observing looking for those signs, because there's likely more than one challenge going on here right. And so it's like, where are we where do we want to go and then running little experiments to see if your assumptions are correct. And if you're moving towards solving the actual underlying challenges that you're noticing. So just kind of like, that's, that's the, that's the vibe I'm getting from like all these great ideas and answers and including the things that people are posting in the chat, like lots of good stuff here be the scientist and start creating more transparency and running experiments. Great Tim I don't know I just saw you raise your hand if you want to keep it short but just to give you. Just real short here and then just going back to something with Ryan saying, guys remember one of one of the key things key tenants of Scrum and agile is continual feedback. Continual feedback doesn't mean waiting for the meeting it means continual feedback. It means, as soon as I have something I need to go either to my engineer my PO, or my product manager. So, yeah, let's just remember that, you know, the ceremonies are the beginning of the conversation not the end of it. Great point. All right, let's move on to the next question which is related to this one here. What are some of the tools scrum master can use. I would like to maybe open this up or you know what are some of the things the scrum master should have in their toolbox so for instance if you think about some of the essentials from your perspectives when you're looking at, you know maybe hiring or if you're helping people hire scrum masters. What would you consider the essential skills tools that the scrum master should have in their toolbox. Yeah, this one's. It's an interesting question right so what skill should it should they have I mean. What about the stances. You know we're when the scrum master role or accountability is such a hard thing to to describe because we're expecting this person to be an excellent facilitator and excellent coach, a mentor, a trainer, a teacher, manager in a sense, or maybe a process manager, right, we're expecting them to be excellent with scrum but now the game has shifted a little bit they need to have a solid grasp of Kanban flow metrics lean thinking and so we've turned this this set of abilities like we need all of these skills and there are people in this world who work as facilitators full time and who work as coaches full time and who work as trainers and teachers and we've put all of these things together and said oh and by the way you need to be a great communicator a great collaborator. You need to speak well you need to be humble. You can't make this about yourself. We need you to put other people first. We need you to have a servant leadership mindset we need you to have a caring heart for a heart for others. We need you to also be aggressive and assertive when needed to remove impediments. We need you to understand what an impediment is we need you to work on the organization, we need you to understand how to work with managers and leaders but also need to be able to talk to everyone from the janitor to the CEO, perfectly. And so to this, you know, and so it's no surprise that on LinkedIn and other sites the job descriptions are ridiculous. And that scrum masters are constantly trying to figure out their place in an organization and so you know what is the right list, we need a person who's willing to step into that insanely uncomfortable space, who thrives in complexity, who loves people and who wants their teams to be wildly successful. And if we can get that, I believe that people like Jeff and Stephanie and myself can teach scrum, we can teach flow metrics we can teach combo and we can teach the skills, but we need that person and so what I'm saying something unpopular here. Not everyone can do this. Right. And so, and it's really hard to explain what this is. Right, maybe Stephanie and Jeff can clean it up for me but it's a lot. What this is reminding me of Ryan is actually one of the fixing your coaching I think episodes we recorded. And so maybe we'll send that link to be sent out but I, and I, and I also want to say like when I read Jeff's book. Yeah, I think read Jeff's book, right, as well it's like, it's not so much about I know X number of agile practices and facilitation techniques. You know, because it's about how you leverage like making choices about what techniques and processes and tools to leverage when, and also recognizing that you don't have to have all the answers. You know, when I'm looking for somebody like as a scrum master it's around like who they are as a person and how they like approach complexity and their comfort level and complexity and unpredictability and understanding of humans and team dynamics. And like that, that openness and curiosity, and like the person who doesn't need the roadmap of if this happens then do X, but then if this happens then do why right like it's not going to that's not. It's not going to work that way like we need somebody who's willing to walk into these uncomfortable unpredictable complex situations and I do believe the personal leadership skill sets those tools are really what ultimately become the most important and then allow you to grow in terms of what one might call your traditional tool kit right in terms of learning about flow metrics learning about facilitation techniques learning about conflict management learning about how to give feedback right like those things all will eventually come up as a need, but it's about how you leverage them and to me that's much more in that personal leadership and like my ability to like be in complexity and unpredictability. I mean, even though you're not both, I guess, you know, Ryan alluded to it you're talking about it, you're not you're not saying like specific skills but a lot of like you know, having you know high level of self awareness like understanding where your blind spots are like, you know, you refer to it maybe I call it like inner development but they're still these are the things that you're still looking at they're not just maybe more tangible but those I would still consider it you know when I'm looking at somebody like you know how well like some people run away from uncertainty some people understand that you can't really you just got to deal with it right. And those are things that, you know, maybe are not as visible but we still are kind of looking for those type of trades and Jeff, what about you what are your thoughts on this topic. My thoughts are that the answers already a fantastic. And if I'd have had 10 minutes I think I could come up with something very clever. But I haven't got 10 minutes so you've got to have something that's half stupid, but I'm going to try. So, I could I could list all sorts of characteristics and traits and skills and tools. But I'm going to limit myself to three. And for a change I'm not going to give you an acronym. Thank you. But I'm going to try and link it to the second half of the question on the screen in front of me which is around sparking purpose and impact. If a screw master can spark something in the people in the team and the organization, then more than half of their job is done. So, if I can tap into that. I don't create purpose purposes there, but I can tap into it. I think back to some of the things that have helped me with that one is around assertiveness. It's easy to just go along with the status quo, but actually we're there to challenge the status quo, not just in the organization but equally the people we're coaching we're challenging their assumptions we're challenging their limiting beliefs we're challenging their views about what's possible for themselves and others. So assertiveness making sure that things actually happen that we can see results from our efforts and putting ourselves in this area of discomfort. I think that ties into purpose and impact is having belief. Now you could call this continuous positive regard or something else but basically genuinely having a positive belief in the intentions and the capacity of people within the organization and the organization itself is very easy to look at something and think about another example of why things just aren't ever going to work around here or what was that person thinking or this policy this process is such a pain in the backside whoever thought this must be an idiot. But there's very few people in the world who actually design processes or make decisions deliberately to sabotage the organization, let alone you. Choosing to believe that people have good intentions choosing to believe that people have the capacity to change to do good things, I think is an essential part of doing that. And the third thing which is probably the one thing I've had to learn the most over the years is calm. So emotions are contagious. So if I start talking really, really fast, then people would start to feel a little bit more stressed. But if I speak calmly and slowly people generally start falling asleep and this is my intention, you won't worry about what I'm saying. All right, so I can have an impact on those around me. And it's very easy, like I said to think to notice all the things that aren't working and things that aren't changing, but having patience, while also being assertive staying calm when things are going difficult or challenging. We're dealing with those tricky problems and we're dealing with conflict and we're dealing with everybody's biases and all these kinds of things but staying calm will radiate that calmness throughout the organization and we are generally more resourceful as individuals, and therefore as an organization when we are calm. So it's not acronym but it's ABC assertiveness bravery and calm about that. Great. I think that the responses are wonderful. What's making me think is that that's not the general perception out there. What's not calm. All of those in general like. All of those calm isn't calm isn't newsworthy. I'm not just talking about the media in terms of grabbing attention urgency grabs attention. Yeah, so it's like, like I love what you did there Jeff is like, you know you took the kind of the big picture stuff and like made it a little bit more tangible. And like this culture of urgency this culture of escalation this culture of like, you know like a lot of times I asked myself first but then I asked other people, like what's the actual worse that could happen right now like, you know, it. So there's a self check, I think involved in helping you be calm as a scrum master, and like helping you help others. Right. Like then how do I leverage facilitation skills coaching skills right to then help others move through whatever we're moving through right now and make intentional choices based on what the reality is versus something that's like but we have to just get everything done. And that's our reality it's like no that's not the reality. Yeah, that's one of the, what you've said there about what's the worst that could possibly happen that that is probably one of the most common conversations that I have not necessarily in those words but sometimes exactly in those words. This just challenging our assumptions about what will happen what can happen what might happen. And we are as human beings we are self preservationists first and foremost, and it's not necessarily about our life or our physical well being at work usually. It's more around social judgment and ostracization and career progression and looking silly and feeling silly and so on. We deserve ourselves if we can. So thinking these things through and actually what do I am what am I worried that might actually happen here is that logical could I plan against that could I recover against that could I put something in place to help me recover from it and so on. And teams need that more than individuals, ironically, because we have the diffusion for responsibility in a team somebody else will step up. I don't put something forward while the rest of my team come with me and so on. So we, as this is what I would come back to that a certain this is a scrum master sometimes saying it's going to be okay if you take action if you step up if you start managing yourselves is all well and good, but until that until someone actually sees evidence that somebody goes out of the comfort zone and doesn't get punished. They won't, they won't feel comfortable. You know, there's a really good book. There's always a book, but if you're uncomfortable with this idea of what's the worst that could happen I think Stephanie's brought up a really good question there. There's a very, very, very old book called Letters from a stoic by Seneca. And I think it's such an important read if this is an uncomfortable concept for you so Seneca would actually practice poverty. Every so often you would make himself insanely poor and live on the street and realize that this practice was that if he were to lose everything. He would still be here, and he would still be alive and it and it gave him the freedom to try things. So Letters from a stoic, it was actually written I think in 50 AD. Very, very old book. But I think it's excellent. It's just a really wonderful if that concept is interesting to you Letters from a stoic by Seneca is wonderful. Great. Thank you. Let's move on to the next question maybe we have about half an hour left so I think it's maybe good to do I just couple more here one I want to from the Liz Padron. Petron, sorry I'm mispronouncing your name. What are your recommendations for non collocated scrum teams, one of my teams has four different time zones countries. Pretty common happens a lot. What are your thoughts and suggestions for Liz and others that have similar situation. I think it's, I find it interesting that in a way that this is is still a question. Because it's been a reality for so long. And even, even when I was a scrum master for the first time we we already had examples of distributed teams being able to work successfully. We have many examples of distributed teams not working successfully as well. But the, you know, the common, the common things around teamwork, don't really change that much, just because you're remote, the things that make a team successful, make a remote team successful. There are some harder things from psychological issues come into play. You feel less accountable to one another if you don't see each other. And how you care less about one another in fact you even become suspicious of people, the longer you don't go seeing them. It's harder to build strong relationships and bonds but that's not necessarily essential. Generally speaking that the tactics that have worked for for throughout my career have been as much as possible, try to get together now and again. Just to just to put a face to a name and learn a bit about them as a person. Listen to listen to each other in terms of your, your needs and your desires about working. And what do you, what do you need from each other from your own perspective in order to be a successful team and are we all willing to commit to that. And if not, what are we going to do about that. It sounds I know sounds like I'm oversimplifying it, but generally speaking just having those conversations and then inspecting and adapting. Yeah, and this one other thing I'd like to throw out there because it's that I just scheduled a newsletter that's going out tomorrow and this is actually in it. I listened to a podcast recently called the offices dying it's time to rethink how we work. And while it doesn't specifically talk about like time zones it's talking about this whole idea of like people are not co located right like different schedules. I do think that there's the questions that that Jeff is talking about like we need to have these conversations and think about these things and talk about it as a team and kind of come to like what do we want what do we need. And, you know, the podcast is long, like it's in depth it's based on, you know, research from the last two and a half years of this grand experiment. There's a lot of like tangible questions I think that that can help you have these conversations. And I would also say like how the organization needs to actually set people up for success. So let's like yes there's a team level of this. And yes there's like a how is the scrum master helping ensure like that you know the team is having these conversations. So there is also things organizations need to do and I think sometimes it's harder for us to think about how we pose that back to the organization. And like, still keep it self managing right like let things emerge. So I would recommend it I don't think I actually named it it's on the as recline show I'll send I'll send you a link to include in the post conference resources but I was really interesting and gave me a lot of like new ways to have those conversations and notice and maybe like I, we weren't even really noticing are the impacts of distributed teams to actually consider a Ryan I'm going to I'm going to break convention and I'm going to come back in in front of you if that's alright. Only because there are a couple of just personal examples from me here so I know when it was 10 years ago maybe when when I wrote scrum mastery. People involved in that project ever met each other. So my editor was in Colorado, I think my graphics designer was in Norway, my reviewers were in different countries. They were, they were all over the place we never met we didn't need to make, and we managed to work together and I think we managed to produce something that worked. I think if you get good people together who are brought together around something they all want to be a part of and their skills and their humanity is respected. Then I think it works, but I don't think it's anything different to being in the same room. Now having said that. I'm having a new website bill right now. And I wanted one of the reasons I chose the firm to build this website is that they are in the same town as me. So, there's no reason for that, you know, I could choose anyone in the world, because this is digital, even more so now than ever before. But tomorrow, they want to go through something on the on the CMS we want to review the staging website because we're pretty much there. And they sent me a gene meat link to meet in in Google. You're down the road, guys. You know, one of the reasons I chose you guys was because I wanted to come and see you. I'd rather spend a couple of hours in your office bashing things through then either asynchronously or over over some kind of online tool. So, for me, I would always choose if I had the choice I would always choose people together. I think. I rarely use the word always, but I think it's brought home for me this last couple of years, just how much of a difference it makes to me to be working with people in the same place. Yeah, I might my thoughts go more towards Jeff's there if I if I have the choice I will always choose together. Right, and the word always is dangerous. There's going to be someone that has an edge case that says that's not a good idea and and I, and so we'll give up the edge cases there I think Jeff would agree with that but I think I am with Jeff on the idea of together. I actually, again, do not have a popular opinion here. I think that people will be back in the office. I think the modern day organization is not designed for remote work, and I don't see org charts getting restructured in meaningful ways that allow for remote work to flourish. Right. So the modern day organization is designed for command and control and looking over your shoulder, we're going to manage you in a certain way. The org chart is not optimized for delivery. And it's not optimized to serve a customer. So in the small instances like what Jeff is talking about with building his book. That is amazing. Right when Todd and I built our book we had Prague product had a team that was distributed around the but it was a handful of people as a small team with a clear purpose. You know, you know, they what is it the open minds clear hearts and a good purpose and you can do great things, but it's a small team. You take a massive team. You take a massive organization they don't have that they have an org chart that's built and predicated on physically being together. And that's why we see so much struggle and people having to, you know, we need the right tooling we need the right mindset we need a working agreement no. We need organizational redesign that is not happening today. Right. So how much do you think it has to like you know this situation like you know what stated at the beginning of this it's it's been around for you know where people are distributed across the globe. And a lot of times it's, you know, people that are hiring to have the hiring firing decisions. They're really not good at designing a ecosystem. Right. The things you just plug and play I need some testers I need them cheap let's go to Eastern Europe or India right I need that. I mean they're not really thinking of what is the long term cost versus I just need to solve this problem way. So it is like it is a structural question but a lot of this is a self inflicted boom by people that don't know how to put or not allowed or whatever it is to design environment. Most people, they'll say, either in person or at least if people are working remotely have at least like four hours overlap half a day overlap for those people. I think we're giving too much credit to randomness. I think this is all intentional. I think most modern day companies not only are the org charts not designed for remote work. They're optimizing very short term profit and benefit. And so they will make they will intentionally make these short term decisions and they will, they believe they're the correct decisions, and they want to make these decisions for those short term investments and I'm not saying they're wrong. In some countries, it is illegal to do otherwise. If they are not optimizing shareholder value, there have been court cases, I believe across the pond that are saying shareholders can sue if you don't optimize for short term profit. But that's that's the way of the world now. And so I'm seeing comments about but that's not system thinking I, I'm not advocating for any of this. I want organizations to shift and change to dismantle the org chart to optimize for delivery what I'm saying is, we're not seeing that in the marketplace, which is why I think remote work is good for right now because of a pandemic and post pandemic situation, but people will pull their organizations back into the office because they will not make meaningful change. Essentially you're saying it's tough to let go of that, you know, control so like, we'll pull back people because of that desire to control to do. Yeah, the illusion of control really right and to so Ryan talking about like, you know, actually optimizing for delivery. Like I just want to name this like he doesn't just mean like efficiency right and getting product on the door like we're talking about how people do their best work together. And I'll just say like I've seen rock star teams that are fully remote and distributed across multiple time zones and I've seen terrible co located teams like all working together in a room. So, you know, I think they're, but it but I think the underlying theme is we do need to think about like, or I should say like we need to influence and support and organizations and actually creating an environment that enables whatever the situation is necessary, enables people to thrive. And the other thing that I initially like my first response to that question was going to be a little flippant and I'll just go ahead and throw it out now is, you know, maybe we need to ask ourselves if we should redesign our teams. Right, like, why are we putting ourselves in a situation if we feel it's difficult to collaborate that way. Why don't we assess should we all should we think about how are we organizing how we do product delivery right like that that's part of self managing to. Yeah, so maybe like to just say I'm that scrum master or like it's out of my control what are some practical things that you know I could coach mentor encourage people. If we are stuck in this situation where we have people still distributed across multiple time zones. What are the things that you've seen that actually work in this kind of shitty environment that we're set up for failure in a way, we're not we're not optimized truly to be a high performing team. What are some of the tips that you would still maybe share recommend. So if I'm a director of ice present whoever it is that has teams like this under under me. Right. And this is where I think the authority is going to flow from. I think if I want those teams to be wildly successful we want a chance at serving people and delivering value to the world and all those great things. We want to give them full autonomy to work in the best way they deem possible. So if they tell me Ryan we need this certain code editor because we can pair program online together. I'm going to buy that for them if they say we need whatever tool set whatever working arrangement whatever working hours. If they come back and say it looks weird but we're going to get an increment every sprint. We're going to go with it support it and build that environment and I think anything short of that is not going to be enough. I was going to try and bring in another question that I saw in this chat and I've tried to hold on to from Roland which he prefaced with I don't want to be funny. Which I think if Ryan was saying, he'd say, this is an unpopular opinion. I'll paraphrase you here Roland but basically developers aren't necessarily known to be the most extroverted. And so it's easy. Is it a challenge. I would say this is something that you have to bear in mind, whether it's remote or not, but it's even more amplified when you are remote. So his question is any advice on how to get less extroverted people engaged. And I'll try and bring you back to something that I said earlier on around belief. Having the belief in what people are capable of having the belief about what people want, generally speaking people want to be successful. But there's also an element of what if you're part of an agile team. You can't be an individual completely. So, if we assume, I've told this story many times before but I was working in an organization where we're talking about self organization one of the managers said yes my problem is Jeff people are lazy. Right. And so if you give him an inch to take a mile. And basically he had evidence to back up that view. So no matter how much evidence I had that he was wrong. He knew for a fact, he was correct, but he was because he believed that he because his confirmation bias he was noticing all the examples that confirmed his view and ignoring all the examples that discredited his view. And if I believe that developers or anyone doesn't like or isn't capable of having productive collaboration and conversations with people then I'll see examples and evidence of that. So be aware of what your confirmation bias is doing for you already, and having the belief that people are capable of that, if there are, if the conditions are right. I'll be honest, I missed the office. So, I don't know everybody does well I know. Todd and I talked about this just the other day they're a co-working. So Todd's in Pennsylvania, I'm in Indiana, we're not going to get together very often. But when we do it's fun but we're actually talking about renting space at local co-working offices just to be around people. It's really weird like we actually had that conversation and and so I know not everybody does. I think I also love working at home because I sleep in my bed every night I see my family I see my wife and kid I really like those people. There are times when you can when you can shut off and Todd can't get hold of you right. Right, absolutely. You could and so we perhaps as one type of person have had the luxury of being able to go to places where there are people. Yeah, and one of the things I felt sorry for certain members of the HR team is that they haven't had the time and space to be quiet and share everything off and say just just go away. Yeah, need to focus. And our teams have always been about having a balance of quiet time and noisy time. Oh yeah. Now we've gone from an overburden of noisy time to an overburden of quiet time. And it's got to be something in the middle. Well it's interesting that you bring that up because I think one of the things that's happening is we're trying to solve the problem with technology, and somebody is like okay here's these new communication channels. And what's happening is it's actually making it more like people are basically like performing, they're being performative to make it look like they're working. I can't just walk away from Slack or Teams or whatever it might be right because if somebody if I don't respond right away people are going to think I'm not really working. Right, and it's like, there's a level of like extra like I don't know like spinning on a hamster wheel that I think some teams are doing in this environment, because they feel like they have to. I think in there though like, you know, I think even before COVID like you know where people with one person will work from home or they will be another building. And I think it is it is part of that part of that kind of figuring out this next phase and I think it will be a combination I think you know, it's definitely what you said I think earlier it really comes back to the psychology understanding humans and like how we communicate and collaborate and if you look at that, we're social people we communicate we build trust easier try to build trust with the teammate on zoom that you never seen versus somebody that, you know, you actually work I tell people like you know some of the best retrospectives that facilitated happened at the bar, like you know, like it's getting to know people. Maybe we have a chance for one more question but Tim maybe I'll give you another changes to add comment or ask a quick question, and then we'll move on, maybe to our last question. I don't know I don't know this is really an easy one, because we're talking around things we're talking, you know, great points from the panel, but really what we're faced with is there's an inertia in the industry that doesn't want to do agile or doesn't want to do agile. Forget, you know, all the frameworks, it's, we've got to overcome the inertia of the mindset. How do we do that how can we effectively do that I mean I'm, I'm, I'm Mr evangelist agile evangelist in my company all the time and it's like, sometimes I don't see the I don't think anybody's against winning. And so let's just drop the jargon and the lingo. And let's talk about behaviors. I think that it's one of the reasons why I love Jeff's book. I mean, it's, it just beautifully describes the behaviors that you see for, for great scrum masters and I think we need to embrace that and just say hey we're going to, we're going to build some stuff for a while after we build this kind of plan for what we're going to do for a few weeks. And then we're going to show it to people and we're going to build some alignment there and make sure that we're meeting their needs and we're going to repeat that for a little bit and we're also going to check in with each other to make sure we're working in a way that we all love and there's joy and their success. And we're going to repeat that for a little while, and try to make sure that we're serve and by the way you know, miss CEO, we're going to protect your investment we got this person here watching the budget and and maximizing value. Does any of that sound bad. No, they want that they want the stewardship of funds they want the delivery when we win they want. All those things are great, but then the jargon comes in and there's baggage assigned to every word. And Joe has baggage scrum has a ton of baggage. No one knows what the heck a scrum master is at the sea level product donor wait isn't that product manager low I don't know what the hex of daily scrum and why can't I attend it. The list goes on and on so get just drop it. Talk about behavior, and then go do it and then do it again and benefits right so it's like and know who your audience is so like to your point if you're talking to sea level like what do they want their investments right so talking about like well you know we're trying to kind of take this approach because we know that our market change is really fast. Remember that time we got really burned by putting all of this money into something and we didn't validate our assumption right like so leverage storytelling real world experiences that people can relate to you to say here's why we want to work in a different industry. So here's what we're going to try because we're trying to avoid this risk happening again, or because hey we're noticing our markets changing really fast and we're falling behind. Right, so like we're leveraging practices that help us really hone in on value and understanding our customers better right so those are just a few more ideas to think about like how you your language and what you talk about like effects, right the context and like it doesn't need people into that like like, oh you said a word that I have a lot of baggage around, or that holds baggage in our organization. Yeah, yeah that remind me also like it's not just behaviors like I recently read Michael Spades I put the link in the chat agile transformation book which where he looks at behavior systems like organizational structures, culture and mindset. In a way it's an integral approach to, to change, right so there's, there's a lot more a play than just behaviors but behaviors are one of the key things that we're actually ultimately changing, but you change behavior by changing environment you change behavior by changing the culture change the behavior by change the mindset. So, maybe that's another resource that you guys can check out. Last question. How can agile teams effectively manage dependencies this is one of the questions at least I get asked a lot. So maybe we can finish with this one what are your thoughts, comments. What could you share on how people can manage dependencies better. Not managing them eliminate them. Seriously, if your architecture is bad picture architecture, if you do not have nine times out of 10, you do, you do not have a truly cross functional team, which is why you have dependencies. Right, so fix your org chart, fix your architecture, I would rather people invest in put put the millions of dollars there before you buy an agile transformation, and I'm using air quotes because I think those are nonsense. But, but the term is understood right. And so, fix those things so that you don't have to manage dependencies they just go away. I don't know about guys that say though, or if you ask David Anderson they would say, you know, you can get rid of dependencies. I don't know who that is. I'm a big Dan, Dan, but Conti though would say, listen to Ryan. So I'm a big fan of a Conti and I work we talk with him quite a bit he's a he's very scrum adjacent. He's a very he's a he's an ally with us and I trust his Kanban techniques and I think he would agree that the more you can eliminate dependencies rather than manage them. The better off your team will be. I think, yeah, minimizing dependencies there in my opinion there's always dependencies so in a complex environment you have dependencies but minimize there are a lot of dependencies that are created unnecessarily. Yeah, I was just going to add to that like the mic drop answer same as what Ryan said right like, don't just manage them don't just assume you have to live with them. Right like do what you can to eliminate and or minimize the impact this doesn't have to be like a big bang solution to every dependency you have right so make the dependency transparent, both in terms of things like, you know, the cost of it right there's a cost of delay to get something to a customer maybe it's the cost of rework. Right like maybe there's an actual, you know, like tangible dollar impact you can create from that right. So what's the impact of living with this dependency, how frequently does this dependency affect us and that could be like a 10x multiplier right when you really, so it's like about transparency really right so I always say like scrum masters number one tool is transparency. How do I make create more transparency to what's really happening and create a compelling case, and get the people involved right have the right conversations with the right people and you need transparency to the data, the impacts of that. And then again like not looking for the big bang solution it's like what is a thing we can do to move in the right direction here. So if people are afraid, right, it's an experiment. Like it's not permanent or we're just running an experiment. You know so there's lots of ways to get some forward momentum there but I think it does start with making the impacts of it transparent. I don't have anything else to add on dependencies. So what I would like to do instead is I would like to answer Tim's question from before. I can completely feel the emotion in the question, the frustration. And that frustration is a real thing. And this is what when I said about my ABC this why I had to work on because I'm an incredibly impatient person. Additionally, we are in a very slow moving in one way world, even though the world is moving very, very fast change still takes time. And it's an analogy of boiling a frog. If you throw a frog into a pan of boiling water they will jump out straight away but if you put a frog in a pan of room temperature water and boil it slowly, it will just sit there and die, because it doesn't notice the small changes. And we don't notice the small changes that we're seeing on a regular basis because we're in the middle of it. But if you look back 10 years, 20 years, we have come a long way. It doesn't feel like it right now but we have. We have planted a lot of seeds and Craig Lamar once said, you know, there was a point in time when people knew for a fact doctors knew for a fact that the way to cure illness was leeches they knew it, it was a fact. And even with the advent of penicillin and drugs and all that kind of stuff. Those, those doctors held on to their beliefs, it took that whole generation of doctors to die out before the new truth was universally accepted. And I'm not saying we need to wait for these people to die off but what I'm seeing is I'm seeing a shift in demographics at the senior level, but those senior people. And this is where I go back to my second, my baby, my belief, my belief in the most people that even though it's really hard to think that they're doing anything that they're doing anything positive that they have good intentions. There's a very good chance they are party to conversations that we are not. There's a good chance that they're signed up to NDAs that we are not privy to that they have conflicts and tensions and political agreements that they have to abide by, even if they didn't want to. And they can't talk about it. So you have to assume that they have good things but there are incentives for short term share options for example that a lot of these people's bonuses are based on. And the next promotion. So being understanding of the empathizing with the situation these people are in they may see the logic and what you're saying, but there are incentives that are naturally conflicting with what they would like to do. But the other thing that these people these senior people have to contend with and a lot of them are conscious of it is what's got them to where they are isn't necessarily what they need to get them somewhere else. And that's scary. Because they are highly visible people in an organization, and they're faced with the prospect of what they need to do now isn't what they have been doing. They need different skills, and they don't know how to add value anymore. If they're not there making decisions and telling people what to do. It's a very scary place for them. And they're not used to being vulnerable to empathize with those people. And I know you used the word evangelist and I know you don't mean it like an evangelist. But think about the messages that we're putting out there. Are we at some level trying to convince other people that we have a better answer. Because if we are even implicitly, we're making it harder for ourselves, because those people then have to admit that we were right and they were wrong. They have to climb down from their previously held view of the world and take on somebody else's and nobody likes to do that, let alone someone in seniority. So as Ryan said talk about behaviors talk about benefits tie into their objectives their motivations their goals their drivers make it their idea, not the process, but the outcome. And then we've got a chance. Great. Great suggestion and I think it's again that shift maybe that we're looking for maybe you know we call it a shift maybe it's a paradigm shift but it takes time and you know I've talked to a lot of top leaders and they said, we made a lot of progress in the last one years we want to overnight but you know, agile still young or this movement is still young. What would you like to share as final thoughts with 400 or so people here. Maybe just keep it short but your final final easy on yourself. Go easy on yourself, go easy on each other, but keep pushing yourself and keep pushing each other. I echo that, you know, this is something that Todd and I and I know Jeff and Stephanie I think they're a little younger than me but maybe not. We've been thinking about this stuff for the past 2025 years. And we still messed it up. Like I still mess up as a scrum master, I still don't know everything I still. I mean I wrote a book called fixing your scrum and I'm not sure how to fix everyone's practices. Right, I don't know how to do all of that. But I we try and we try things and I fail constantly, and we try something else and maybe it works a little better. And anyone promising the right true way the one true way walk away quickly. But just yeah, I like that Jeff take it easy on yourself we're all still learning we're all still trying things and the fact that you're willing to try something after one thing didn't work is awesome. Failure to adapt is, I think the number one killer of organizations and teams. So keep trying things keep changing. You know to Jeff's point, you know make it about outcomes and how these things help other people, and you might have a chance of getting these things to work so I like that's a good, that's a good key thought there Jeff. Yeah, and just to kind of remind us right like we're in this really weird role where we are accountable. Like, like we are our success is measured by the growth and success of others, and the outcomes that are literally beyond our control. Like I mean, for like really think about what that means and so to me like everything we're talking about here is like, let go of control and I have layers and layers and layers of control like I stripped one thing away and then I'm like oh there's me trying to control things and think I know the right direction, you know feel compelled to have a perfect plan and get it right. And so again this is why it's like this kind of constant like, how am I showing up right now where am I still kind of even myself bringing in like these mindsets that are no longer serving me and the team and the organization so it's like we are a constant growth work in progress as well. And so give yours like, don't take yourself too seriously this is really hard. You know, it's about recovery. It's all about recovery. Notice and recover.