 Until people come and seem to settle down, I just want to show you a video. Hopefully that video will interest you. I just want to show a short video to everyone. It's about one minute video, so I hope you enjoy this video. Among them being able to communicate by performing a unique dance. It informs hive mates where a newly discovered food source is located. Every cycle of this waggle dance roughly describes the shape of the figure eight. Let's rewind and look in more detail. The bee only waggles on a part of its route, the straight run indicated here by the waved line. The secret lies in the direction of the straight run, or to be more precise, in the angle between the straight run and the perpendicular, which in this case is 90 degrees to the left. This tells the other bees that food is available 90 degrees to the left of the sun. If the angle is 60 degrees to the right, they'll be flying 60 degrees to the right of the sun. You must be wondering how honey bees really find their way out. What is it that really tells them how to find the nectar? And this is the simple thing that they actually do. They do this funny little waggle dance and that's how the honey bees really communicate. And let me see if we are able to talk about that in our session today and understand how that is relevant to us. Is there a clicker that I can use? Okay, I'll just keep walking here. So I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the things that are, which I believe are important in terms of how we organize people, how we organize the work around that. And I've taken, the topic of the talk is agile management 3.0, holacracy, what next? Some of you might be familiar with management 3.0, some of you might be familiar with holacracy, and I'll introduce these subjects just so that we have the right context. So, and this is what we are going to discuss today morning here. Now we'll start, I just want to have a very short filter that I want to apply for the context of my talk here on agile manifesto, go to 3.0, talk a bit about holacracy, talk a little bit about lattice, and lattice is a very interesting concept, which I personally find very well aligned to how some of the organizations of the future could actually look like. There is a new movement that's been around for the last few years, and the best hashtag for that is no manager. Now that's a movement that really seeks to eliminate the entire middle management and really puts the top execs in touch with the people in the trenches to make sure that the work gets done most effectively, most efficiently there. We'll analyze some of these stories and understand what does it really mean. And finally let's try and pontificate a bit on what next, what does it really mean, where is it all going to lead us to. So let's try and look at that. So let's break something today and starting with some mental models. I think that's the best thing we should be breaking, right? Does anyone know what are these? I think we all know these are pyramids, right? Majestic, huge things, why were they built? Why did they build pyramids? Any suggestions to keep people safe? To keep mummy safe. Well, I like to put it this way, to preserve the dead, right? I mean, as simple as that, they actually build the pyramids to preserve the dead. Now, very interestingly, the shape of pyramid resembles something else, something that we are more very closely aware of, we can relate to it on a day-on-day basis, right? So my question now is, do we know why were hierarchies built? Why did we really build hierarchies? What was the reason why we felt the hierarchies were important there? And if we go back into the reasons why hierarchies were built, we'll have to go about 100 years back in time. And one of the things that we can talk about, I hope it's visible, I've tried to play around with the colors a bit, so I hope it's visible in the back seats there. Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, he was at the Bethelam Steel and he did a lot of work in the start of the 20th century, and he wrote this book on the principles of scientific management that has become the de facto Bible for the entire manufacturing industry for the last 60, 70 years. And one of the things that he said actually in front of a congressional committee was, I can say without the slightest hesitation, that the science of handling pig iron, so he actually studied a lot of how people were working in the pig iron plants, how were they getting motivated, what was the best way, because apparently before Frederick Taylor's time, it was a very haphazard management. There was no scientific basis to that. So he did a bunch of these time and motion studies. He actually very carefully tabulated all the time periods and came up with the fact, how can you get the maximum efficiency out of people? And one of the things that he says about that is that the man who is physically able to handle pig iron and is sufficiently flagmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig iron. Now you can imagine where did the discrimination of a manager and the worker start, right? A few years before that, one of the other luminaries in organization behavior, a gentleman of name Henry Fayol, was doing very similar kind of things in France. He was actually analyzing people in the French coal mines and he was trying to understand what is the ways in which the operations in a coal mine would be more successful. And he was also coming up with very similar kind of data points. So what we started to see was a very clear demarcation that there was this dirty heavy lifting work that some people had to be flagmatic fair enough but stupid to choose that as an occupation. And then there was this elite class of people who would typically sit in a corner office and they were really entitled to basically call the shots, right? And this is what really started happening there. So with that kind of a thing, and if we fast forward to 100 years, one of the companies I used to work for and the innocent shall go unnamed, the CEO of that company, it's a few billion dollar company, used to call all of us as this name. His emails used to typically start with this, all managers and overheads. I mean it could not probably get any more insulting than that, right? But that's the reality. We actually ended up creating over a period of time. So what started as a very innocuous observation by Taylor 100 years back that the people who are doing the grunt work and the people who are doing the intelligent work, there has to be a distinction between their abilities, motivation, skills and so on, has over a period of time it became a religion that we actually started creating a hierarchy of people and it literally was that we created so much of overheads in the system around that. Now when I think of the hierarchy, the way I look at hierarchy is they all look pretty shabby, they all look pretty bad there. And my question always is, can't they look a bit less hierarchical? Can't they look a bit more simpler, functional and even a bit more beautiful? I don't know if you have seen this but one of the org charts which has recently been doing rounds on the internet is an org chart of the New York and Erie Railroad back in 1855. And it's probably a very beautiful piece of work actually. One of the things that you will see in this is that it looks a beautiful sapling actually that you have just planted there and you are talking about some of those roots that are spreading out and some of those stuff that's coming out of here. But the biggest problem was at that point in time that this gentleman who made this McCallum, he had a problem because he didn't know how to really do the tracking of the operations very well. So he had to build and he used the technology of telegraph at that point in time that monthly, weekly and even hourly updates on the train operations. 1855, he built this org chart which actually reflected the way work was done in the railroad and he was able to use it to get hourly updates and make sure the operations went on well there. It's supposedly known as the world's first modern org chart. I would call it as the finest as well. And Walt Disney Company that started in 1938 within five years of their operation they came up with an org chart of their own and the best part about that is that org chart reflects how the work was done. You don't really see hierarchy, you don't really see people embedded deeply buried under those hierarchies there. So we started I think on a right footing but then somewhere it got little complex, somewhere it got little ugly. We really didn't understand what was going on. I'm sure you're seeing some of these cartoons on the internet, right? How some of the companies have very territorial hierarchies and how politically charged environments in these companies are and they are literally, I mean, I hold none of these companies in disrespect but I think that's something which are some of the memes that make round on the internet there, right? Interesting thing, one of the company that actually has people shooting out of the hip to each other in the company. How can collaboration happen if there are silos within the company that are fighting with each other, right? So clearly the org charts at some point in time became a little ugly and they got even more uglier over a period of time and what used to happen was that there was a published org chart, there was a published org chart which was supposed to be how the work was expected to be done and then you had those org charts which were invisible. There were deep rivalries, relationships, favors, all the kind of things that actually make the work happen there. So what we are seeing is a situation where we have created a hierarchy to please the egos of people who sit and occupy those costly chairs but then the work really gets done in a dramatically different way, right? And I think the time has come for us to really understand what is really happening here. Is the hierarchy even working after all? Because the work doesn't seem to be getting done because of hierarchy, rather the work is getting done despite the hierarchy because of all these personal relationships that people have because of when I started working several years back, I won't tell when because that will tell my age, but I started working for government defense research and one of the senior scientists, he said, you know how the work gets done in the government? And I said, no sir, I don't know, I'm pretty new, this is the first job I'm holding here. And he said 90% of the work done in government happens because of relationship. And that was not just an eye opener, it was like pouring 10 liters of water on me, it was like I never thought, I said, well, I mean that's what I've been made to believe that the work gets done because everyone has a charter, everyone has a role, everyone has a job description and they're supposed to do that. He said, no, the work gets done because I like you and I will do it for you. And this was like several moves back, right? So is the hierarchy even working or is it some different kind of things working at play here? So let's try and understand some of that stuff there and I just want to go in the context of our conference and software development in Agile. So let's go back to where it all started. When I looked at the Agile manifesto many, many times, from the 12 principles, I found only two principles that really talk about people. The first one talks about individuals and the second one talks about teams. And the most interesting thing about Agile manifesto is they never talk about structure. There is no notion of what is a good structure, what's a bad structure, should it be flat hierarchy, should it be a manager, should there be five levers of manager, should it be... All it says are these two things, build projects around motivated individuals, give them the environment and the support they need and trust them to get the job done and the best architectures, requirements in the design emerge from self-organizing team. Doesn't really go beyond that in giving guidance on how do you really motivate individuals or how do you create self-organizing teams there, right? And the least of it all, it doesn't really talk about the structure or a hierarchy as the way we understand it. So the question then is who really killed the hierarchy because the original Agile doesn't really talk about that. So here's my take on that. It was Crumb that killed the manager, though it did not kill the management. I think that's an important distinction that we should know. It killed the role of a manager as traditionally command and control manager as we have seen from the times of Taylor and Henry Fayol, transforming into somebody who was really controlling things, directing people, and of course in the last 20 years sending a bunch of status reports every week. So it said, well, we don't really need a manager to do all this stuff there because the teams are self-organizing. The teams will be able to figure it out themselves. And then it went on democratizing project management, democratizing the whole notion of management so that the teams are able to rise up to the level where they can manage some of these things, right? And then it created a new nomenclature. It created a new notion of a servant leader who basically was known as a scrum master who was, in a sense, was a traditional manager without the authority that was vested in them, which was really the source of a lot of heartburn and frustration there. So if this is the kind of a thing when we took away the whole authority and really the work is supposed to be still done there, who does the work in the team there, right? So who does the management then? Now, if we see in a traditional project team we have seen the project manager and the team lead, whatever name we want to call it in different parts of the world. They have been taking care of that. And when it comes to an agile team, the expectation is that we are talking about a self-organizing team. There is a servant leader who is a facilitator and that management is not done by the servant leader, but it's done by the entire team, right? The scrum 101 basically. Now the question that I have to all of us is has that really happened or is it a promise hyped enough and oversold to everybody there? Do you believe that this is really happening that the scrum masters have really happened if anybody would like to just share any thoughts at this point in time? But if not, I think one of the simple tests would be to go on LinkedIn and really search for project manager jobs for the companies that claim that they are completely scrum shops. I don't think that has happened there. Do you believe that it has completely happened that we have done away with a lot of them? And I'm sure there are pockets where it's being done there. I do see some people saying that, no, it's not happening there, but I'll be humbly willing to accept if it's happening, because clearly they are doing something right there. I'm just reflecting on things here. So in response to some of these observations, one of the authors, Jurgen, he came up with the new book, his author of Agile Management 3.0, which came two years back. And one of the things that he says is that I believe that Agile Software Development has overlooked the importance of line management. If managers don't know what to do and what to expect in an Agile organization, how are they supposed to feel involved in the transition to Agile Software Development? What is the message of Agile here? If it's just we don't need managers, it's no wonder Agile transformations are obstructed all over the world. So that was the hypothesis with which Jurgen started working on it. And he came up with this whole thought process where he said, hey, management 1.0 was really all about hierarchies from the time of Frederick Winslow-Taylor and Henry Fayol and whatnot. And then he said the second generation of management 2.0 was really all about fads. And he calls Six Sigma and ISO and CMM and a lot of these things as the fads. We just tried to slap it on the structure that was already crumbling. And we somehow wanted to believe for the next 20 years that this thing will be the next silver bullet and they will really help us fix the management part in an Agile organization. And which didn't happen, right? I mean, most of these things were fads and they went away. And then he talks about the management 3.0 as something that he says is really all about handling the complexity part of that. So he brings the whole system of complexity theory in that. He puts a lot of stuff together in saying that management 3.0 and he has created a funny character that he calls as Marty. And he says Marty is really the management 3.0 which encapsulates these six activities that the managers must do in the management 3.0 world. Now, I have a little bit of text on that. I'll not go into in detail here. But what it essentially still does is it does not really do away with the notion of a manager. It does not really create a leaderless or a managerless hierarchy, if you will. If anything, it actually says this is how the managers should behave in an agile environment. And he said there are tons and tons of books written on agile engineering practices and so on but not a single book written on how the agile managers should behave. So that's his response to how it can be done. So this definitely is one step forward where we have tried to legitimize by saying that, hey, we are not against management. We are not against managers. And by the way, this is the fieldbook. You go and run with this. What will tell you actually as a manager, what are you supposed to do to be more effective in an agile organization? So this is one step. It's been around for about three years. I'm not sure if anybody has been able to completely go through that, but these are definitely interesting thought processes. The next one I want to talk about is holacracy. And holacracy has been gaining ground for the last five years. Brian Robertson, who was a management consultant, he runs holacracy.org. And by the way, holacracy is actually a registered trademark. So this is the time I'll introduce the registered trademark, but I'm going to use it as that. So you're free to use whatever way you want to use it, but if you actually have to use it in a commercial way, then you'll have to go and talk to those guys. Now they claim that holacracy is really a real-world tested social technology for purposeful organizations. So they have a bunch of things that they have. It radically changes how an organization is structured, how decisions are made, how power is distributed. That's where something that they are trying to do. So instead of creating distributed power centers, how can, I'm sorry, instead of creating centralized power centers, how can you distribute them so that people who have to take certain action, they have the right level of power along with their roles. It is not a leaderless organization. It's not a leaderless social system. It relies on leadership in some shape or form in a different title, but it does believe that there has to be a sense of leadership there. And the focus is on work, not on people. So this might come as a rather surprise or a shock to some people that, hey, there's not really people-centered kind of a thing. It's really more corporatized kind of a thing. Let's try and understand what it really is. So what the proponents of holacracy say that in the conventional organization, and we saw some org charts, right, how they really reflect the thing, they say they really have three org structures. They have three org charts. The one that is in peach color is the formal structure. That's what is really published on the websites, on the intranet that says, this is what is supposed to be the power lines, how people report to each other. The green one is how actually things are done. That's, sorry, what they call as the extent structure, right? So I may know Raja, but Raja doesn't really report to me, nor I report to Raja, but we are in a different group. But we have an equation that whenever I ask for a favor, Raja never says no to me, and whenever Raja has a favor to ask me, he's there to do that, right? So those are things which are how the work is really getting done. No org chart is going to talk about that. And finally, the requisite structure that says that is how the ideal structure should be, right? We probably don't want it to be very deep structure. We don't want a very wide span of control, and so on. So these are the three images of an org structure in the minds of people, most organizations. And what holacracy tries to do is it tries to create, superimpose all of them into one single thing. So what it should be like, what it is like, and what it is told to be like, they all look similar. And that's the way they basically do that. So they do it by basically dismantling the pyramid and creating instead of that some circles. And these circles are the ones which is basically how the work really gets done. And it has basically all the people in the circle who are all required to be there. Like I said, holacracy is actually not a leadership, not a leaderless social system. It actually requires certain element of leadership to be there. So there are link leaders and different type of terms they have for that. And what's really happening is, sorry, if you don't mind, can you hold on to that because there are even more provocative ways in which this question needs to be answered. So I'll come back to that in a moment if that's okay with you. Thanks. So what is holacracy? It comes from a Greek word, holon, which actually means that you are a whole and a part as well. It doesn't mean that you are always a part or you are a whole. You could be really changing it. It's like you have to really see from a flexibility part of that. All at the same time. There are no work titles, only roles. So everybody has only roles based on what helps that you bring the best product to the table. So this is how you start looking at holacracy and then you say, okay, what is it based on? It's really based on only one single thing, whatever invigorates you, whatever really brings you to life, whatever you really want to do, whatever you signed up to do when you said, okay, I'm going to work at this place. And everyone is a stakeholder and they are able to invest in the same way they are personally most efficient. So it's really taking away from the notion that work is being assigned from somebody at the top, but people are subscribing. It's exactly like you subscribe to. You opt in to certain mailing lists. You subscribe to certain work groups on the internet and you say, okay, I really love their defenses or I might take the role of a sponsor or I might take the role of a mentee or a learner there. And I think the people who are so flexible that they are able to basically have the humility to learn at any stage of their lives and careers will probably be able to succeed much longer there. So these are three things that I definitely cull out from all the study that I did as a part of this and what I'm seeing in the workplace as well. There's a bunch of things here. Well, my laptop has frozen, so I think it's a time for me to stop now. But these were the things I wanted to share here, which are basically my own learnings and perspectives and readings on how I see things happening there. Thanks for listening, but if there are any questions, I'll be happy to take them. Thank you. So I'll give you one case study how they do it in wall. In wall software, it's a peer appraisal system. Everybody appraises everybody and that's how they decide the bonus. And sometimes the bonus have been known to be 10 times their base salary, but that's how they actually do that. So there are examples. I have actually the next page that didn't open. I have like 40 links. If you are interested, you can follow the links. There are a lot of answers to that from these companies. So the question is it might work in... So I have a question. I mean, with no disrespect, I have a question to service industry. Why do we need managers? I don't think the kind of people we are hiring are any less than the kind of people we are hiring for the product companies. We are just giving them a different name. We are just putting them in a different organizational boundary and telling them thou shall behave that way, right? DNA-wise, education-wise, competency-wise, there's nothing to differentiate them to be... that they deserve to be under adult supervision. I would say get rid of those managers and see what happens. Try an experiment and see how that goes. I don't know about service industries, how that is done there, but I can tell about one case study which we have never published, the company I work for. It's actually a BPO company. I mean, we have a big BPO arm and one group in our centers has actually tried that and it was very successful. We have never published those results, but I know from internal sources that in a call center, if you can actually run something in a managerless situation, that's a big deal, right? So at least I know one data point in my company which has been done, but I would not be able to comment on that because it's not in the public domain, the study results at least. In organizations like Gore and Valve, if you are able to get your work self-assigned the way you just described, how does hiring happen? What are you hired for? So in Valve, for example, the hiring decision, they say that it can happen as much as you and I talk and say, hey, I think I need a designer. And you agree with me and say, yeah, I think that project needs a designer. And that's how they do that. They actually do that. Yeah, but then if the designer joins and says, okay, actually I joined for design, but I don't want to design. Yeah, so, I mean, see, they will explain. See, again, I'm not saying that it's going to be slam-dunk. This is something which is a radically different way of doing it. I think the problem that people are... So let's not stretch the problem more than what they need to be. We are believing that we are hiring the people the most... the people who want to really make a difference there. Why would you want to join a company like Wall Software which gives you so much of empowerment because you have a certain skill set. And then just for the sake of saying, okay, I don't want to do design. In theory, that's possible. But in practice, I'm sure that system has worked for them for the last 15 years that they are able to eliminate those patterns that say, hey, this guy doesn't seem like the guy is here for the real job, right? So there's no interview process. In fact, hiring is the most important thing to do there, actually. But I mean, I don't have any first-hand knowledge to say that. I've only read from the net, but I believe that that's how they are able to do that. I mean, they are a 400-people company. So they have been able to hire people, and they are like a $2 or $4 billion company. Clearly, they have patterns that have made them successful, right? So, sorry, I don't have any data points, but I would like to believe that it's working from them. Otherwise, they would have abandoned this long back. Okay. I think difficult to put a timeline around it. I don't think I know enough to comment on that. But I think there are enough success stories available that if you have to start something of your own tomorrow, if you are an entrepreneur and you want to set up a new organization, I think there is enough case study available to get it going there. So I would say that, and to be honest, I would not worry about it. Frederick Winslow's, Taylor's ideas are 100-year-old. There are still organizations practicing that, right? So in all fairness, there will be a long tail of change. We will still continue to see some of the remnants of the old way of doing things. And some of the people who want to try out with the new stuff will always do it all the time. So I don't think there's a one single point answer, but I would say that if you have an opportunity to change it, change it in your team and try it out and see how it goes. These are very small examples, honestly. So I don't want to give you a number because I don't have a basis for giving you a number. But I believe that if I were to start a company tomorrow, I would be majorly influenced by a lot of this stuff there and I would want to start it with those basics. I don't think any of these companies is using the psychometric profiles to basically look at that. And for that matter, even the traditional companies are not using any psychometric tests or indicators to do that. I think we human beings forget one thing that, with all due respect to MBTI and other ones, I think we have an innate ability to judge people. When we talk to them, when we break bread with them, when we sit down and have eight series of, eight round of conversations with them, I think let's give credit to the people who will be able to figure out who's the right cultural fit for them. I think it goes back to Dave's earlier session today. These are unknown knowns. We have this hardwired in our DNA. 200,000 years of socializing has given us the ability to do that. And some of us may not be able to explain why we did that, but I'm sure these companies have been, I've taken only the successful examples here. So clearly they have been able to demonstrate certain patterns that they have been able to repeatedly build upon. So I would give them benefit if the numbers speak better than opinions, right? So question related to the question that was asked earlier, right? Scaling it up when you are working in a services organization, right? This model, the way it works, LATAS, etc., and also the way you're hiring people. Predominantly in service industry, you see a lot of fresh graduates coming in and then they growing up the ladder. This would work. This model would typically work for people who understand and use the freedom that is provided to them and direct it in the right, and put it in the right direction, right? But typically what I've seen is as you grow, people tend to, if there's no supervision, no direction, people tend to misuse it a lot. I would again, I would want, with all due regards, I would like to challenge that notion there. How many data points do we actually have where we have given that level of freedom to the people and we have seen them abuse that freedom and trust? I think we always give people less credit than they deserve. I mean, look at children, school children. Many times we believe that we have to really watch out for them and really do that, but you give the kids a chance to self-organize something and they come with fabulous things there. We don't have to do all the time there. I would say I would want to make an error of judgment by believing people more than rather believing people less because people might surprise you for all you know by actually, when you give them that opportunity to do that. So I would say that companies that have employed 200,000 people actually have a more business to try these experiments and see how it works for them. For all we know, these might actually sow the seeds for some changes that will make them survive five years down the line there. Because the way I see the current model, I think the current model is only adding people on the top of it and creating more deeper hierarchies that really are, to be honest, meaningless hierarchies. I personally don't know why five people of managers are needed to basically run a team of five people actually. I think those five people should be fired and their salaries should be given to those five people. You will see a different level of motivation on the floor. Okay, thanks a lot. I think I'm running into another speaker's time. Thanks for being here.