 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Leading the Remote AF Enterprise. Thanks, Andrew, for joining us. Over to you, Andrew. Thank you very much, Shadeep. And also thank you to Naresh and the entire Agile India 2020 team who've made this really easy. I'm loving this platform. It's really good fun navigating around. I'm really looking forward to seeing where platforms like this go in the next 12 months because I think we're going to see some really cool innovation in that space. Hi to everyone who's out there. I can't see you, but hopefully we'll be able to do some Q&A and I'll be able to see your faces towards the end of this talk. I just want to draw your attention quickly to, on the left-hand side of the screen, the second-last link that says Handouts. If you wanted to grab a copy of the slides to take notes while I'm presenting, you can grab a PDF in there. There's also an image in there which is, we'll do a future spective together at the end of this talk. If you want to take that and use it in your organization or with your teams, then just grab that as well. That's in the handout section on the bottom left-hand side of your screen. I'm going to start presenting now. Just bear with me two seconds. What I'll ask you to do, if you have any questions, in the discussions panel on the right-hand side, put your Q&A in there and I'll try and answer those questions and then hopefully we can do a little bit of sort of panel-style Q&A at the end of the talk if I get through things quickly. What I'll do, I'm very aware of how much fun it is to listen to someone on a VC call. I'm going to try and get through this content as quickly as possible. We'll do an interactive exercise together and then hopefully we can have a chat. I'm just going to present my screen now. Today, what I'm going to be speaking about is Remote AF or the Remote Agility Framework. This is a framework that we've created. We kicked the program off in February. We launched a mission team. We were very aware of the fact that to give you a bit of an intro, I'm a founder of a consultancy called Elaborate in Australia. We've got about 100 people and it was a pretty stressful time for us looking at the numbers coming out of the pandemic and thinking about how do we adapt to that as a consultancy. One of the things that we thought would be really useful to the community was to take some of the ideas that we've got from 10 years of working as an organisation and 20 years as individuals with Agile in distributed and remote and sort of hybrid organisations and bring those together into something that people can use to help them navigate a new world. The origins of this are probably at an Agile Australia event back in 2018 where Simon Woodley and Dave Snowden spoke on strategy. We had Simon talking about Woodley Mapping and Dave talking about Apex Predator Theory and Kinefen. That kind of helped us to understand that when you have a big shift like the pandemic, it has a tendency to accelerate things. The reason for that is basically you have all this capital that gets poured into a problem space. We've got financial capital. We've got lots of money being spent on things like Zoom and money flowing in from the stock market to remote solutions. We've also got this massive intellectual capital shift. People are teaching their kids to learn remotely. Teachers are teaching remotely. Older adults are learning how to work remotely and because of that something like remote working which was probably previously considered a bit heresy and something that you would not really be able to do in a lot of organizations of any scale, that suddenly becomes something that's more mainstream than it ever has been before. What we're trying to do with this framework is provide the basis for organizations that are embracing Agility to do it in a really effective way for the remote context. I'm going to go through five steps in this presentation. First of all, I'll talk about why we're doing this. I'm going to give you a very brief framework intro. The third thing I'm going to talk about is leading the remote enterprise. I'm going to go through a series of tools and patterns and things that are in Remote AF that help people to lead in the remote context. Then I'm going to get you to do an exercise with me. We're going to do a workplace future perspective where we try and reimagine what work might look like in the future. That's an exercise that you can take with you, as I said earlier, and try with your teams. Finally, we'll do some Q&A. Without any further ado, let's talk about why remote is something that we think is going to be really great. First and foremost, there are a range of benefits that you can unlock with remote working. We know that you get reduced emissions from transport-related emissions. That would not be more pertinent than somewhere like India where there's so much traffic on the roads over there. Last summer I was in Bangalore. I was just shocked at how much people movement there is in that city in Bengaluru. The story I like to tell here is Kathmandu. There was a photo taken from Kathmandu earlier in the year when people were locked down because of the pandemic. For the first time in living memory, you could see Mount Everest from that city, just because the smog had cleared and the environment was a lot clearer. We've also got the opportunity to reduce urban sprawl. Cities are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and taking out agricultural lands on the outer rings of cities. We can reduce office waste. We've got a bunch of social benefits that we can unlock. I'm in a regional community in Australia. We're already seeing massive renewal in our community. We're seeing parents out with their kids. My three-hour daily commute is now five minutes out to my shed. A lot of people are really enjoying being around their communities and getting to contribute to sporting clubs and things like scouts and community things. The regions are renewing. We've got more vibrant communities. For countries like India and also the more third-world countries in the world, in Africa and those kind of places, we've got the opportunity to reduce the brain drain. You don't have to live in Silicon Valley to work in Silicon Valley remotely. The more that we can get this thing working, the better social impacts it's going to be. We'll have the best and brightest staying in their communities, spending in their communities and growing their communities. Finally, we've got the commercial benefits. Depending on where you are in Australia, we're talking about $5,000 to $20,000 per head to have corporate office. There's a reduced cost. Remote-first organisations have always had advantages in terms of access to talent. The borders disappear. You can engage the best and brightest from anywhere in the country or the world. We're also seeing a lot of evidence of higher engagement in those organisations. There's all these benefits to remote working if we can make it effective and sustainable. We've also got these challenges. First and foremost, we've got to make sure that by virtue of moving people into their homes, organisations don't forget that they're responsible for sustainability for their employees. We've got a lot of really energy efficient buildings in Australia. Some households aren't as energy efficient. We've got to make sure that we don't just shift the responsibility for environmental sustainability off the corporate balance sheet and onto the personal balance sheet. We've got some social challenges in Australia and in a lot of the western world. We've seen a rising family and domestic violence. We've got a lot of people in rental environments or in places with low internet connectivity or just not great spaces to work. Like a lot of the people I've been talking to in Southeast Asia, they just simply don't have space in their homes for a desktop. The final one there is cultural norms. Depending on where you're from and what your gender is, there's different expectations on you in the household. It's really important that we make sure that we recognise that not everyone has the same responsibilities at home and that we work around that a little bit. Finally, from a leadership perspective, I speak to a lot of leaders who are talking about that loss of visibility, the loss of control, the loss of the water cooler conversations, the decay of the informal networks that they use as a sensing mechanism. We're also seeing a lot of people that have been managed by people that just sit on their shoulders. They've got that real learned healthlessness thing where they're waiting for someone to tell them what to do and no one's there to do it. I suppose what we're saying with Remote AF is we want to get the stuff on the top. The stuff on the top is amazing, but in order to do that, we need to make sure that the framework caters for the challenges on the bottom. I'll talk through a little bit how we tackle those. The second primary reason why we'd like to go remote is that you've got an opportunity to design your work around your life rather than designing your life around your work. This picture was taken in Lake Centrants. I'm not there at the moment, but that's on the east coast of Victoria, the state where I live. I could conceivably be working somewhere like that at least once a month or even more. When I was last in India, I visited Kerala. I love the beaches down there. There's lots of places that are far better to live than big cities. This is a great opportunity for us to really redesign how we want our lives to be as we embrace remote working. I'm going to give you a very brief framework intro. If you want to talk about this in more detail, I'll hang around. I'll go into one of the VIP rooms afterwards, but you can also visit the website, www.remoteaf.co, and you can register your interest there or hit me up on Twitter. My handle is AJ Blaine, or the Remote AF, which is just Remote AF Twitter. Lots of ways to get in touch, so just reach out and we'll spend some time with you if you've got some things that you're interested in learning about. This is the... I suppose the... We call this the crop circles diagram, but it's the high-level framework overview. It shows you what's in here, and I'll probably go right to left here because it's just easier for me. We start at the team layer. Over the last decade at Elaborate, we've... Look, I've done a lot of work trying to understand Kinefin and complexity and systems theory and systems thinking. I suppose at a team level, what things boil down to is that there is a lot of... The context and the nature of the work makes a big difference to how you organise to work. Where we landed is that there's three core team archetypes. We've got operations teams. Many of us would have worked in an operations team at some point. This is not IT operations. It could be finance operations, people operations, marketing operations. It could be a tech ops or an order handling operations teams. They're the teams that are the custodians for the revenue of the organisation. They need to make sure that customer requests are fulfilled promptly, that we invoice, that we build, that cash is coming in and that we're running the business effectively. The nature of the work in operations teams is vastly different to the nature of work in what we call product teams. So these could be DevOps teams in technology. They could be teams that are introducing change. They could be teams that are doing regulatory programs. But these are the teams in the organisation that are trying to understand where the organisation has to go, be it an initiative or a change or a new product, and they're working to implement that change into the organisation. So for an operations team, a lot of the work is just unplanned. The demand is flowing in constantly. It might be spiky. It might be seasonal. For a product team, you've normally got a relatively good plan of where you want to be going. And because of that, the how we organise, how we work, the kind of things that we want to measure, the tools and the patterns that we use are necessarily different. The final team type here and the remote AF team, which we launched in February is one of these, it's a mission team. So it's a team that's working to strategy. They're independent. They've been given a mission and they're told to go and autonomously solve that. And the reason we draw the distinction there is it's really important that mission teams are unstructured, that they're led differently, that they're funded differently, all that sort of thing. So what we have is three core archetypes and then we've got basically guidance on how you do planning for each of the three team archetypes, how you review, how you reflect. We've got a really nice pattern for launching teams and a pattern for health checks. In the centre of the diagram, then we've got a team of teams. So this is General Stan McChrystal's concept. It's basically a team containing many teams, that fractal concept. Teams of teams, I suppose, contain direction and they look at what a group of teams should be doing in order to achieve largest slices of value for an organisation. And here are the patterns that we have. We have an all-hands planning pattern, which is basically how do you take strategy or a big programme of work or an initiative and break that out in a virtual setting with remote teams. We've got a virtual abeyer, which is designed to basically visualise all the information that's necessary to effectively lead and participate in that team of teams. Finally, we've got a pattern for reviewing how our progress against our plan. And the two down the bottom there, we've got an approach for how you design the teams that are in the team of teams. So it's kind of what teams do I need to execute the objective that I've been given. And we've also got a programme or team of teams launch pattern, which is how do you take a range of teams and set them up for success. Finally, we've got patterns at the enterprise layer. So we've got an approach to strategy. Again, we've got a virtual abeyer. An abeyer room is, I'll talk about that in a little bit, a little bit down the track, but it's basically a visualisation of critical information for decision making. We've got an approach to scoring the strategy and how we're going against it so that we can make interventions. And then we've got a few things down the bottom there. So first and foremost, you can't just take your existing operating model, move into a remote or a hybrid environment and pretend that it's going to work. You can't lift and shift someone else's operating model. There's a lot of organisations that are taking the Spotify model, which isn't a model and rolling it out in their organisation at the moment. That doesn't work. So this is an approach for designing a fit for context operating model that respects the constraints that your organisation has. We've got a pattern for remote governance. There's a lot less visibility of the physical work in remote and hybrid organisations. So we need to make sure that governance, that we govern the system effectively. And finally, the area that I'll be focusing on today, patterns for leading remote enterprises. So you can kind of see there's a whole lot there. We've designed the framework as something that sort of, it's not meant to replace agile frameworks. It's meant to be a remote layer that sits on top of agile frameworks. And the other thing is meant to be modular. So if all you need to do is plan with a bunch of teams how you're going to solve an objective, you can just pick up the all hands planning module. If you just want to design a remote or hybrid friendly operating model, you pick up the operating model design pattern. And basically the way that we're rolling this out is that there's range of training courses. We've got a bunch of guides who are going through an early adopter programme at the moment. One of those is Manoj Khanna, who's servicing the Indian region. So yeah, if anyone's keen to talk to Manoj about what his plans are, I can make that intro as well. All right. So now let's get into the meat of this presentation, which is leading the remote enterprise. I'm going to anchor this around a very simplified version of Wilbur's all quadrants, all levels, the integral framework. Basically what Ken talks about is that you have four dimensions and that people tend to focus on the bottom right here rather than focusing on all the things that you need to improve leadership in an organisation. So first and foremost, you need to be able to lead yourself. You need to be able to recognise the patterns that are holding you back as a leader. And you need to be able to actively disrupt those patterns when they're getting you into trouble. Secondly, you need to be able to lead your team so you need to show up as a leader, be effective, have the hard conversations, create an environment where people flourish that's contextually appropriate to the problem that they're trying to solve. You need to lead together as a team so you need clarity, consistency of message. You need to be able to argue as a leadership team and forge a direction that you all agree on. And then you need to hold in behind that direction and really commit to it and be accountable to what you've said you're going to achieve. And finally, we've got the idea of leading the system. So this is how we work, what our operating cadences are, what our hierarchy looks like, who reports to who, how we measure things, KPIs, system measurements, all that sort of thing. And what we're finding, speaking to a lot of leaders, is that there's an awful lot of fatigue in the leadership community. A lot of people are finding that they don't have the tools to do some of the harder parts of leadership, and that's what we've tried to solve here. So I'll walk you through some of those. Leading yourself, now, what I will point out is that there's not much that we can do with a framework that's going to be better than some of the really great tools that are out there for helping you to understand other people's perspectives on you and work out how you're going to adjust your behavior over time or kind of work through becoming a better leader. I recommend the leadership circle, which is Bob Anderson's tool. It's a fantastic tool for getting feedback from your team that's actionable. What we do do in remote AF is give people a lot of guidance around personal productivity. So how do you set your home up? How do you get your ergonomics right? How do you build really good habits so that you're doing time and task management well? How do you keep yourself in an engaged and fit and well state, those sort of things. And we've also got the idea of these StoryMe cards, which are a little bit of a window into people to make onboarding easier and also to sort of reveal to people a little bit about yourself. So this is my StoryMe card. As you can see, if you didn't know anything about me, and this is really critical in teams. I've worked with a lot of distributed teams in India, in China, in the UK, in the US. And in the Philippines. What you don't tend to know is you don't really get a window into who your teammates are. So what we're trying to do here is just give people something that they can reveal as much or as little about themselves as they'd like to. And it enables you to kind of go, where do I want to have a conversation here? So for me, I live in the Macedon Ranges. I've got my wife, Nis, my two kids, Jasper and Evie, and my beautiful Kelpie, Nelly. On the right-hand side at the top, you can see what I do at work. Bottom left, I am a winemaker. So I've got a little winery down the road, and we buy about 20 ton of grape in and make some really nice Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. And then there's a little exercise in the bottom right, which comes out of Robert Keegan and Lisa Lay, his book, An Every One Culture, which is kind of getting leaders to show people that they're working on stuff as well. So I can rely on myself for strategy. I can rely on myself for optimism. I can rely on myself learning things quickly. But I need to work on making sure I stay focused, so not chasing squirrels. Optimism can be as much an advantage as a disadvantage as a leader and also need to watch out for inconsistent energy levels. I can go at a million miles an hour, but then I can fall in a heap if I'm not really monitoring how I'm managing my energy. So you can kind of see how this is something that allows people a window into their leader and also starts to create that environment where their vulnerability is okay. And people can see that work is not a place where you have to be perfect. You shouldn't have to hide your flaws. You should be open about your flaws so that other people can help you work on them. So the second part of Wilbur's model is leading teams. What we're going to talk about here is basically how do you take what you're intending to achieve and make sure that that gets down to the teams? Remote teams are really effective if they've got bounded autonomy. So teams that were already doing agile had control of their backlog or working through things. They moved into remote working relatively easily. It's the teams that get their work handed to them, get sat on their shoulders and that kind of thing that really struggle. So in remote AF we've built a whole bunch of stuff to enable you to take strategy into planning and then down into the teams so that the teams can work out what actions they're going to do. And we've also built a range of metrics, advice based on probably the last five years we've been working on this stuff. So how do you observe the system effectively from a data perspective so you can see the flow of work through the system? And then as a leader, you don't have to sit on people's shoulders. You know where the place that you need to intervene, the place in the system where you need to interrogate is, which is a very different way to look at a system. So these MIRO boards, which were basically built up but they'll work in any digital whiteboard tools are basically things that help you to do that as a leader. So you can articulate the long term and more visionary aspects of your strategy. You can explore where you are and what movement there is in the system that you need to be aware of. You can define your long term strategic planks. So the things that they challenge the possible, they should be really hard to achieve. And then you use OKRs to take those down into things that can go into the teams and then come back up in a bi-directional fashion so you get the back brief that shows that people understand and are committed to be going where you're going. We also have... I'll show this quickly. What you can see here is a bunch of teams across a 70 or 80 person program who are taking a telecoms, a large telecoms transformation program and using the all hands planning pattern in remote AF to bring things into a group plan. So similar to big room planning but conducted remotely, it's a really good way to get everyone aligned and make sure that you understand as a leader what's happening, where the constraints are, that kind of thing. We've got leadership team, launch canvases. It's a process for launching or relaunching your leadership team in the remote context, thinking about how you're performing as a team, what demands are on you, how decisions are going to be delegated, how you measure performance, going through a process of building a team alliance and working out what behaviors you're going to accept, looking at when you want to work, when you want to get together and also how we're going to communicate with ourselves and with the broader business. So this is a pattern for launching or relaunching the team, which is, I forgot to mention, we're in Wilbur's leading together quadrant now. So this is the leadership team working together. We've also got the virtual abaya. An abaya room is something that we use profusely as part of the engagements that we do as a consultancy. It's a room where you have all the information that's necessary to make great decisions. So the virtual abaya in remote AF, I'll show you some of the patterns that live underneath. We've kind of got data, the key data pieces that we need. We've got connection to strategy. We've got connection to plans. We've also got team agreements and story, me story us cards to kind of hook everything together and make it really easy for people to see what's happening, where things are and where things are going. There are some really good tools out there that support this. We're really liking where a lot of the existing tools are going as they're getting investment and really pushing into this remote future. Finally, we've got leading the system. So I won't go into this in great detail. As I said, you can come and have a chat to us and we'll show you around. But the core thing here is making sure that you sit down and work out, all right, I've got all these new constraints. I can't do the things that I used to do. So how am I going to design my operating model, my operating cadences, governance, leadership, all those things? How am I going to design them differently so that I can make the most of this new situation? And that's the operating model design and the remote governance patterns. So yeah, you can start to see how from a leadership perspective if you're leading an organization that's remote or hybrid or planning on being remote or planning to go hybrid, there's a whole range of stuff in the framework that'll help you with those problems. What I wanted to do now though, is show you a little tool that we like to do before we do operating model design. And this is a workplace future-spective. So it's basically something that you can do to think about where you want to go. The basis of this is the futures cone or the cone of possibilities, which was work of Herman Minkowski. He was one of Einstein's teachers. It was introduced to us by Eladad Hamedi via Jay Bloom, who I think presented on this at DevOps conference a few years back. Basically, humans can get a little bit stuck when they're trying to think about possible futures. We kind of get locked into what's immediately visible to us. So the future-spective is designed to try and take you out of that constrained thinking and get you to think a little bit more into the future. What I'm going to do, I will stop this presentation now, and I'm going to pop into the discuss on the right-hand side, a link. I'd like you, if you can, to jump into the Miro board. So this is in the audience public section of discussions on the right-hand side. You'll see the Miro board and the password is remote colon AF to that board. And I'll bring the board up. Good. We're starting to see some people appear here. I'll just bring you all to me. So as I said, this is something that you can take from this talk and you can use with your teams. I'm going to go through it very quickly. The instructions are pretty clear. So you should be able to take this and run with it. I'll just give it a couple more minutes to make sure that we've got everyone. You can see that now. So if we move in, how do we run this? So the problem statement for this exercise is how do we make the best of now and then purposely evolve towards a more productive, flexible, engaging, sustainable and equitable approach to work? I'm going to bring everyone in to the current state. And for those who have joined us in the Miro board, I'll bring you to me. What I'd like you to do is on the left-hand side of the Miro board, you should be able to pull some sticky notes in. I'd like you to think about your current state. Use a green sticky note for something that you're really liking about your current situation. Use a pink sticky note for something that you're not liking about your current situation and kind of think about these eight lenses. So what's life like at home? What's life like at work? In your community? Your personal wellbeing? Equitability? Safety and sustainability? And risk? That's the eighth one. Black monotonous, I like that. So we don't need to spend a whole lot of time on this, but you can see how you can start to get some really good insights into how the current state is, which is really important. So if you're a leader and you're seeing people say things like monotonous and stuck and that kind of thing, risk of getting COVID-19, it's an opportunity to really empathise with people and try and understand how you can create an environment that's better for them. The worst thing that you can do in remote working is take all the things that you used to do in your physical workspace that were designed around the constraints of being in a building, having a set of rooms that you can use, having floor space in a certain configuration, and just roll that stuff into the remote environment. Meetings need to change. You need to rethink the way that you do things with remote at the heart of it. So if we then scroll over, I'm going to bring you across, what you then do with your teams is ask them to project forward. So basically say, if nothing changed about the current situation, so if we did nothing, what mess do you think we'll get in? So what problems do you foresee? And you can challenge them with a few questions around the edges there as they fill things in. So I'll get you to start bringing in some sticky notes now. But as people are doing that, you might challenge them as a leader or a facilitator by saying, is the mess stable? Will it improve? Will it get worse? Are any of these problems related to each other? How are they related? Why are they related? You might also start thinking about more of a larger systems view. So are there powerful external agents acting on the system? We're already starting to see in some places that there's a big push for people to return to the city. The reason for that is there is a lot of money tied up in corporate real estate and in retail in the city and that kind of thing. So we will see as things start to move forward that there will be a big push to get people back into town, into the city. Great. All right. So once you've done that, we then ask people to take the shackles off. And we ask them to move out to the outer edge of this exercise and just say, what would an ideal future look like? So if we just got rid of all the constraints, if we just said, let's do this differently and build a workplace that is perfectly suited to where we want to go, whether that's fully remote, whether that's hybrid remote or something in the middle, what might that look like? Again, I'll get you to bring some things in there, but it might be something like, I'd like to be at work one to two days a week. I'd like to live somewhere a bit further out of the city closer to my family or closer to my hobbies or something like that. I'd like to make sure that we are subsidizing our employees or paying for them to have ergonomically safe work tops. I'd like to have a series of hubs. So maybe not a big corporate office. Maybe it's a series of hubs that are closer to regions, that kind of thing. So whoever's put that water cooler chats in, I'll move that out to, we're just in the purple circle now. Good, I think everyone's getting the hang of this. So then finally, we then ask people to go, all right, well, between that ideal future and where we are now, there's a more plausible future. So how about we start to look at what's plausible in our context and then look at what interventions we're going to need to make in order to take us closer to that ideal future. So you can kind of see how the exercise focuses you in on the now, makes you cast forward to see the issues with not acting, then resets you to think about something that's ideal and utopian before bringing you back to something between current state and reality. And through this, you can have some really good conversations about the kind of workplace that you want to create and what that's going to take. You can do this at a team level, at a group level or at an organizational level. So we'll close that off now. As I said, if with your own organization, you can go into the handout section and you'll find a copy of it to chuck in your own digital whiteboard, whether that's Miro or Mural or Atlassian or Google or whatever you're using. You can hit me up on Twitter, A.J. Blaine. You can find me on LinkedIn. You can visit the website and make contact with us via that means. So plenty of ways to get in touch. Always happy to talk about this and talk about how we can make this work in the future.