 We could probably start there because the first few couple minutes is quite informal so It's a picture here. It's not very Uncommon unusual picture, right? It's a bunch of aunts trying to bridge a gap between Two lifts and funny thing then is that doesn't seem to be a ant manager You say look I have an idea Let's hold on to each other's legs and heads and make a bridge even though this ant leader here Seems to be like a manager, but I'm sure he doesn't have a title called ant manager Which brings us to our today's topic, which is the self-organizing teams and in a moment I'm going to ask to do a very quick survey and before that Let me take 20 seconds to explain what I mean by self-organizing in this context It not only means just flat structure, but also no job title Radical transparency Everyone is decision maker no manager also making finance and purchase decisions even including hiring and firing So that's not a low bar. This is quite high bar, right? So just for that. This is the context of through which we're going to talk in Today's talk. So can I ask everyone can I ask those to stand up if you have heard the term Self-organizing before today if I heard that could you stand up? Yeah, thank you. Thank you Yeah, as you can see, there's a little trick to pretty much get everybody stand up Especially after lunch and trying to keep people people awake. So thank you for doing that now No, keep standing keep standing keep standing. It's all right. Keep standing if you have ever worked in an organization That has had at least one team that is self-organizing. Otherwise, take a sit Just one team. So if you work in an organization that has at least one team that is Self self-organizing. Otherwise, take a sit. You have so you have yeah, all right So quite a lot sitting down here now the third question keep standing if you have actually Participated in a team that is self-organizing so that you have hands-on experience. Otherwise take a sit Quite a few still standing also now last question keep standing if you have personally Transformed a team from a normal team to a self-organizing team. Otherwise, take a sit Wow, awesome. Probably you should do this talk over here now Definitely great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for taking the participation. Yes So this is now officially starting already so please start recording. Thank you I didn't know there wasn't recording So Yeah, but definitely in the right audience. Thanks for that. And what does that mean, right? So if we look at the whole Research at Gulab research, which is a very well known research organization that has done over 30 years of research over 30 Million of employees that found that only 13 percent of employees are engaged which also means 87 percent of that is disengaged in the workplace and among the 87 percent over here 16 percent of them is not just the usual slackers. They are the ones who don't settle They are the ones who go out of way to make sure the business hurt They're the ones that you heard from the newspaper like, you know, this one is stealing the data that one is upsetting customer Now what does that mean to the business? It means a lot of loss The fact that it's up to 550 billion you're still up the year lost due to The disengagement and just put to put that in context Indians GDP average GDP from 1960 to 2017 average is Let me check my notes 545 billion sorry. Yes, 545 billion dollars and but that's not to say Last year for example 2017 Indians GDP has gone so much higher like I think a 2.3 trillion or something but the average is about the same So that that's kind of like the context we're putting in but at the same time for organizations who have higher engagement rate than the company's share Share market and trading is 147 percent higher. Now, you may still ask how does this rate it to me, right? This is the organization. I'm not owner. I'm not the boss. How do I care? This is why I bring in a picture of Team member had before Cynthia. I know there's a mask The only reason I do that is because you know, he doesn't feel comfortable showing the picture But if you look closely, it's there's an eye here. There's no idea There's definitely a real picture behind that and the reason I bring this up is that he His full name is sentio kuma kaskani. He used to work in India in a very well-known Organization starting with I which name I shall not name He is a excellent QA engineer he works very hard and The story kind of like shock me a bit and he goes to work very early Like six or seven clock and comes home quite late sometimes eight nine sometimes ten and he has to go through all the traffic Go through the metros and you know all this very very crowded Trains and public transport and get to work and get home and over is sweaty and etc It gets to the work and then spend whole day doing the work and even when he goes to Toilet and stuff like that he has to swap the cart so that the system knows how long you've been spending in total Etc. I don't know how prevalent and how true that story is But what he's telling me is but by the end of the day when he gets home He was so exhaustive both mentally because of the work as well as physically exhausted that he did not have time to even talk His wife or his son and on the second day has repeated again All right And so he has it's not very energizing in the in the way that he finally made a decision to try to Sort of like a micro to Australia and that's how I met him But again, I don't know how true the story that he is I choose to believe him and also how prevalent that is today to the rest of organizations of India But the reason I brought this up is yes Those numbers up here may be organization and business et cetera But it's more so to the happiness and welfare of the individual who works in the system And that brings us to the topic of today How a deeply troubled unit turned into a hard-to-form in true self-organizing team of teams because it not only has huge impact to the business but also has a profound impact to the today to the happiness of the Employees working single organization. I mean we just think about it right because Most of us like a majority of us spend majority of days and times at work in fact, or not at family and With a wife and husband and children, but I work and if the time you spend at work, it's not for thinning It's not like giving you the the purpose and giving energy then that's pretty shit like to leave part honestly So if we turn this around it would have a huge impact to everybody involved So some of you may may think they know it's just really possible, right? In a later section of this talk, I'm going to show you quite a lot of stats to show that yes It's absolutely true, but here's a sneak peek of a quote from a quote that I heard over and over again in multiple occasions by multiple people of the team and so if many people are saying that in different occasions then we must be doing something right and Yes Move this one. Oh, yeah, okay. Sure I thought I'm trying to get closer to the audience and then in the end stop your view So I probably just gonna stand here anyway. So yeah, he's a good great. Thanks So and you also probably think that is that really applicable across different cultures or not? Obviously this was done in Sydney But what about different cultures like in India and Asian cultures, right? So to answer that question my view is that cultures are made of people and if you look at the of the team That I was talking about is just take a quick look right. So this is India. This is a me by the way And this is another India There's India here Indian here Indian there Indian there Indian there Indian there and Indian here Indian there Indian there So my trod of the development team especially the core team They're actually Indian people I think it's 78% of them are from India And so and some of them just came to Australia very very recently, right? So if they these people is able to make a huge shift I believe that this is cross-culture as well and I have quite as messes in different countries like Like Hong Kong's and China's etc. So yeah, I would say that it would be cross-culturally applicable Quick intro of myself. My name is William Feng and interesting enough my career. I just started with an IIT I'm sure everybody's very familiar with that. So over a decade ago, and I started the business in Shanghai and that's that's when I I was one of the early employees of an IIT working with percussion madam I don't know if you know him and then after that I am mostly around went to different places and mostly settled in Sydney And I work majority as a as a consultant doing our job transformations across different countries with companies like McKenzie's and Bain and the company etc. But beside that I have quite a few sight lines Many people have made comment that the picture doesn't look like me That's because I started growing beard in past few months. So yeah, I thought that's that's pretty cool and let me let me try that out and The trigger for me to start growing beard is because I lost my charger for my shaver and said, okay Let me give it a try. I like that. Anyway, so long gigs. I did quite a few other things like, you know Rested investments and I was this close in going into a development of the properties But didn't go ahead in garments woman's garment business and in faculties like woman's laundry Don't judge me there. But that's one of the things that did there Restaurant and also a personal coach and stuff like that. So as you can see, it's not I did quite a few things But most of the things I stopped here because I stopped now because of the children's and kids and just couldn't handle it So that's me and today I'm going to walk you through the journey of how a team Transfer from a problem past to a very high-performing team and I'm going to do that in three parts first four club the history top three top three things we did and The results so let's jump straight back in In the first one is that the the guys had a lot of past failures now in the past four years they have spent over 10 million Australian dollars and Didn't produce Mars. They were supposed to replace a legacy system and in the end they developed a new system But the new system is not was not good enough to stand by its own So in the end of the end up with two systems happening at the same time So have to maintain both and they're going to sink and sink for some backwards There's a nightmare and they kept on failing on the deliverables and deadlines, etc and hence led to the second problem that is a dire external environment because it's a government organization and the organization's existence depends on the funding and because in the past they have been failing delivering and the minister basically said What I'm paying for right? I'm paying so much and give me so much time And you know didn't do anything and also do you because the government organization even though is in Australia? The bureaucracy is still there the red tape is still there So it's quite it's not a very friendly environment over there and there was a lot of leadership dramas as well the leaders were not very competent the Constantly in the field with the team constantly changing direction. In fact just before I joined them the one of the senior leaders They went away, so it was a very unstable environment over there and extreme personalities What I mean by that is the kind of people in the team ranging from total warlords as in The alpha male you can listen to me that kind of thing to total slackers And also we all have people from all different kind of like backgrounds in terms of even some of them is mentoring It's bordering mental units is almost over there and we have people with from LGBT community nothing against them We have lesbians as well as gay people at the same time was of a people who is very devoutly religious as well So you can you can imagine the kind of a dynamic is going on over there And then also team composition is also very bad. You just give an example one of the core development teams over there. They have three developers one tester one devops and they have five architects I Know the response will be like that I mean the reason for that was one of the reasons for that it was the GM the general manager who overseeing this operations He was an architect by trade, so he likes architects And then the other thing then is within again within the court team. They have two PO's Now anyone who had any anybody who had any basic understanding of of the whole agile Scrum and setup knows this is a big no-no's right big no-no's and they have all that over there And as a result of a whole thing and the team is pretty traumatized in a sense, right? There was open conversations that is very heated There was almost like like a physical fights almost not really there, but almost there were people fired on the spot In fact my predecessor was fired on a spot by that GM just before I joined So as you can imagine, it's not a good environment for people to stay hence the 10 over is almost like 50% and because of that reason When I spoke to my mentor before I took a job and he said He happened to know this organization's running. He said, um, yeah It's very it's well and good that you want to go it's noble for you to go and try to make a difference over there But you know you're running too far, right? He said I said I know but he said I'm standing here Holding a bucket of water Just so that ready when you get burned and come over to me. I can put over the fire for you That's not a very encouraging start of a job anyway, so I finally decided to go for it and And these are the three things that we mostly did to kind of attend around of course There's a lot of things we're gonna do but these are three main things and also due to time time constraint So we're gonna dive in straight away. First one genuine deep care of people now I cannot stress enough how important this one is genuine deep care of people It sounds a bit of counterintuitive. It's not talking about productivity. It's not talking about a velocity and stuff like that Why this I explained to you in a moment of why first of all Put people's personal worth above the word explain that with a with an example on My second week or third week in the job a girl Came to me and she's the DevOps. She came to me and said I want to quit That's not a very good Start my job right especially after on my first day. I told them I said yes I'm here to do you help you deliver but also at the same time I'm how I'm here to look after you as a person now It sounds like cliche but check with me 100 days later because back then I started with three months contractor So check with me 100 days that I'm putting myself out there. I'm here to look after you check So it doesn't sound very good. All right two weeks later, and she says I want to quit. What the heck is that right? In hindsight, I was thinking maybe she was kind of like a testing. You said you're looking up for me Okay, what are gonna do? So so the first thing I said to her was congratulations, that's the first message to her and I really mean it the reason I said that is because She was offered she was in DevOps, right? So she was offered a job by her previous employer A higher position, so it's gonna be a DevOps team lead slightly higher pay Similar kind of a familiar environment because it's old organization. So that's definitely a good offer for her Right and so I said, you know congratulations because that means you're valuable and that's pretty much the same reason I want you to be here as well, right? So that's first thing a second as second thing I said to her was I thank you for telling me now the reason I said that is because How often do you so when if you decide to quit? What do you do? Do you go around the announce to the world? Hey, I'm quitting I'm looking for job now and and so on so forth or do you just quietly look for your work and then say bye-bye That's what most people do right they don't announce that so the fact that she come to me and talk to me about it Shows her somehow maybe somewhere I struggle with her someone as someone that who's sort of like a sincere And she can pass me to talk about it. So I thank you Her name starts with C. So C. Thank you for trusting me third thing I said to her was I Sometimes I don't want you to leave because number one not only because of a technical excellency but also because I need you as a cultural warrior here because She was one of the person who who speaks out Right one of the reason that she wants to go was actually because she was having kind of an argument with the GM again the evil GM the GM wanted to decide that Jim wants to do AWS code pipeline Well, so she thinks that it's not necessary that you know just a plain old bamboo would do the job And so that's where the caches come in and and so she she kind of won't go I said I want you to stay because I'm here to create a new culture I need people like you as brave like you to speak out So I want you might you to continue to work with me But at the same time though, I want you to go check out the new job Right, so go take time off and check out a new job If that works out for you so be it if it doesn't at the same time I still want you to know that I don't want you to go to stay so she actually did go ahead and About a couple weeks later. She decided to stay So that that's that's a very good outcome Right, I never actually get to the chance to check with her exactly what the process behind it But the fact that she stayed with self already says quite a lot about it So that's the first example of oh did I go back? Sorry put people's personal welfare about work and when you do this when you focus on this personal welfare over there You're probably going to get this anyway. That's the point. I'm finally a second example Is do not give up a person easily for productivity game This is another girl which I mentioned a bit earlier that I'm almost bought a real mental illness What I mean by that then is she is fairly young and she is fairly immature and in a very very emotional Goes up and down not able to control her her response, etc as a result the team is very hating her a lot and It came up so strongly during one of the virtual sessions That even though I knew this girl was wrong I had to have to defend her because the kind of overwhelming emotion come across is really strong and her relationship with The team needed was also very bad that it goes all the way up to the HR performance They're accusing each other of of racism of Discrimination I mean you name it is all full bono HR Issue over there and the other thing then is she is a contractor. So naturally the team thinks okay What's the point? Let's wait for a few weeks. Let the Contracts file then they go we're not a problem anymore So that that is a default position of we want to gain productivity instead of keeping the people right so And the thing that we're trying to do then is default position default position for myself both from the agile as well as from From my own personal philosophy is that you don't you don't give up people that easily even though it's as bad as her so I said Ability convinced the team need to give a bit more time. So instead what I do then is Have a study built a relationship with her. The thing is that this girl she was very she felt very isolated She doesn't feel that she was trusted or being contrast to anyone I think imagine because there was no trust between the people then there's no way you can do good communications over there So spend quite a fair time with her Quite often is over the coffee and chat like that and Finally she started to open up and talk about issues, etc. So my theory then is No matter how good message you have imagine this is a very good message How good message it is how true how how how correct and how good it's going to be for that person Unless you build I can't do it unless you build a vehicle Then the message never can get cross Also be it like, you know passengers and a gift if you want to send a gift to someone You're gonna have found a way to send through right if you don't find a vehicle to give it There's no way that gift is going to present himself, right? So spend quite a bit of time to do that and finally become it becomes a bit of a counter between myself and the rest of The team and her as well. So across a few I want to go to Into too much details of that but eventually the result is during one of the Retros where we are really going to understand each other to understand to know each other backgrounds the struggles and successes and in the life, etc It's it becomes a fairly emotional retro For people and quite a few tears being shed and in the end which I didn't plan this at all in the end the team need and this girl They are they are literally apologizing to each other in tears in front of whole team That's that's pretty touchy moment, right? And you don't usually see that kind of things happen in the corporate world But I'm just to show you that this is possible. Oh, I totally didn't plan that I myself was in tears And by the time we walk out of the room the the reception was looking at whole bunch of people who in tears And this is what's going on here and actually I earned a name name for that It's not before I went to the second organization the guys and said hey, well My name is winem by the way and then my neck my current organization said hey, don't make all these people cry That kind of thing. So this is another example to say You do not easy to give up people That's not you say that this problem has come pretty soft, right? This girl she will continue to have a good performance over there But the team has to build a trust through which they can actually build things a bit better And as a result the the girl herself has grown quite a lot Learned how to control herself the team has also grown a lot learn how to deal with conflicts and learn to live with each other and This girl she was actually a very good worker The days that she would just smash to work straight away and that There are the days that she just don't want to do anything. So we just learned how to manage through that Next point is sex set expectations that we're going to know each other deeply and really do it. So this point Actually kind contributes to the other points as well because without we understanding each other without this relationship You can't do any any management or performs anything at all the analogy we can make here is that the time we spent in Know each other build relationship. It's big like you're shopping your axe So you have an axe that is not sharp at all and you're supposed to use that to cut the tree You have two options one you just use them straight away so that you don't lose the time or you spend the first hour Half an hour or so to sharpen the axe And the time you spend shopping axe is definitely going to be paid back later. We all know that by nature, right? But so the time we spend together with the team to build a relationship build trust is precisely like You spend time to sharpen the axe. It's definitely going to be back. It's a bit of contradictory But that's definitely true Be courageous to have courageous conversations This point kind of like come in tension with the first two points first two points is about, you know, all caring about people Or bit make people happy and look out look after people etc But that's not you say that you don't deal with problems Right, you can't can't do that if you have problems you're gonna deal with it Couple examples over there is one of the team guy one of the team is I mentioned rather total warlords, right? So he is definitely not listening to anyone. It's very very implied implied imply So very kind of like a root to people So you got to have to be able to do that conversation I want to tell too much into that but just to mention that you do have to be both of that There's another example with this with this again this evil GM I went into a shouting contest with him because he wants us to use Jira portfolio plan to produce a gunshot like report For the project where anybody had heard some laughter, right? Anybody who had any experience with Jira and portfolio applying would know that's a terrible terrible idea Especially for full plan had a very bad reputation there. So I see many laughs over there as well. So But he's had is locked in there You know, he has to use a stool no other options and I still it I went into a discussion with him And then it quickly escalated into a shouting contest So much so that during the conversation His secretary came in and closed the door and asked are you guys all right? So nobody dealt even to do something like that I was I was kind of like a risk in my job on that one But the funny thing then is after that conversation up that a very robust and courageous conversation The respect I had from this GM is actually way higher than before So I would say encourage you don't be afraid to do that If you if you're willing to loss your job or something that usually going to get you something very good so few quotes Whoever tries to keep the life or lose it and whoever lose life will preserve it without going into too much details of that one I have my hashed version of Productivity so whoever tries to keep productivity at all costs. Here's the here the keeper at all costs will lose it right and Whoever keeps people first people first will gain productivity naturally sustainably ungoingly organically and happily next one is We usually often remember that people is a problem. We all know that right so people is usually problem But also at the same time try to remember that people is also the solution Next one bring a job to life problem solving. I think most of here it would have either coached or Would be working in an agile environment and how do we bring this agile? Help people to adopt a new way of doing it. I found that usually Training is not always necessary because it's not too hard to get people to train up I found a far more effective way of bring our job to life is Teach them involve them and show them when you're faced with problem and lo and behold you always have problems some examples here first one is What do you do is? What do you do when you have a total slacker in the team? I mentioned this a little bit on Sunday and I Won't go into too much details of how we solve that problem because that itself warrants a 30 minutes talk But in our job slash scrum, there's a brilliant way of dealing with that. That's called stand-up Now during usual stand-up what you do You ask three questions what you did yesterday what I'm gonna do today and what was the was with the blocker Whilst it's good, but it also it's very easy to become a fertile line for Bearing what's actually happening Especially for the slackers right the slackers usually they are very good talkers They're not necessarily good at doing but they're very good at speaking and then how easy is for that someone to come here and say Oh, I did this yesterday. I did that I had a meeting. I was working on my documentation Didn't work out had this problems I was waiting for that one and I didn't get a response and feedback and that's me That's it. How is it for that for people to say that right and then I called that I called that that verbal diarrhea It's just we're just going on get people all lost so but if you do if you do your Stand-up properly There's no room for that and it's a very simple trick and that is basically that word conversation to a outcome based Communication it's a very simple. So for example instead of saying I had a meeting yesterday What was the result of the meeting? Right? Did you agree on something? Did you make certain decisions about that? Did you? Did you decide to not make a decision today and so that you're going to arrange another decision? What is it or another example is working on a documentation? You didn't finish documentation yesterday But did you finish the first section or did you find out what the problems you need to find out? What is the result of that right? So once you've dealt with a conversation to that outcome based communication There's no way to hide Now get the whole team to do that and then the same then at that point the slacker won't have two choices One is he continued to try to the verbal diarrhea in that case as you you as an agent You the change agent or scrumast or archiculture warrior is you basically step in and respect respectfully Guide that person into a clear communication respectfully Right? So you can say oh, yes, okay. You had meeting yesterday, but what was the result? You know and it's totally fine to not have result as well because usually you may take few days to get a Reasonable result and totally fine with that but just quote it out that I did not have any result You say I plan to progress this much today and so on so forth So that's the first option he has and second option is pretty much he has to step up and do the proper thing And then failing both then that person is probably going to have to think about Selecting themselves outside of team, which is what's what happened in one of the cases in other cases We what happened is is that person he he started realizing yeah I've been very very busy yesterday and actually in the past few days, but I'm not getting any results I need some help here right it's probably getting someone to For clarification or whatever that might be and then people start to not only do better in the stand-up But also in better way of carrying out the day more effectively. So that's just one example Example problem number two not enough creative solutions and ownership Again, this is a when you face with this problem is another excellent opportunity for you to teach the team how to do proper Spring planning again, I'm very sure that you all know how to do spring planning But do you know how to do properly a somewhat good spring planning looks something like this a Team the prior owner comes to the meeting Present with the guys about the proud Priorities needs to be delivered or problems to be solved and also clearly classified Clarify what sort of acceptance criteria that might be and at that point Throw up the problem to the team and the whole team come together and work out a solution All right, so that's that's just a natural way to do it But in this particular case one of the team members, which is actually the architect. He's very good he's very dominating kind of a dominating and He pretty much domain dominate the whole conversation of Spring planning he comes in. He said when you do this do that do this Person a you're very good at doing this. So you do that person B makes sense for you do this It's a kind of like a doing assignments and stuff like that. So We as coach we know this and the pattern. So this is an excellent opportunity for you to teach Hey guys, this is not the right way to do it And then that's not to say when you teach them to do that They're going to straight away and jump on it because in this particular case, for example, it requires the architect to step back We will quite actively say okay. I'm happy to not to do what I'm comfortable with I'm happy for the team to swap in and do that and that's not that's not easy to do So that's not easy to convince someone to do that. So that's going to be again It has going to be side conversations. So in that particular case, I spent about two three months To work with the team to do that because on one side You need to raise up the team to step step in and do that Usually the team is very willing to do so because there's opportunity for them to grow but the difficult part is tell the architect to die down step back and That was not very comfortable conversation again goes back to courageous conversation again So it does take some time for them to get over there Another problem is may build things on run assumptions It's quite it's quite possible that you spend few sprints and Build something that's not useful then again is an excellent opportunity for you to teach the guys Hey, how did you proper spring review? What's the number one hands up if you if your organization is doing spring review having users in the room? Not many three four five. Yeah, there you go so Number one thing for spring review is you have someone and user to see What you build and give feedback and if you don't have using the room perhaps you need to think about it So that's again up excellent opportunity for the for you to teach and involve the the team to do so And it's a great chance to start getting people Into customer centricity into user testing into spring plan into design spring and design thinking it etc Etc. So user opportunity to do that Problem example four is team conflicts just give you a very quick view of the team conflicts We have recorded down because there's a lot of names on it So I'm going to just hide you straight away. So just to show you there's a lot of conflicts going on All right, then how good is an opportunity for you to teach the team using the retro to teach them How to do the team conflicting team conflict resolution there's many ways to do that So just use the opportunity to do so what so That's just some examples I purposely picked, you know stand up With this planning review and retro. It's very very typical Components of of our jobs that I scroll the point. I'm trying to make them use Use the opportunity instead of like full-on training use of anything you want them to solve the problem straight away So that they can not only learn how to do it, but also actually do it for learning Last but not least the point is the last one is let go one at a time So what I mean by that is is very good that the team is able to do things with your help But is not good enough you need to be able to grow the team up so that I can do by themselves It's a bit like a growing the child You want the child to be able to do things by themselves the usual sequence I do that is first of all I get them to be able to do stand up very well without me being involved so that I can do really Efficient stand-ups and then followed by spring review because that's slightly easier then followed by Spring planning and then lastly spring retrospective once a team has learned to do retrospective Very very effective and efficiently then that's a good indicator that the team is very mature You can kind of a hands-off man few quotes Tell me and I'll forget teach me and remember involve me and I learn from Benjamin Franklin And give them fish was teaching them fishing what you're all familiar with that, right? So what do we need to do we need to do this one? Teach them fishing so that you can get yourself out of a job This sounds interesting right? This is the most I live by as someone who enables people you go over there My success is measured by the fact that I can get out and the team can still do I can even Instead of me going out and think crash I want to go a step out and think I even on the under and a transaction of going up all the way And Don't be afraid of losing your job because if you can do something like that the next job opportunity is gonna line up on your door So the third point is fuel delivery with culture two aspects of their one is delivery wine sculpture It's all good for you to have a bunch of people who are very very happy But if they're not delivering anything what's the point right you may as well just hand out in the park There's no point of doing that big even existence of the team would be in danger, but if you also just do What's happened here So if but if you also just do you delivery and do not worry about people and you burn people out and Eventually you're gonna lose it as well, and nobody's he's not just a number anyway So there's a beautiful combination of a culture and delivery When we talk about delivery, there's a few factors that affect the success or failure of delivery And that's usually again. There's a many many ways to cut it But this is one way to show you such a making skill set Teen ownership and purpose and success criteria. I'm gonna show you very quickly just how one simple one single culture Building practice can answer almost all that question and that is a culture mapping I don't know how many of you have done culture mapping or familiar with it It can't be very long. It can't be very short and if you do properly usually need a bit of like a Block of days to do that But in this particular case we decide to cross that through different sprints so that we don't take extra time So we're basically use a retro time to do that first step is that you get people to map out the symptoms And which is in the blue cars by the way, you don't you don't have to pick a particular color doesn't matter So get people to map out. What are the symptoms that they perceive one example of symptoms would be The spring go has not been delivered All right another symptom could be Our product is not selling well, for example, these are symptoms that you can see you should have a business impact And so the quite a few come cross and then the next step then you get people to map out What are the behaviors observable behaviors? That is leading to that particular symptom. So again, for example, the spring for the symptom of Spring go not delivered. That could be a lot of behaviors to contribute to that one of that could be Team are not showing up on time another one could be Integration is not happening or happening too late that kind of thing And this itself can take up to a couple of couple hours to do itself, right? So we do that and we'll park it come back in next spring and do that again. So next step then is we have the The white cuts that are white cuts is where it's getting a bit of interesting. So we had symptom we had behavior But then there's another thing lying behind a behavior. That's the beliefs and the values and thinking All right, so on the top on the middle and on the bottom So this thinking part and what the values and belief system is the most critical and fundamental thing If you want to make a change you make a change at that level example of They think in a values and beliefs behind people not coming to work Untie enough they may be thinking are there's no need for me The thinking might be there's no need for me to come to work on time as long as I finish my job Doesn't remember that's that's a thinking right? It's not necessary bad It's not necessary good, but that's a thinking another thinking could be We don't need to integrate as long as in the end that we can integrate at the To a stand so that's a thinking as you can see that this is where it's getting a bit of uncomfortable Because that uncovers people exposes people thinking again. This exercise itself can take a long time as well You can gauge on your own on your pace now. This is what we ended up with so I Need to point out those a spell spelling Error I can't spell as my handwriting, but anyway, I took a picture. I can't change now I don't know if you can read it But if you look at this right so on the left-hand side, these are the limiting beliefs that we uncovered Mistakes I will be blamed for mistakes, and I don't want to be blamed if something goes wrong This is our current belief system another one is decisions One of the current belief is I'm not allowed the question authority and leadership And making decisions are not authorized to make a decision on my own, you know, these are the current beliefs of the people You can see it's quite courageous for people to write something down like that already yourself, right? So a bit background by that time the team is fairly fairly mature already They understand each other the transfer is fairly high Another one is I require clear instruction or people need a constant supervision to perform So that's the current belief system another one is cross link cross-skilling may delay overall time frame, and it's not It's not effort. It's not worth effort. So we said, okay, these are the belief in limiting Beliefs, what are the new beliefs won't adopt take a quick look of that are mistakes are how we learn Isn't that something that we tell our children? Mistakes is how we learn and yet we don't practice that in a workplace And another one is rules are made by people and I'm also one of those people all right, it's all plain things and Another one is we can make and take better decisions together Another one is we are all our dolls doing our best to deliver girls so that a new belief systems were trying to adopt What are we going to do with this next one? This is where I get more interesting. So the guys voted that we're going to work on something To design a experiment a cultural experiment and they voted pretty much equally but inside in the end They decide to work on this one You decide to work on we are all our dolls doing the best to deliver the girl and we did a Hypothesis driven approach, you know what's hypothesis with the things what you can do how can I measure et cetera? And again, that's my handwriting of the workshop yourself and then put down into a proper document Just walk you through very quickly The hypothesis is if the sprint is clearly defined and team gives sufficient trust and flexibility in terms of time and How et cetera then we will see increase of work ownership Productivity and quality is a nice nice hypothesis, right? And then the team work together and decide a few things they're going to do to test this hypothesis I'm going to run it quickly cross, but I'm going to land on one thing point number three No stand-ups What's the reaction at least when I told the agile community in Australia? I said we're gonna have a team that is not going to stand up So we're gonna come up so close of our job and they're gonna say forget it get out of the room How can you tell yourself that your agile if you're not even doing stand-ups? And that was my reaction as well first when when the guy mentioned about this I'm gonna wear quickly. I want five minutes. So I'm gonna run run real quickly. All right, so I'm In the end we decided adopt that practice See him run out of time So but I was not feeling comfortable. So as okay I'm gonna have to measure you guys and the first thing I'm going to measure is what's the success criteria? We're going to gonna make sure the spring goes 100% met the velocity is going to be the same Definition of done must be met and then team MPS must be positive and also I said I'm going to measure you Everything from your interactions of everything like slack message. How many screens I'm going to measure you How many times you're taking leave? How many people is working from home? What's your usual working hours? It's less than usual before it's pretty like you know Checking how long you spend in the toilet that kind of thing And then what's the interactions between the people? What's the creativity going down? I haven't lunch together No, I'm surveying them. I'm like a security surveying them But I told them this is what I'm doing because I don't feel comfortable and also at least down a lot of Concerns that concerns of not having daily stand-ups at least I'm all of them twelve of them a very Likelihood of that. What are the things we can do? As you can see I was not feeling comfortable with that But I was willing to let them give that a try and then very quick results on the first sprint of the after this cultural experiment the spring goes 100% met velocity jumped 210 and The difference down all met the MPS is plus 82. I did not believe it I'm going to cover in the in a moment and the spring to drop it down a bit further Drop down a lot because some of the tickets did not get finished some of the story did not get finished But then on the spring three it bounced up back again as well Overall results is phenomenal the guys really loved it. They're buzzing together. They are delivering and smashing it And so the point then is if we just look at the whole One single exercise we already addressed decision-making because talking about you know We want to make good decisions together. We talked about cross-scaling. We talked about team ownership is through the roof And there's only one thing that didn't cover here, but a couple someone else So the point is culture is real Culture is everything culture produce lots of results Speaking for results. These are the MPS scores we had before Before the cultural experiment is very low, but that's normal But right after this is jumped hugely which I did not believe I said guys you're gaming it the same I'm not gaming it. So so we continue to measure and all the way up sometimes drop down sometimes goes up But overall it's really good and these are the some of the productivity games I'm not going to go into too much details But what I'm trying to point out then is in about 10 springs time the productivity jumped 163% to almost more than double Right and this is only 10 sprints which we are running on weekly So this is over two months of time and that actually produced a lot of results Here's a letter from the GM the same people GM Upon a deliverable says moments achievement. I can't tell you how proud I'm of you We have matured as a team into the past in the past while and we truly are entering a new era together But this is a very strong words and nobody has ever seen an email like that from a GM So it's quite astonishing. There's another email from the service director That says we're looking so we we've got the reputation looking for the government and commercial sector Which then it means the money etc. And they actually get secure to find in Phoenix five years It's another letter. I'm gonna skip that the other thing to mention is that 14 promotions out of 50 people That's 30% of promotion rate. I personally have never seen anywhere over there So there's awesome people growth The attrition rate was down to six percent, which is very low. It's about three people here It's a bit of failure over there Because that one sub team three of them resigned within the same pretty much same week And that's you just have a different reason we're gonna go into but among the three people who resigned one of them actually came back As you can see over here the niche came back the niche back on board because We grew the culture in over a period of time people don't actually see fear that much It's not until they went somewhere else. They could find out I should I should I'm left I didn't know how good it was. So he decided to come back and I said, of course we come back So that's one thing that the second person who resigned He wanted to come back, but he couldn't the third person who did not want to come back He was actually one of the person who said the quote I had in the beginning that you know This is the best thing I will work with so that's civil learning over there even As a managerless team over there, um, this is actually the real picture, right? So the real picture of the person especially this one day man He has grown himself into a self-educated himself into a technical expertise and that they really the team meant the team lead Decided to take a travel month tour of Australia So he just she decided to quit the job and then team decided to we don't need manager anymore Right, it does not the reflection of the of the manager's job. He does a very good job But that's a true self-managing team over there and to just give you a bit of context over there We have about 50 people I was four teams and we don't have Scrum master we don't have project manager. We don't have program manager It's pretty much just myself and the rest of the team The only way we're able to do so is by growing team to a mature level that I don't need inputs anymore So that's itself. It's a testimony of that. Yeah, finishing very soon Here's an a chart showing the team the self-managing and referring to short stuff That's what it meant the manager gone over there If we can do that, I can do it in a government organization. You can do the two So three simple points number one choose people over work every time K2 or so Allow me 30 seconds to explain this it sounds counterintuitive It sounds that you're not focused on the productivity But the world is entering in the way in in an era well where people is really being a center and And if you are the you if you are the ones who is able to overcome the Intuition to step into space where you really care about people get to the soul level You will be the real leader true leader in the future Second point is don't do for them show involve make them better than yourselves Not grow your children. That one is relentlessly hunt the culture DNA and Transfer from there. Do you not work on this symptom level? Do not work on the behavior level go down to the root cause go down to the beliefs and value system and change from there Change your individual change your team change your organization change the world. Thank you very much You have to have a time for questions or Okay, yeah, sorry about that I was going very fast, but if you have any questions, I'll be staying around and very happy to answer any of those. Thank you very much