 This bass voice all week. I'm getting used to it now. It'll feel very squeaky when this goes away. Alright, so I want to come to this session on change. I was just saying something. I just want to keep it all outside. It's kind of weird how, before you learn about something, the less you know about it, it's kind of scary. Because I think every time you learn one more thing about something, realize there's five more things that you don't know about it. So as a beginner, you learn something new, you're like, now I know everything there is to know. And the more you learn about it, the more it's good for you to feel. So I don't know anything about change. I'm going to share a little bit of what I've learned so far. And I'm Henry, by the way, I'm from Sweden, and I'm very happy to be here in India. It's the first time in my life. So I chose this title. Everybody wants change, but nobody likes to be changed. Does that sound kind of familiar? Does anybody here have this feeling? I'm inspired. I want to change things, right? But how do I convince those people over there? I want to change just those people over there. The purpose of this is to help you understand what you can do to trigger organizational change. In fact, it's not really organizational changes, it's in fact any kind of change. And a lot of this is actually little tips and tricks that I picked up on a lot of the theory, but little tips and tricks. And actually one model just to make it look a little bit theoretical. And first, an exercise, right? An exercise. Are you ready? Right. Change something on yourself. I don't see a lot of brave change. I see it a little bit more than that. I don't see it dramatic. Right. I can't see it. I don't see so much panic on it. Yes, some of these would be really cool to put their phone in another pocket. All right. That was the workup. Now change something on somebody else. Somebody else. What is this? Resistance. I'm seeing resistance. Right. So how many actually changed something on somebody else? I tried. It's hard. It's hard. It feels weird. The changes tend to not stick. Right? It's not on the same second. So how do I convince people? Well, don't bother. Just don't bother. That attitude is defective. I mean, who likes being convinced? It's just not fun. Look at it more like change starts with you. You can change yourself to a certain extent, although that's actually quite harder than that. But it's something you can control yourself a little bit more. If you can change your way of looking at the problem with the situation, that might inspire early people to change as well. That seems to be more effective. Although I realize that it sounds a little bit weird, so I'll give you some examples. Oh, by the way, I learned that this actually works, too, sometimes. This is Akka Oyobe-san, who is in Japan. He said that after seeing this presentation, he went back to his team, and he said, I changed myself, he told me. After that, my team also changed. Oh, I don't remember what it changed exactly, but it worked. It's all very happy to see that sometimes. So let's start with this. How can you get a six-year-old to clean through it? Who? Art. How many of you have kids? Yeah. How many of you are agile coaches? How many of you are evil coach dads or moms that experiment on your kids? Not kids, but family questions. I have one of those, and sometimes experiments blow up, but sometimes they work. And this one worked amazingly well. So yeah, how to get a six-year-old to clean through it. There are a number of bad strategies, such as, you have to clean up your room now or else. It doesn't work very well. Short-term solutions. I'll give you ice cream if you want to. It might work for a while, but yes, have a lot of ice cream. Look, I cleaned your room for you. I'm a servant leader. Give me the best ideas. No, it's really facting. What is my goal? What is my goal, personally, for him cleaning his room? I thought about that. Is it actually because I care about his room? No, I don't live there. Oh, it's a house. Okay, I want to teach him to take responsibility for his room. Maybe it's a bit more about that. Well, why? Why do I teach him? Well, he enjoys keeping it clean by himself without being reminded. That's what I really want. But why? Well, because that saves time for me. It's perfect. And because he learns a valuable skill for life, I leave my son and I care about stuff like that. So it's kind of like, what's my motive for this? I don't understand my motive. So look at it that way. I've changed my approach. Coach mode instead of a story mode. Father, you're automatically turning into a story. And that can be a disadvantage. You know, warp your mind. I'm not a story. I'm not a coach. So what do coaches do? Well, coaches don't force people to do stuff. Right? You don't do the work of the client for them. It's basic coaching. Okay, so now I'm going to present a little bit of a change model. It's kind of like a bastardization of a number of real change models that combines the simplified it and made it my own. It doesn't have a name. What is the destination? What does that look like? Clean room. Okay? Ask him about that. What would it be like to be in a room that is really nice and clean? Do you remember last time your room was really nice and clean? Yeah. What was that like? I could find all my stuff easily. I wasn't losing my toys. I felt better working inside the room. Make that... Make it... Kind of describe what it's like on the other side and see if he agrees with that thing in a nice way. Because if he doesn't, he says, I like the room better than that. Then that's the problem. But if you don't actually... Yeah, he actually does like the nice clean room. And then you look at the current situation. Right? The destination and the motive. All... It doesn't feel very good. I can't find my stuff anywhere. I keep stepping on things. My younger brother goes in and feels things. I don't know. Right. These are things that aren't needed. And the next was... What is one thing that you can do to make it a little bit cleaner? I offered him a property. I basically stole anything from an in-box cleaning process. There's a thing here. What is that? Well, how about it lives here in the spot? Okay. Done. What's that? Where does that live? I don't want it. I just asked him that question. What is it? Do you want it? Where does it live? After a minute or two, there was this little spot on the floor that was empty. It's clean right there. Right. Progress meter. Something's happening. So, we just did this. After a while, I just left. I'm not cleaning a whole room. You can have one random thing, putting it there, and then that's it. It feels very simple. But that's all he was doing. He could see the progress of the room getting cleaner. I walked out, came back up an hour or two, and the room was beautifully cleaned. Wow. And not only that, he was basically torturing his younger sister. I was like, oh, amazing. It was showing up. Wouldn't you like your room to get clean as mine? Imagine if your room wasn't clean as mine. How would that feel? And how does it feel to be here? It's really good at picking up coaching skills. But the interesting thing was that this kept working. Now he's nine years old and his room is so clean. You wouldn't believe that, would you? And it turned out to be repeatable. I have four kids. Now my oldest daughter is seven. It didn't work when she was five. But when she turned six, seven, it actually went, even backfires. I'm like, come on, some dinner's ready. It's like, no, I still color-sorting my socks. So things can go a bit too far. But what this did, it caused change in a permanent way. I have a kid. It's quite interesting. And let's look at this model. Turns out that this is quite useful. Make sure that whoever is involved in this change agree on what is the picture we're talking about. Maybe it's agile, right? For example, it's an agile concept. You want to work in agile. So what does that mean to us? What is it like over there? You might start with a manifesto, or start with an experience report or something. You should paint that picture. And then you've got to make sure that people are going to be involved. They actually want to be there. It's just where we want to be. Never mind how. It's just where we want to be. Just kind of paint that hypothetical picture. And then next is, well, we've got that where we want to be. What is the difference between where we are now? And then, it's not enough. We need some really concrete things we can do to get, not to get to here, but to get one step closer to here. Right? And in some way of finding out are we getting anywhere near, otherwise we tend to lose theme after a while. We can't see that we're making a difference. It could be things like metrics, simple, it could be subjective things. How does it feel like, that's the last reason? It looks easy, right? But as many of you know, and many of you here are changing this, take courage. It's hard. Because you're questioning that this state is closed. And there's quite realistic risk of resistance. So I found that this model is useful for understanding the nature of resistance, when it happens. It's not working. What do I think about? Well, it's because I had to communicate clearly what this is. Maybe there's a different standard. People have discussions about what it is. I'm using Agile as an example, but think of any change you want to make. So maybe we don't have the same people, or maybe we all have exactly the same people, but these people don't want to be there. Maybe I'm going to lose control. I'm not sure if I want to have control of my people. And you're going to set a way for me. And that matters to me. So I know Dan Wright is in my Agile thinking we need to. Because if not, you're probably going to attack the problem in the wrong way. Or maybe we know we want to be there. But we know what it is and we know we want to do good. But we have a different kind of current situation. The manager who always sits inside his office says we're already Agile. Okay. So how can I help you see that we're not? For example. Or maybe, yeah. I know what it is. I want to be there. I know that we're not there. But it's impossible. I don't see any step. It's not possible. So that can cause resistance. Because why wouldn't it waste time? It's always something that can't be solved. Or maybe, you know, we get started but lose team after log because nobody sees that it's actually making any difference. And there's a tendency. There's like a muscle memory in an organization where we tend to just revert back to where we were unless there's energy pushing us somewhere. So I never apply this model strictly. It's inside the back of my head. So I give that to you. There is some resistance that is silly. That is unnecessary. For the wrong reason. So I'm going to give you some approaches for tackling that. What is the us and them problem? So, yeah. How many inside here are us? Do we have any of them in here? Yeah, any of them? What does it feel like being them? I feel outside. This is not fun. If us and them work together every day, then gradually us and them just becomes us. So here's the thing. I've seen this so many times. It's funny. I'm sure many of you have too. So talk to developers. Hey, so do you want to go agile? They're like, yeah, definitely this is what we want to do. But you know, those managers won't let us. Won't let us. So I want to go to the manager and say, so do you want to go agile after describing what it is? They're like, of course we do. This is what we want to do. The customer is going to let us. And then you can guess the rest of the story. The customer, if you want to go agile, this is what it means to you. Of course, this is how we always wanted to work. The projects that I've seen that succeed, this is how we work. Although we didn't call it agile, we worked that way. Great. So should we do it? And all those developers, they don't want to. They can't manage it. They can't do it. Does this look familiar? So this is us and them, right? So there are some tricks to handle that. The best is to get everyone together at the room at the same time. If you can't, right? And ask the same question. So this is what agile is, right? I'm just showing you what it is. I want to know if that's where you want to be. Right? Never mind how. And then quite often, surprisingly, everyone's like, yes, I'm in the look around. It's a surprise. Well, that's the customer. He's saying yes to it. Everyone's like, okay. So we actually do want to go here. Great. We're halfway there already. Just by agreeing that that's where you want to be. It doesn't always work. But all these tricks I'm showing you are tricks that have worked amazingly well at least once. But of course, nothing works always. So hopefully at least some of them will be useful to you. So now we can start talking about how. Right? Now we have a dialogue. If you can't get everyone together at once, you can capture the intent. What are the project managers? The project managers, maybe. So shall we move this interest? This is a real-life example, by the way. Ask the bunch of product managers so this is agile. They're like, great. So I ask them, this is where you want to be. And then they put marks on this sheet. Everybody put up. Plus means yes. Minus means no. Question mark means I'm not sure right now, let me think about it. And to my amazement, every single person in the room put up plus and yes. And I walk through all of that to the people, developers, and managers. They're like, what? It helps a lot. Statement on intent. Just capture it somehow. Here's another trick. I think it's called the art with the possible. I'm not sure. But never mind what it's called. It's about changing your why can't you question to the do you want to question. Coaching voodoo. For example, we can't release software abbreviation, says Peter. We can't release software abbreviation. So coach said, why can't you do that? That's the wrong question to ask. Right? Because what am I doing right now? I'm begging for resistance. I'm begging for resistance. I'm asking, why can't you do it? So he's likely to tell me exactly why we can't do it. It's better to ask, first of all, if you could, would you want to? Right? Separate the two. If you could, would you want to? And then maybe the answer is yes. We can, but if we could not, we'd want to. And the next question is, well, what needs to happen to make it possible? Or if we just pretend that we succeeded, how do we do it? So in a way, it's a kind of manipulation, but it's really about framing the problem in the right way. So what would need to happen to make it possible? Now this person was full of reasons why I can't work, because instead we're going to use all that information to think about what would need to happen to make it work. Right? Very useful. Sometimes it's what you need to ask yourself, too. Right? What's the answer for, do you want to use super long? The answer is no, then, you know, go to the next problem. Don't convince people it's a waste of time. If they don't want to go where you want to go, you need to start thinking about your motives, right? Why should they want to go where I want to go? Why should they? Better find a reason or stop trying to change people. Right? So here is a very concrete technique that I've been using at Spotify, which is a company that is changing very fast because they're growing very fast. And changes happen all over the place, right? I found it quite useful to put off a board. This was used by all the coaches about ten coaches and some of the people from HR and some of the managers. If we put off this board, which we call the improvement board, and Spotify has about 600, 700 people spread across four cities. We had this physical board. Later on, we changed an electronic board, but it doesn't look like this. What's on there are improvement fees, right? We agree, you know, what are the high-level improvement fees for this organization? One was squad autonomy. We want our squads, which is our weird word for a scrum team, to be able to put stuff into production on their own with no dependencies. So, of course, we're not quite there yet, so we wrote this definition of awesome. Every improvement theme has a definition of awesome, which is kind of like, in a perfect world, it would work like this. Or how would we recognize a perfect world? And we put up all the characteristics. Well, the squads are never blocked under dependencies. They can put stuff into production any time, right? For example, we'll probably never get there, and that's okay. That's the definition, right? We'll start there, agreeing on the definition of awesome with some of the key people involved. And then, of course, we've got to make it concrete. So, for each frim lane, which is one theme, we make improvement stories. So, improvement themes have a definition of awesome. We don't expect to ever get there. It's just a direction. And then each improvement story is a concrete step. One thing we can do, we can get done, which will either take us in this direction or teach us something. It could be an experiment. Teach us something, which will help us get in that direction. So, in this case, it wasn't teach us something. We started doing surveys to find out, interviewing teams to find out what is getting in the way or what would they need to build some production on their own. All kinds of stuff. In fact, the rest of my presentation is really about what kind of stuff might you put on one of these improvement stories, the concrete things you can do. And they're typically just a few days at work or something. Now, we're trying out a version of Trello. The tool doesn't matter too much. It's just about making it visible and everything at once. So, we've picked five improvement themes. These are the five things. We should say actually too many both. And then what are the next stories that would take us in that direction? What are we doing right now and what's done? So, that way, we can be thinking about, well, okay, we've now done these two things. We're a little bit more autonomous than before. What would be the next two or three stories? Just to focus the improvement after a little bit. Does that make sense? It's an important thing. It's a very effective tool. We're at the top level in management team of an organization. Okay, so let's look at some sample actions. So, now I'm just throwing techniques at you. You can choose which one's applied. Make today's pain visible. I'm assuming that you want to change something because there is a problem you want to get rid of. So, make that problem visible. How could you do that? Well, boards like this are a typical classic solution. It can be routine or it can be a crossable product. Some of you were in my lean from the trenches section when we were talking where I showed this big, big, these little board. But what we saw there was a bottlenecking system test. All this stuff here is stuck in system tests. Whoa, what's happening? Is someone having fun back there? I'm glad you're detaining yourself. I wouldn't want people to fall asleep. Would I? So, yeah, look. This is just visualizing the pain. Everybody knew about the problem, but making it visible made it more tangible. Plus, we measured velocity. We just counted how many of these nodes are getting production or get done. Like, really done every week. And it turned out it was zero every week because they're all piling up here. So, this creates a sense of urgency. Our velocity is zero. It doesn't solve the problem, but it visualizes our current situation if that's what we're going to do. The classic is a burn-up chart. These are all real-life examples, by the way. I'm not making these up. They're quite interesting. This was a project which had a fixed scope of 250 story points. We estimated each feature in story points like it's a bigger, small, add them all up. It's like 250, right? That was a scope. And it was a fixed time contract as well. So, it was a big promise. It has to be done here by April, Q2. The project actually started a year before. You have to get to here sort of 50 by this date. Okay. Now, we're visualizing the goal, right? And then we want to visualize the actual current situation. Actually, it's visualizing history. After one sprint over here, they actually finished 10 points. And the next sprint afterwards, they finished another 10 points. We started measuring this, right? And... Why is it likely that I was getting this curve? Well, you know, we don't... I mean, it's a wishful thinking, right? It is more likely just looking at the trend that we'll end up somewhere here, which means that, you know, okay, April, maybe April is okay. It's just the wrong year, right? So, this is visualizing the current situation in a way that cannot be misunderstood. Most people, you know, pictures work. But if they're more like numbers people, you can just do that instead. That, right? Two or three or 30 things left on the list. One sprint, do the math, and each sprint is two weeks long. People have vacation sometimes in Sweden at least, and then, you know, over a year. Sometimes you don't have some objective data. Sometimes you need subjective data. And this has turned out to be surprisingly powerful. We have some kind of a goal, right? So, it's good to ask yourself, what is our definition of success for whatever we're doing right now? Agree on definition of success. It could be to reach a certain impact or to use a group. Regardless of how you phrase our definition of success, once you've done that, you can ask people, do you believe this is achievable? You can do it in formal serving. Just walk around the hall and ask people, what's achievable? So, yeah, scale like this, certainly or forget it or somewhere in between. And then, in this particular case, the data showed us that forget it. This is a death march, right? Pretty much everyone asked, do you believe that one or two? It's a death march. We don't need any more data than that. People's gut feels amazingly powerful. So, this caused all kinds of change because people realized that we're on a death march. Very simple technique, actually. Here's another visualization technique. This was actually the most impact I've ever seen from one single picture. This specific picture, a company for a long time that had been trying to improve their process to get faster at building games. We tried all kinds of stuff. What we did was get a cross-section of the company into the room and asked them, what happens when we build a game? What are the steps involved? Turns out that a single game that's being built from idea to production goes through all these steps, gets stuck in all these cues, right? And there's all these handoffs. The red numbers are waste. Time is passing without that game being built at all. Six months right here, right? Green is someone who's doing work on this game. So we're just tracking the game. Turned out this was a typical game, two years, right? Two years to get a game out the door. But what they didn't realize was it was actually about three months of work, right? Most of the time was just waiting. So this picture, just walking around with it, showing developers, showing managers, showing designers and products, they were like, what the hell? It was the biggest collective, oh shit, moment I've never seen in a company. Why is that? Well, because everybody's focusing on their box here, right? Most people are inside their box, optimizing their box and not noticing us to be able to make a dramatic organizational change and do scrum and pull out feature teams. Pretty much get eight times faster without hiring more people. But to be able to do this was really just a realization that this is our current process, right? See, it doesn't always work. Sometimes we've drawn this picture and nothing happens, right? But it's a cheap thing to try. All right. So actions, concrete actions, right? That's what this is about, things you can do to help change happen. That's not what people really care about, right? Sometimes if you think you have the best idea in the world and nobody reacts to it, maybe you've misunderstood people's motives, right? Here's a very concrete example. Suppose I want to get the team together, right? They're spread out in different rooms and that's, you know, very unagile. I want to get it together. But nobody wants to do anything about it. They're like, well, this is our facilities are like this. We have rooms, right? We can't change that. We're not going to move to the office, right? So, you know, get back to work, go back coding, right? So it turns out, so, okay, what drives? Who do I need to recruit to get this changed, right? Well, maybe we need to knock down some walls. I need to get office management in, right? There's money involved, right? Got to find out. And then I got to speak their language. So maybe what they really care about is money. And maybe it turns out that the thing we're building is going to earn us money. So reframe the problem, right? The team here estimates that their velocity will be 50% higher if we just sit together, right? They're in gut feel. They're in gut feel, maybe previous experience. It's just estimate. But nobody can estimate it better than themselves. And asking their product owner, he says, this means we can release two months early. The math is quite easy. Just look at it, right? We can get four stuff done. We can release earlier. And he can probably calculate the value of that, right? And then if you look at what is the cost of tearing down this wall so that the team can sit together. And now we have a business case where people start thinking, hmm, right, hmm, maybe. Once again, it doesn't always work. We can't speak the right language, right? In a business case, right? Here is a recommendation. Whenever we're talking about change, we tend to fall into this trap of thinking that the status quo is what we have. And here is someone's idea. And no, I don't like that idea. For whatever reason, it's not perfect. So therefore, we'll do that and we'll keep it for an idea. Maybe it's just fear, right? That idea might not work. So that's why I don't want to do it. Because then I'll look bad, right? So once again, change yourself, reframe the problem. And this is a good trick. Option A is actually status quo. Put that up on the board. Here's option A. Do nothing. Continue as today, right? That is just an option. And option B is this horrible idea that I just made up, right? It's actually something that's a good idea to come up with a horrible idea. This is a bad idea, but I'll put it up there because that's another option. So what other options can people come up with? And that might make people challenge. Like, Henry came up with this really stupid idea. I can do much better than that. How about this, right? Getting people to come up with ideas. We're brainstorming because they realize that wait a second, if our only two options are to continue like today, which we don't want to, or implement Henry's horrible idea, ah, that's not good. So now we're getting ideas up. And then we can classify them all at once. Based on the scale such as 1 to 5 from get it to great, right? Everybody goes up. Everybody takes a pen. We don't need a whole lot of discussion, right? We don't need to analyze. Just take a pen, walk up, and what is your gut feel about how good this option is, right? This is real data. So, status quo was actually pretty good. It was pretty okay, but there was some real, some people had a big problem with it, right? And we looked at all these options, and we actually didn't have option F yet. We looked at all these people like, hmm, hmm, hmm. But then someone said, wait a second, option F came up after doing this. And everybody went up, and option F was superior. It's great. But in order to get there, we needed to kind of look through this very, very gut feel type analysis. And once we looked at this, well, okay, we can start analyzing a little bit more of what it means. What this does, it basically gives us a faster route to finding what might be the right solution. And if it turns out to be wrong, if it turns out that this screws us up, we can try another option later, right? And pose these as, you know, you can't use the word experiment anymore. What am I supposed to use? We decided to do tries. Help me, what's the name? Trials. Trials. Or I say experiments. Okay. So, yes, this one is a severely underrated option. Do it. If you have an idea. Maybe it's easier to just do it. If it's within your power. And see what happens, right? And as forgiveness for that information, this takes a bit of courage. But has been surprisingly effective in many cases. Example, do we really need to produce all these documents? This is a friend of mine who had a gaming company in Sweden. They were producing a lot of documents for regulatory reasons, for these documents and stuff. Do we really need to produce them? The managers will say, yes, we have to because of love. But their gut feeling was nobody uses them. So, finally, he did the guerrilla thing and he took the documents, such as configuration product findings, took some of these documents and he inserted a sentence in the middle of the document which says, if you see this line I'll buy you beer. There was not much beer but beer. It's a good test, right? Things like that. And then as they built up this bank of data of people not meeting stuff or people not liking beer the most, then he started telling his teams, if you're about to produce a document that you don't think anybody needs, don't produce it. Instead, put in a placeholder document with the same name. In it, it says, if you need this document email me and tell me why you need it and when. And then I'll work my butt off. I'll work evenings, weekends, whatever I'm to get it to, so that's my side of the deal. I'll make sure you get it. And of course, sometimes it turned out they were doctors who did these, so they needed to work. But on the whole, they eliminated a whole lot of ways. That's quite amazing. These are guerrilla techniques. Use with care, don't sue me if it fails. Right. We only use guerrilla techniques when the other techniques such as communication are that thing. Here's another real example. Developers sitting there, testers sitting there, normally not a good idea. But there was resistance. This is a different organization. They have a different manager. And this is how we work. You don't have to get permission from the CTO and blah, blah, blah. How about we just lift our butts and we lift our chairs and we just move? 10 minutes. We can do that really quickly. Just lift our butts and go over there. And try it. And if it works well, we'll keep doing that until someone yells at us and asks you. And we have a discussion, right? And that was quite an easy sell. I'm not trying to change the organization. I'm just saying how about you come sit over here. Turns out that this is a good quote from Mattia Valley. People do not truly believe in new things unless they experience them. So I'm not asking these people to believe that this is a good idea. I'm just saying bear with me. You want to give it a try. If you don't like it, go right back again. Of course it turned out that they loved it. Actually, I wasn't managing this organization. It was funny because even a year later, streak on paper, the organization was still that the testers are separate. The developers are here. But in the physical reality they're seeing together. And guess what? It's the physical reality that counts. Not the organizational chart. All right. These techniques don't always work. Do they? I don't know. Do you have any examples? Anybody have an example of one of these techniques that worked? What? Current situation, visualizing it into the card balls. Any other tricks, any of these things that you've tried yourself? The only thing that stopped doing it was like some of the things you talked about. You just stopped doing it and it was okay. Bringing everyone into the room. Just to talk about it, yeah. Breaking silos. Breaking silos? How did you do that? Encouraging people to talk to each other. Encourage people to say, you don't always have to move it physically. You can just organize a coffee break or a coffee break together. Sometimes talk to each other and then call up. What's the source of the kind of really important process? Very quickly, we can see what could be automated. So you drill your deployment process out. Anybody have any examples of techniques that are utterly backfired? Some version of velocity metrics I didn't quite catch. But I'd like to hear somebody's backfire if you work in favor. Recent example, yesterday. As the facilities, we want a new scrum room built. Immediately. The response was, your business unit has taken up this, this, this and this conference room. We can't give you any more room. So you've got to know. So what are you going to do next? Well, I went a little higher and I went to his boss. I went to his boss and said, we really need this. It affects our team. It affects our productivity. And then he got the dialogue started. Hey, we'll get somebody else to talk to you. We'll get somebody to talk to you. So can you talk on Friday? I'm not available on Friday. So Monday. So the first attempt backfired, you're the good metaphor. I like silly metaphors. Think of your team or think of a river. And your team doing its work is this river flowing. You're trying to get to the destination. Now, suppose there's a rock in the middle of the river. What does the flowing river try to do with the rock? What does it try to do first? What does it try to do first? Try to push it away. Put it on a small rock and push it away. It doesn't work. You tried everything. So what might that mean? You tried everything to get your organization to improve on some aspect. And it just doesn't work. What does that mean? What? Maybe they don't want to change. Maybe they want to be the way they are. Maybe it's just too difficult. So there's always the option of doing what? This is long two feet. You only have so many years of your life. The long two feet doesn't just apply in open space. It applies to life. It can move. It can be scary. But if you know things are bad here it can move. What's the worst that can happen? It might be bad here as well when you move again. So long two feet, if you really can't change your environment. Use your two feet to fight in your environment. There are plenty of really cool agile companies here in Bangalore as well. In fact, I visited one today. It was really cool. What? I'm allowed to say it. Are you in here? Walmart was pretty cool. Anyway. Okay, so you can always change yourself once again, even if that means using your two feet to go somewhere else. So I think that leaves me time for a personal story. Because I have an hour, right? Until 5.30? Okay. This was 2010. I think I had this dilemma. I like traveling. But, I don't like being away from my family. That sounds clear. So, wait a sec. It took me way too long to realize that. Wait a sec. There is a solution to this problem. What? This was a background thing. I have four small kids and there is a school and stuff. So I didn't really think beyond this is a problem I should travel less. But then, at one point I was talking to my wife and we were like, if we could do whatever we want which is a good question to ask sometimes. If we could do whatever we want, what would we do? It would be really cool to just travel with the kids. Because I was like seeing all these cool places in the world and I wanted to share that. But this would be really cool. And the first thing that popped out of our mouths were, but we can't because. Exactly what I told you not to do is what we did. We can't because. It seems very natural. We can't because we don't have time. We can't take kids out of school because of work commitments because traveling with kids must be impossible. What about my bands? I play music. I play bands. What are they going to do without the bassist? Or what about the hamster or the house? Just no end of excuses for not traveling. So, but then I realized, wait a sec, what are we doing? We can't be listing up all the reasons we can't. We have to turn this around and say, do we want to do this? Yes, but we can't because, wait, if we could, what would it take? So all of that I can turned into actions. Things we have to do. In some case, so agreement from the family we have to check for the kids. We want to do this actually. And we need to set a date otherwise we'll never get out. And then there's the work class. I can't be travelable over the world with the family. I'm trying to work all the time. What school is it? How do we do that? We have no idea. We have no idea what the game thinks to do. And this model turned out to be useful. Just this way of thinking. Once again, we pull, why on earth would we want to travel? What is the point? And we have several reasons. It would be together as a family. We could see new things together and have fun together. It would be a break from the daily routine. This list of why. And then understanding the current situation. What is it about the current situation when we achieve that goal in an easier way? Is it just work less? Don't need to travel to work less. We can solve that problem instead. So we looked at that. We concluded that we actually do want to travel. There are some things we want to achieve by traveling that we're not getting today. And then there are a number of concrete steps and how we measure progress. Well, here's our word. That's the vision. What we did was we went to Google Images, which is cool. We liked the photo album to look like when we get back from the trip. Just pretend we already did the trip. It's already finished. We came back. What kind of stuff would we like to see? And we're all googling around. The one-year-old didn't know Google yet. And there are elephants and there are saving boats and there's a double-decker bus and there are birds on a plaza and all kinds of stuff came up. This is not a backlog. This is a vision. There's a difference. Really. This is the backlog. This is the stuff we want to do to achieve this. Never confuse outcome with output. This would correspond to the stuff you deliver in the features you're building. This is the impact you're achieving. Different. There's a motive why we're doing this in the first place. We want to keep that in mind all the time. Sometimes we have to make decisions. There is a big constraint when society would leave on the 1st of October. 10 months, 11 months in the future. We leave. That's our fixed date. Everything else is variable scope. We don't know exactly which countries. We don't know how long we're going to be traveling. It turned out at the end of the 6-month trip we took us through 8 countries. We took us through Denmark, China, Japan, Thailand, New Zealand, Peru, Brazil and the West Indies. All kinds of things here and here help to decide which countries and which order how long time each country is in central. What's here is to do. This stuff that we have to do or there is no trip. We have to get flight tickets. We have to figure out a solution with school. We have to figure that out. These are the must-haves. These are the should-haves. We really want to get these things done. We really like to rent out the house as we leave. This trip is going to be very expensive. We might afford it. Rent out the house, get some cash, etc. These are the bonus things. We should clear out the basement. All these stupid things we'll never do. For some reason people want to put them on lists. It's weird. We had all these things done. It would be nice to do this. We saw we would do it. We didn't do it. It's weird. Some of these have lead times. We can't do them all. We can't strictly do them in priority order. There are sometimes other aspects that influence the order. We did a few of these. This is what's ongoing. Natural living in the form of helping. It's the square. And then done. This is pretty much how this model looked like in practice. This was in the wall. We walked by it every day. We got reminded of what we had to do to make this trip happen. Over here you can't see it. There's a little arrow. I think it's in the wrong place. Kids move it sometimes. It actually was here. The date was down here. We were actually over here. Here you see different countries for me. The arrow moves. That's a good daily reminder too. The date is not going to move. The arrow moves. The kids like that. One of the things we realized was a fear was one of the impediments. We don't know. There's always things we don't know. That you have to think about traveling with kids. We haven't really done that before. One of the notes here on the must was do a spike. Travel spike. We did a short trip. It was a three day trip to London. With four kids with the right stuff that we would bring on the long trip like can they carry their own stuff? Can they do that? Will the baby hate flying in the plane? What type of baby carriage do we need? All these little things we need to figure out. We did that trip, came back to the broken baby carriage and realized we have to get to the baby carriage. Things like that. Very, very useful. That was it. This was very, very helpful. It helped us get out. We had a wonderful trip. Whatever your goal is. Whatever it is you want to do. You have different goals, different constraints. There's probably stuff you want to do which may not be this. But whatever it is, I can recommend this way of thinking. This model. What is it we want? Why do we want that? Where are we now? What are the concrete steps we can do to get there? How do we measure progress? And for Christ's sake, stop saying we can't. Okay, wrap up. Here's the stuff to take away points from this. Change traffic. That's where it starts. Don't wait for someone else to do something. Don't change other people. Motivate people to change themselves. And to do that, you need to be careful. Give them a reason to change. Why would they want to change? What is their reason? Visualization helps show them a way. Small, clear steps. Sometimes you don't know the way. You have to talk together to figure out the way. And support, encouragement, feedback. This is what good managers do. They want to evolve the organization. Support, encouragement, feedback from these things. And this hope will help as some kind of model. I think that's it. I think that's all I have about change. We have a few minutes. Any of the questions? Any ideas? It was really a pain carrying this frontboard. We realized that next trip we're not going to carry this frontboard. The purpose of that board was to get us on the plane. And now we're on the plane. We're on the plane. We're on the plane. The purpose of that board was to get us on the plane now. So we didn't need it afterwards. Any other questions? I suggest we do this because the room is hot. Some of you will want to move on. I'll be around here for discussion. Thanks for coming. This was interesting.