 Good morning, folks, welcome. It's a challenge to follow a talk by Linda Rose, because she's always inspirational. You probably saw me get up and tell you a little bit about the day earlier on, those that haven't met me. My name is Shane Hasty. I'm the Director of Agile Learning Programs for the International Consortium for Agile. And business agility is something that is really important for us at IC Agile, but also an area of passion for me personally. I've seen agile work, agile development practices, agile philosophies, agile approaches in information technology organizations and information technology departments within organizations. But what we're seeing today is the need to take these ideas, the concepts of agility agile with a small A, that ability to change quickly and to respond and bring them into other parts of the business, to other areas of the organization. But there are some fundamental things that need to be in place to enable that to happen. And that's what I'm gonna talk about here are the foundations. I got this badge a number of years ago at a conference. Agile is not a thing. Agile is something that changes something else. Agile development, agile analysis, agile business, that flexibility, adaptability constantly able to change. And I'm gonna look at this from the point of view of a start with why Simon Sinek, go right to the bubble and start with why is this important. And then I wanna deal with some of the what's but the what's that happen at an organizational level and the what's that happen at an individual level because change starts with you, not with the organization. So the nimbleness of a company, the ability to quickly adapt while empowering everyone associated with the brand. Now that was Steve's definition of the important. The ability of an organization to renew itself, to adapt, to change quickly and really important to succeed while they do so. And this rapidly changing, turbulent, ambiguous business environment. And that is the nature of our business environment today. This model, the nine domains of business agility with the customer right in the middle, that comes from work at Evan who was the business geek in the three-piece suit who was there with me, who we were doing the introductions. And he and I and Henrik were the track designers and we looked at these nine domain, these nine areas as things that matter, but really, really important. This is one of the hardest changes for many organizations is changing the focus and putting the customer at the center of everything we do. So the why, why does this stuff? How many of you have seen this acronym before, FUKA? It's a buzzword almost. It's been around for a few years. Actually came out of the US military talking about the state that they found the world in. And it's about the volatility, the rate of change. The rate of change is faster today than it ever has been before and tomorrow it will be in the faster. It is accelerating at a truly exponential rate. This drives uncertainty. We have no idea what the outcomes are going to be, what's gonna happen in the future. Linda mentioned US politics. I happened to be in the United States in 2016, November. I was at a conference in California. Now I live in New Zealand, so it didn't directly impact me. But we were there, the conference was there over the election period. And on the morning after the election, everybody in that conference in California was in shock. It was a physical thing. They were in a state of disbelief that this couldn't have happened. The complexity in our world and within our organizations there is no simple path anymore. There are no obvious problems. If we think of the complexity models, we live in a realm where most of the challenges that we face are in that complex environment, which is why the trial, the experimentation approach that Linda was talking about this morning, the probe sense respond is so very important because we don't have a nice sequence doing root cause analysis actually is really, really hard in most of the challenges, most of the opportunities that we find ourselves in our organizations today. And ambiguity is a constant state. The lack of meaning, the lack of clarity. What is this? What is the implication of what is happening to us? A rapidly evolving dynamic chaotic, complex business environment is the norm rather than the exception. So is this true? How many of your organizations are dealing in this world of avuca as the norm today? Anyone who's not, sadly. So that means we have to change our ways of thinking because our management structures, our organizational dynamics, the way that our organizations have been built generally is not supportive of business agility because these organizations were chartered, were founded, were structured using models that work well in the 19th and 20th century predictive, mechanistic work place where the primary source of value was leveraging human labor. Today, the primary source of value is leveraging human knowledge. And that means we absolutely have to change everything about our organizations if we are going to actually survive. We have to become fundamentally responsive, adaptive, agile in the truest sense of the term. And we have to build it right down into the core. It's not something that we lay over the top. Ahpad Sidki uses an analogy that is beautiful when he talks about a transformation that organizations go through to become agile. It goes right into the DNA. He talks about adopting agile practices as a bowl of strawberries. And we see this in many organizations. We bring in these new practices, we maybe adopt Scrum, we might be doing it in marketing or in HR and it's more of human people operations because human beings that offer resources. Or we're doing it in IT and we've got these small groups that are doing quite well. They're adopting the agile practices, they're maybe even getting some of the agile mindset. And then we spread and we bring it a bit more and more and more teams. And if we talk to management, they're happy because you are becoming agile. But the fundamental DNA of the organization is the chain. A true transformation happens when we take those bowls of strawberries, we put them into a pot, we add sugar and we put them under heat and pressure and we make jam. Strawberry jam is a completely different thing to 25 bowls of strawberries. And by the way, you can't go backwards. You can't reverse engineer the strawberries from the strawberry jam. Take the sugar out. Doesn't work. And this is a commitment to change that is that significant in our organization. So it's not putting a veneer of agility. It's fundamentally changing the way we think. The core that the true DNA. So what are some of the changes we need? The computer associates who do rally software, they study these things. They've gone out and done research. And they're finding that the project management office strangely enough for many organizations has figured out that their current way of doing work doesn't work really well. That we can't predict many projects that we've got to adopt different philosophies and the evolving into an agile way of working. So PMOs are getting it. But now that's one small area. In this exploration, in this study, they looked at what's happening beyond the PMO and other departments, other areas of the business that need to change. So if we've adopted an agile delivery mechanism for product delivery, and your teams are doing really well and they are able to deploy products every two weeks if we're using Scrum and we're deploying at the end of every sprint, or more frequently if we're using a continuous delivery model. But your marketing department has a six month planning cycle and books advertising space nine to 12 months in advance. Then we've got a fundamental disconnect. If the human resource policies treat people like resources where we stack rank people and we compare them against one another. Oh, and then we tell them we're gonna highly collaborate a cross-functional team and help each other be successful. But your bonus is not dependent on being a team member. Your bonus is dependent on doing better than the other people at the end. But there's something that we have to change not just the product delivery, not just the R and D, not just the IT, not even not just the marketing, the HR, but we've got to change everything in the organization in order to bring this new way of thinking. We've got to adjust our management policies from the top down command and control to leadership at every level where we empower people to be leaders, to take ownership. There's a hotel chain in North America, a fairly exclusive hotel chain, and they have a policy. If any person in the organization, anyone in the hotel, comes across a guest who is in any way unhappy, that person is empowered to spend $2,500 immediately to solve their guest problem. There is no getting permission, going to a manager fully in three forms. It's that guest is unhappy. This is a customer who we care about. Fix their problem immediately. Oh, and by the way, do tell us what you did after it. Go, there is a form for film that says, I used the company credit card, spent $2,300, and I hired a limousine to take this person where they wanted to go. Well, that's fine. There is a, be a good corporate citizen, be responsible, and that's the key thing. We're empowering people at the edge, the people who are closest to the customer, the people who are closest, who know where the real challenges are to be responsive, to be adaptive, to take leadership, to take ownership. How many of you have been told, now do more with less? We want this efficiency focus. It's nonsense. Just do less. We know from the Pareto principle, 80% of value comes from 20% of the features in any product that you use. We know from studies in the information technology realm that look at the usage of the features that we build into our products. 68%, according to one study, 68% of the features that we build into these software products are never used. Not used occasionally, not used by one person in a thousand. Built because somebody had a requirement that never, ever, there is nothing worse than doing well. That which should not be done at all, that we're doing. How do we minimize the process? It's not about getting rid of process. What's the minimum viable process? Business rules would empower people. Linda mentioned Menlo Innovations. They have a hiring policy that when they're looking for people, their single most important factor, criteria, is not your technical skill. In fact, they don't look at your technical skills. They don't even look at your CV when they decide to hire. If you wanna come along and be a programmer, they don't even check to see that you've been right. Before they will even talk to you, they're looking to see, do you have what they call kindergarten skills? Do you play well with others? Because they have figured out that the technical skills in their environment, they can teach you really, really quickly. Because they work in a pairing basis. So, if you've got the basics of programming skills, but you have never programmed in the language that this product is being built in, well, you're gonna be paired up with somebody who does. And within a day or so, you will be picking up knowledge provided you've got the kindergarten skills, our people minimum process. We've got a keynote by Beata Povicius later today, looking at the whole beyond budgeting movements and why this matters. Get away from the annual planning cycle, which is typically 18 months to two years ahead. We're trying to predict what we're able to achieve. It doesn't. So what do we do? We produce piles of paper with all eyes embedded in it. And everyone knows it's a lie, but it feels. Change and look at what are the real-time value metrics? Not vanity metrics, value metrics. Return on investment, customer value delivered, customer engagement, stake up, employee engagement. Outcomes driven metrics. The things that are hard to measure and that are often very embarrassing over the really simple things to measure. Velocity. How many of you use velocity as a measure of delivery of something in your IT program? What does velocity tell you? It might tell you that you've been busy. How many times have somebody come to you and said we need to increase our velocity? Really simple way to increase velocity. Double the number of stories in the story. I've just doubled my, increased my velocity, 100%. I have done nothing different than that is based around these, these one, two, three, even six, nine year project. Think it back, adapt, respond. And a lot of this is about changing the way our organization is structured. You're just gonna talk about how we have to do that. So it's kind of embarrassing to sit in, to do a talk like this with somebody like Steve and in the room because you're talking to the people who've written the books about the books they've written. But Steve talks about the, these three laws. The law of the small team moving away from bureaucracy and hierarchies into small, cross-functional, outcome-focused teams. Putting the customer at the center, the law of the customer. Customer delight is the single most important metric for your organization. It's the purpose that your organization exists for. And moving away from, again, bureaucratic structures to networks where teams can, teams of teams can collaborate. So these are big shifts for the organization. To do that, we've got to change a lot about the way we think. We start with one of the most important characteristics, psychological safety. This is the output of Google's Project Aristotle, where they look to see what makes a successful team in the Google environment. Now, Google is a metrics-driven organization. They measure everything and they automate the measuring. So they really, really can get down to the numbers. And they thought, going in, the premise, the assumption of this research was that technical skills are probably gonna be the most important factor for a successful team to do. And they were shocked to discover that that was wrong. By examining the outcomes, results achieved by the different teams and then, of course, with the psychologists, exactly what was going on. They found there were these five factors that actually make a difference. In the outcomes the teams achieve, the first one has a bigger impact than all of the other four put together. This is the concept of psychological safety. In the team environment, I am safe. My colleagues have got my back. Is how it was expressed most frequently. I can take a risk if I make a mistake. I'm not gonna be attacked and belittled. I'm gonna be supported. I'm gonna be cared about by my colleagues, by my friends. That single factor was the biggest contributor. And they were able to measure the numeric, the monetary impact of this. They looked, one group that they looked at were the sales teams. And they founded the sales teams where psychological safety was in place. Those teams that had psychological safety in place were consistently performing at about 21% above the norm. So they had the norm, they had the average. These teams were consistently at the 21% above it. On the other hand, teams that did not have psychological safety in place were consistently performing at 19% below the average. So the difference between a psychologically safe and an unsafe environment is a 40% performance outcome in real money terms in the sales teams. They are now actively working in their organizations to figure out how do we make things safe? How do we create this environment of safety? Because that's gonna push everybody up and lift the averages. Better teams make better money. What a weird. In order to allow these changes to happen, within our organizations, we absolutely must make space for the need to learn, unlearn and relearn constantly. Things are changing. Those that will thrive are the ones that can create, embrace, generate new ideas constantly and discard the old. It's not again about doing more with less, it's stopping doing what doesn't work. It's taking the lens of waste and saying, where is the value here? Stop doing it. What could we do differently? And that means creating space, time to explore and to learn. Again, we've all heard of Google's 20% time. It may or may not always be applied, but that's that capacity to step back from the work that you were doing and think about the bigger system that you were in and just being given permission to relax and think about work rather than constantly focus on the work. And the concept of aligned autonomy, the value of empowering people to make good decisions and management's responsibility is to set goals and outcomes, but trust that we employ highly skilled technical people who know what they are doing. That's why we employed them and then we trust them to figure out the best way to achieve the outcome. Dan Pink talks about autonomy, mastery and purpose. The autonomy fact, provide clear goals to allow people to figure out the best way of doing it. And when you've got these highly creative, cross-functional, collaborative teams, they will amaze you with the outcomes that they achieve, with the creative ideas, because we've also started to figure out that all of us are smarter than anyone else. And in that safe environment, we can actually achieve. But I touched on vanity metrics earlier. We need to stop measuring the wrong things. We need to change what we look at, what are the metrics, what are the outcomes that matter? It's not how busy you are. It's not how many story points you deliver. It's how many customers purchase the product because of this new feature. It's how delighted we're your customers. It's how engaged are your people. It's what's the quality of the product, what is the value you are delivering? How rapidly are we learning and changing as an organization? Metrics kill us. And this is an example of a metric that literally killed an organization. This is an airline that I used to do a lot of business with a number of years ago. We sold, I had a company and we sold airline back office administrative systems. And one of the things that airlines do and have as a target is on time performance. It really matters because you actually pay, you get penalized if you don't depart on time from an airport because those slots are quite expensive. So they had a penalty measure, a metric in the organization where the engineers were told, you've got exactly this much time to service the plane and it's got to be back and ready to go. Well, the plane went in for a regular service, one that was scheduled and they had this block of time or they were getting close to the end of the block of time. So the engineering manager was walking around, hurry up, hurry up, hurry up, work harder, work harder, we got to get it out. So they got it out, got it to the departure gate. They loaded it full of passengers and they went to take off and took the way around down the runway, that thing that's where the whole day you see just in engine. And when they did the route course analysis, it turned out that the engineer had put one in every five volts and we could be in charge. Fortunately, the plane hadn't actually left the ground. The airline closed down and never opened again. But they did leave the on budget. And I'm not going to talk much about the on budgeting except to say, come to the keynote this afternoon. How do we make this visible? So part of this culture change is openness and transparency. And this comes from an organization in New Zealand where I'm from, Kiwi Bank. These are the walls in a room they call the sorting room. It's up on the top floor of the head office building. It's a small conference room and they hit a wall. There are all stools, all available. And once a week, the executive team get together and they talk about what's happening in the organization. Every one of these posters presents an initiative that is underway. And they look at it in terms of time frames and that's so cool. Now they've got a couple of key protocols. One of them is open to anybody in the organization at any time. If you want to know what's the big picture, come up to the 12th floor and have a look. And anyone from the lowliest post office to the chief executive can and do come in there and see, okay, what the work that I am doing? Where does it sit on these initiatives? And every single person in that organization can trace the work that they are doing on a daily basis back to something that's on the floor. And they're also empowered to say, you know what, the work that I'm doing doesn't contribute to something here. Why not? Why am I doing it? And if it doesn't, they can stop doing it. The other thing that they have, and this is part of their social protocol, is see on the, that there, that is a picture of an elephant. It's on the back of the door. And if during the conversations, they discover that if somebody feels there is a topic that is not being addressed, it's the elephant in the room. Their protocol is write it on a post-it note, stick it on the door. We will not leave until we've tackled the elephant problem. And that's a commitment that they make to each other. And it, again, it makes it safe to have those hard conversations. And in amongst this team, they have that psychological safety that it's okay. And that pervades to the whole organization. In our organizations today, this Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle's been written about since about 1935, wasn't it Steve? I think it was the Sherman cycle for around about the 1930s. Plan-Do-Check-Act, Cuda Loops. What we find in our organizations is we're really good Plan-Do, Plan-Do, Plan-Do, Plan-Do, Plan-Do. We suck at checking. We don't change direction. We Plan-Do, and we will continue that plan, L or I would. Because success has somehow been defined as, plan the book and then book the plan and any deviation from that is failure. Whereas the reality in these environments is that the Plan-Do cycle is part of a cycle that we shouldn't really explore because we check and then plan the plan. And changing our planning approach to constantly learning, adapting, responding, and remove waste. This is part of my do less. They never do more with less. They just fundamentally look for ways to do less. Don't build things that people don't want. Share knowledge. There is the old adage that knowledge is power and in siloed organizations that fruit. In collaborative organizations, the sharing of knowledge is powerful. Remove the handles. Again, the concept of a cross-functional collaborative team and cross-functional individuals. Get rid of delays. Stop, task switching. Focus on one thing. Build quality in. Test quality in place. And from the partially done work, finish what you start. Don't start easy to say. Reasonably hard to do in those organizations. So we have to rethink. We've got to find ways to respond to the speed of change, listen to the voice of the customer, empower our people, align them, stop treating people as resources to be consumed in the production of a product or assets to be sold, slavery was abolished. People are the primary source of value and innovation. Here Maria's talk is fundamentally about how to approach and change that the people people in our organization. Focus on the outputs, on the outcomes not the outputs, on value instead of busy. Think of innovation as a core competency and stop trying to predict the fundamentally unpredictable concept. Move away from it. Estimation as a constraint, as estimation as a learning factor. For the vast majority of knowledge organizations, projects don't make sense. I've got to do an advert and make it commercial here. Kevin and I are very, very close to finishing our book on a project. But this is about genuine change. It's not putting the veneer of agile on your organization. It's not doing a standing up, which is micro management from head to head, where the manager wants to know just if I read it. These are fundamental and hot changes. But they don't just have a organizational level that can happen at the individual level. Because organizations are made up of people. You are. It's not an abstract thing. So it starts with changing yourself. It's examining, it's holding up a mirror and these are at least a bit uncomfortable conversations. It's looking at your mindset, lovely term. We hear it all the time. Agile is a mindset, look at that price. Your established set of attitudes and habits. When you are faced with uncertainty, how do you respond? Is it with fear and narrowing your focus? Or is it with excitement? Wow, there's something new I can learn here. If it's fear, what happens? Court as well gets released and we narrow our focus. And we don't come up with creative opportunity, creative solution. We revert to the habits of organizational cases, and then reverting back to that command. Oh, style of action. What we want to do is free and be able to see uncertainty as an individual level. The responsibility is on you to constantly learn, to be a lifelong learner. You're here at this conference. That's an indication that you're learning and that you want to learn. I hope it is anyway. Not just a matter of, well, genuinely open. The learning thing, it's a lifelong thing. At the end of every day, do you ask yourself, what did I learn today that I didn't know yesterday? What assumption that I had yesterday have I invalidated? The answer is nothing. Please be disappointed. Become passionately dissatisfied. The status quo is wrong. The way we did things yesterday is probably the way we should do them tomorrow. When you get the do more with less, stop. Actually just think about where's the list? What can I stop doing? What can I do that is new and different? Make ownership, make responsibility for your own growth of yourself and hold your colleagues accountable. So ask that question in the daily stand up. What did you learn yesterday? Who is your customer? And it's not the manager who signed the project approval. There is somebody whose life is changing because of the work that you do. What do you know about that person? How much do you care about that person's needs? If you don't know who that person is, if you haven't met that person, go and find them. Have a conversation with them. Find out how their lives are changed by the work that you do. And then become fanatical about approving them. Everything is a trial. Everything is an experiment. Open up to learning. Then just talk this morning with beautiful and that it really is this concept of the hypothesis that we're trying to test. The trial we want to do, the learning that we want to achieve. Yeah, maybe it's not safe to talk about failure in your organization. I hope it becomes such. Because that's the honesty. What is that experience? And the responsibility is on nobody but you. You can do it. You can choose to do it. You can choose to ignore it. It's not the senior executive in power. It's you making the decision. Yes, I can do it. And that change has paid the price of all the money that we can achieve. In turn, fooka. It's something really inspiring and positive. Vision. The intent to create an exciting and compelling future. Understanding, learning, hearing, feedback. Clarity. Making sense. In the concept in this concept world. And agility is responding to change in order to profit with that ability to inspire. So that that rapidly evolving dynamic chaotic business environment is actually a source of advance. First of all, you want to use that experimentation learning approach and find the quick wins. Find the small outcome. The things that are getting better. So you want to identify the outcomes and the metrics that are going to matter. So maybe it's customer engagement or it is profitability or quality of the product or employee engagement. So what are the metrics that matter? The things that are hurting at the moment. And then do the small experiment to see well we believe that if I do this, that's going to improve. Does it improve? Yes, it does. Okay, so now I can report we tried this, it improved that factor. What would we do next to improve that factor a little bit more? And if it didn't work, well that's great because you've made the trial frugal using Linda's advice from this morning so that the cost, the investment required in doing that experiment, doing that trial is low. So it's the constant feedback to leadership and management to the various areas of the organization saying this is what we're achieving through this process. So it's not a matter of they're waiting years to see outcomes they're starting to see outcomes and frequently we're starting to see outcomes within weeks of bringing in some of these. As you mentioned, we need to change these structures in the organization. Even if we change these structures first of all it takes a lot of time to change these structures. If you go to new structures so one of the things which I have found useful in my work is virtual teams are forming and dissolving. So if you can treat and use them as self-organizing cross-functional teams agile teams and really take the benefit of that it helps to go across the cellos without tipping down the cells. So the one pattern from software engineering is the concept of the strangler pattern. One small piece at a time replace one aspect one area make that change then do the shift then the next and the next and the next. So yeah, incremental you don't have a different view on that we'll hear about that with sociocracy because sometimes in organizations it actually takes somebody to have to do a radical change. And sometimes sometimes an approach of course the effect of the resilience Question about the engagement with the customers today what is the way we deliver value in terms of an outcome-based strategy the payment models if you look at today the contracts when I say contract is not necessarily in full contract the way of payment models that exist customers that milestone boost but when you talk about business agility if I do a traditional approach maybe there are 3 or 4 milestones in payment now with the business agility coming into picture with the engineering delivering and more frequent cycles what should be the model there is there any position I'm going to do it, it depends again but there are contracting models that support progressive commitment engagements Daniela Benefield has written a book called flexible contracts where she actually looks at different legal aspects different contracting models that support different ways of engaging with customers in that contract structure but the fundamental idea is progressive commitment thin slice delivery coupled with either milestone based or thin slice payment but again it's a shit I think we are out of time so thank you very much folks last question thank you first of all for this amazing session so my question is on one of the slides you mentioned about changed imperatives wherein it talks about long-lived teams now as we know in the agile world we talk about having virtual teams which come together to work on a particular project or basically on developing certain services and these are teams which are there for a particular period of time now when we talk about having long-lived teams over virtual teams how are we talking about being agile here I am going to do an advert read our book when it comes out our fundamental message is the project structure is broken that what we build in knowledge worker organizations is products and products are fundamentally long-lived so if we have a group that builds a product and they pass that over to another group to look after it there is no care about the quality of the product that's one of the key things so it becomes a phase two it becomes the other group's responsibility whereas if you have long-lived product teams they are responsible for both building, maintaining, supporting that product it's basically project versus product project versus product and as a general rule today in knowledge worker environment projects are a bad idea