 Hi everyone. I have a confession to make. I'm a recovering Olympian. Are there any other Olympians in the room? Doesn't come as too much of a surprise. But I'm 25 years after I'm still recovering after having spent most of my life in professional sports. What I do today is entirely different but also not because I'm an agile coach and I design and I create teams for the high performing and I believe that I'm qualified to do this because I have been part of high performance teams. I represented Austria in a 1992 Olympics and I played handball. Anyone have any idea at all what handball is? Wow amazing. It won't spare you from watching a little video later on anyway. But good that you know. I played handball in the Olympics and then at some point I realized I had to grow up and when I did I started working with companies like these. Most of those are in the Southern Hemisphere because I live in New Zealand but some of them you might have heard of such as Sony Ericsson or Weta Digital. This is not cricket. This is handball and while it's widely unknown probably in India but also in the UK the US basically in a country that speak English don't play handball. It's the second largest sport in Europe right after football and people have professional leagues. We have professional players and you can make quite a good living playing handball. For those who don't know yet what handball is I want to play you a video which is about a minute and 30 seconds. Enjoy. If you do want to do professional sports it's really important to start at an early age. This is me doing sprint resistance training when I was really young. Also my parents realized that it's really important to stretch and to be tall when you want to play handball. It kind of worked out. Yep. It could be like when that's me and my dad and my grandparents. I grew up being a complete sports geek. It was what I did. It's what I love doing and what I did every single day when I get home from school and I think having been a sports geek makes it easier for me to relate to software development geeks and I found a community where I thought people are actually quite similar. They're like tightly into one thing and they love what they're doing and it's their lives and we all lack social skills. That's another thing. My idea of a perfect holiday at the time was touring Europe and playing at youth tournaments. It was really really cool and one of the things that has done to me was very early on it instilled a sense of joy of achievement. I love being good at something. I love the element of mastery and I love let's face it winning. It's pretty cool and that's something I've kept all my life. What I haven't kept is the pink jersey but it was the 80s. It's my excuse. And everything I have achieved at any age I have achieved as part of a team. There's no such thing as a single athlete achieving things on their own. And there's achieving things as a team. You're part of a team but you still have to achieve mastery in your own right. And what you need to do in order to achieve mastery is like in software development you need to become a professional. And that's exactly what I did when I turned 17. This is what they do to you when they ask you to pose for a photo for this little signature card. You're definitely not allowed to smile. But when I turned 17, handball really became my life. When you play handball you train twice a day. You don't do this as a side job. This is your job. This is my first team in 1986. We're a three-time European champion. We played in the European Champions League. And one of the things I learned from early on is that professional sports is an exercise in pain management. As I said, you practice twice a day. And I don't know if any of you have done this but you do uphill sprints until you vomit and you do and then you do five more. It's all doable by the way. But what it has taught me is that whatever pain I felt in companies I work with today, it's not that different. Sometimes I'm facing the pain of a startup where we really don't know are we going to have jobs tomorrow. This is all going to end in month because we run out of money. And sometimes I face the pain of bureaucracy, of going at a speed that I perceive as being really, really slow. And playing handball has taught me how to manage that pain. And also like software development, professional sports has big fat lie. What for us in software development is phase two. In professional sports is active relaxation. There is no such thing. It's what they tell you when you're supposed to take a day off. They chase you up a mountain to increase your blood cell count. And really it's nothing to do with that relaxation. Very much like phase two in software development that actually never happens. So all of this pain got me ultimately lost to the Olympic Games, to Barcelona in 1992. And sticking with the pain, we had the saying of no pain, no Spain. We came in fifth. And I got to say thank God, because the worst thing to possibly happen would have been coming in number four. I'm also the only person ever who regretted not getting a tattoo. Unfortunately, this is not my shoulder and this is not my tattoo. Everyone else seemed to have got a tattoo, but I didn't and I still regret it. What I got instead was a number of life lessons, a number of things that I learned and can apply now. And it's also a number of things where I needed to have 20, 25 years to pass before I could put them into perspective, because before I could manage to make things and understand how things related to each other. And I want to share with you the six key learnings that I got out of being a professional athlete. I also forgot to ask, so anyone here, even though they haven't been to the Olympics, has been a professional athlete before? Amateur level? What do you guys play? That one? Cool. Anyone else? Oh, finally. And I think the most important thing that I have learned and maybe all of you who have done team sports before can recognise this. The most important thing I have learned is how to pick my team. How you pick your team is incredibly important. And the one thing that I want to recommend is to choose a team where you are the worst player on the best team that will still take you. Why? You learn a lot. Yes, exactly. That's the way you learn. You learn from other people who are better than you. Really good teams, have the best coaches. And also you learn how to normalise high performance. You don't wake up every morning and think, oh my god, I'm going to the Olympics. Oh my god, I'm a pro. Because all of your friends, all your mates are doing the same thing. They're going to the Olympics too. And they're all really, really good at doing sports. So what you learn is to completely normalise high performance. And let me just tell you, it's not fun. For me, definitely was not fun. Because I had picked the best team that would still take me. I was 16. And I was playing with people who I absolutely couldn't relate to. I wasn't even sure what I was supposed to use the formal or informal with people who were as ancient as 25. But what you get when you stick with it, when you go through this really, really hard part where you're just the worst person on the team, is ultimately success. And I can only recommend doing the same thing in professional life. I believe it is really, really important to pick the right company, to pick on a high level the team of a company where you can learn as much as possible. And even within your workplace, to pick a team where you can learn as much as you possibly can. If you're lucky enough to be allowed to choose your own team, there are three questions I usually ask people when they can. It's what can I learn? What can I teach? And also, is this fair to my company? And if you get to a point where you can't find a place where you can learn, I believe it's time to find a different team or a different company. If you're not lucky enough to choose your own team, I've written a how-to instruction guide for how to introduce self-selection into organizations. Any of you been at my talk on Tuesday? Cool. I hope you're going to self-select very soon. And I still do this today, picking my team. And even though I'm a self-employed consultant, I still need a team. I still need a group of people to learn from. And that's what I've learned to do in an informal way. I pick a team of people, an international group of people, who I bounce off ideas with. I go to conferences and I make those connections so I can discuss ideas and concepts with people. Just a quick question. How do you guys pick your teams or companies? What criteria do you use? So is the person willing to learn or are they and are they an optimist? Is that for when you choose your own team or is that when you choose other people to be on your team? When you choose your own team, like which team you want your company, what do you choose it by? Challenges, yes. Which is pretty much the picking the best team that will still accept you. And speaking of, sorry, do you have more than one company in Bangalore? So I think if you apply it to a higher level of abstraction you probably do have a choice. I think we all have an influence in making this happen by using criteria for how to choose the companies we work for and helping the companies we work for getting to a stage where people can choose their own teams. Another thing I've learned is that it's actually really important to know when to go. There seems to be this thing that people feel bad about leaving a team or leaving a company. We all feel that we're letting other people down when we do this or we feel we don't have a choice. I believe the moment we have outgrown a team we need to decide that we're going to leave. It's nothing, we should not ditch a team from one minute to the next but it's a price is when you realise that you can't learn on this team or in this company anymore to look for a different place. And I believe that's actually okay because we're responsible to keep learning throughout our professional lives and we do this by picking the right teams with the right coaches. I also believe that collaboration is key which is absolutely nothing new that I'm telling you there. I'm also telling you nothing new telling you that it's really really hard. What I find interesting though is that in professional sports you have a meritocracy. People are chosen 100% because of the talent and their skill because of their performance and when you've got this you get a collection of people with very different backgrounds. You get people here from different classes of society people with kind of different cultures people who have different backgrounds and different levels of education different levels of intelligence. Lots of athletes are actually quite dumb but you need to work with all of those and you need to make sure that you can establish a relationship with people so you can work together. In professional life this is the same by the way this is what you do when you can't find a good picture always use cats. In professional life that's the same and I'm not sure what your diversity stats are but I used to work in Amsterdam 45% of the population in Amsterdam are not born in the Netherlands. In Auckland where I live at the moment I think it's 41%. Any stats for here 90% warning? Yeah and maybe and there's different kinds of diversity but I do think that in a tech industry if I compare this to professional sports and see how a goal and high performance results in people being really really diverse on the team and then the tech industry well we're actually not particularly diverse it tells me that most likely we're missing out on a large group of talent and we need to be better at looking for that and there's one thing that usually people talk about how great it is at startups how great it is at work because people are friends. I don't think there's anything bad about being friends at work but I do believe it's absolutely not necessary to be friends. I've played handball with people who I didn't like I've played with people who had very different values from people I thought were boring people who were homophobe people I would not have grabbed a coffee with normally but all I needed was being sure that that person is the best left wing in the world I don't care would I like them or not I want to play with them because together we want to win and there's research to back this up you guys heard of Project Oestotla done by Kulul some of you it's a four or five year old analysis or it's the analysis of data over four or five years where they look at what makes teams high performing and is there any way to predict high performance turns out there isn't the only thing where you how you cannot the only thing that's a prerequisite for high performance is safety it's making sure that you have a shared goal and that you can achieve success together that when you make a mistake you're covering each other's backs that's the one and only thing and I think that goes very well for sports teams sports teams in a way have it easier because if you've got a very diverse group of people who don't necessarily like each other but are the best want to be the best you need to make sure they have a reason to actually collaborate and that reason is a really really compelling goal in sports those are dreams you want to go to the olympics you want to be that person with the olympic torch and that helps you overcome any problems caused by diversity by the way i did this the right smoke it kills you almost but and also in professional lives we need to find compelling goals that makes people want to live to live to work together and when we do have that a diverse group of people who are highly talented a group of people with a goal that is really compelling we also need to have working agreements to make sure that we have an agreement how we can work together and achieve success together and there's a book by Bob Sutton that's called the no arse of all and i like it because basically what it states is that if you got one person who's not a team player on your team the cost is enormous and it's actually so big that he makes a really good case that you should get rid of that person we see this in sports in sports that's the player who doesn't pass the ball who's going for his or her own goal at work that's the person who hides information it's the person it's a developer who refuses to test it's the BA who refuses to learn something new and when we see this kind of behavior we need to get people to change it and ultimately if we can't we need to get rid of them because the cost or the entire group of having one person not pulling in the same direction is enormous i also believe we need to get really really good at feedback because you get this group of people and they're really diverse they need to find a way to talk to each other and by getting good at feedback i mean both giving and receiving feedback both are hugely important on a professional sports field there are two types of feedback there's instant feedback it's feedback on the field if you're on the field you need to have feedback right here and right now if i'm in full spread in this direction the third time the ball comes here behind me i need to shout at my colleague that i need the ball over there there's nothing personal in it but it's something they need to know right here right now there's no point waiting until halftime there's no point waiting until after the game and also it can't matter whether this person is junior or senior this is something that just needs to happen but then there's also the other kind of feedback and that's the delayed feedback that's the feedback off the field because sometimes you can actually wait because it's not an emergency you can wait until you give feedback in private i call it on a team having no undiscussables where you can really talk about problems and over time solve them personally i was i remember being about 18 or 19 and i thought it was a really good idea to slack off a bit and go out about town town and get pretty drunk and have fun and i thought this was just my problem until an older player took me aside and said hey you might think this is your problem but really this affects all of us when you go out and drink and you're not ready for practice in the morning this is not just your problem this is our problem and that's what i want to get to with any type of team that we can have those discussions around what's okay and what's not okay is said no undiscussables within a team and i found this really cool framework for giving feedback who of you are familiar with radical candor it's a framework that's made by maryl scott she has been and she has received feedback and out of that she has come up with a framework based on her personal experiences and basically there are two axes on feedback one is behavior where something needs feedback and you can either challenge directly or you can back off and not challenge at all then there's the other dimension which is how much do you care personally you can care a lot or you can actually not give a damn about that person and i really really like that framework because there's so many techniques around giving feedback but i think what it comes down to is what's the place that feedback is coming from and the place it should come from is radical candor where you care deeply about that person and you also bring things up directly be careful to question yourself or i always question myself before i give feedback am i just annoyed and actually don't care that much about the person that would put me into the obnoxious aggression category and sometimes i find that people care but they don't really dare to give feedback and i had a really interesting experience a couple of months ago when i asked some friends to come and give us feedback because we're a couple of people in my company we want to be better at public speaking i'd love to get keynotes and i asked myself what do i need to do and they told me well it's a little thing here and a little thing there but that's all they said but i also got the feedback that if i want to do keynotes i need to change my accent because that person really didn't understand what i was saying and i thought that's an amazing data point this is really cool to know and it is like a professional athlete getting to know that actually you need to play more of a topspin and the problem with that feedback was i didn't get it they sent this in an email to my business partner and i think there's so much damage done by having this ruinous empathy trying to protect my feelings which is actually really unfair because i can't improve and i'm not sure about your culture but in a new zealand culture in a southern hemisphere culture we're very often in the we're too polite corner where we don't say what we really think because we're trying to protect other people's feelings and while i'm at feedback receiving feedback it's equally important to consider the source because some people in professional sports we pay professional coaches and we listen to them we also listen to our teammates but also there are people we don't listen to i don't necessarily listen to a sponsor or the audience in a handball game i know also if you had any advice for me on how to throw the ball better i really like you but actually i would just go yeah whatever you probably are not qualified handball coaches and i think it's really important to actually always consider the source of feedback is this something i want to take on board is that something that's coming from someone someone who's either not qualified or where it's not coming from a place of radical candor i also believe i was going to ask you questions about this but every time i ask about feedback it's going to take an hour and a half so i'm going to tightly move that through after the presentation and i also believe that it's hugely important to never ever stop learning do you guys like learning seriously you're different from me i hate it i hate learning new things because that's when i'm back at the stupid phase that's when i have the beginner phase that's when i don't feel competent and when i'm like totally out of my comfort zone it's really hard i like when i get at the end but learning per se don't like it that much yes yes unlearning is even harder still no one really to admit that they actually don't like learning that much if i put it that way yeah i think it's important but it is really hard and one thing that i learned in professional sports is that if you learn you go 100 in you are out of your comfort zone you're trying to learn something new and there's absolutely no room when you do this when you're 100 focused to think about what you look like what other people think of you what things you should hide and how you come across so i think in order to speed up learning and to be good at learning we need to not even try to look good and put all vanity aside and stop caring what other people think so my suggestion is just to take off take your mind off the outcome and be totally in the moment and have the courage to be ugly and a beginner and not very good at what you're doing and when you do that at some point you're going to outgrow your idols in sports you get to a place where you need to take those posters off the wall where you realize that the people you were looking up to they are actually not better than you anymore they're on your team there's not that much you can learn from them anymore and that's when you realize that actually you're on your own you need to stop doing what other people have done before you need to stop looking for people or for one single person you can learn from you need to broaden your spectrum and learn from everyone but follow absolutely no one and I think in an agile world in agile companies we have an advantage because we say fail early fail often so we are all trying to get better at the mindset to put ourselves out there and fail something that annoys me very often though is that people seem to go no failed didn't work out not a big deal I think we need to fail often and early but give a shit in professional sports you try something and it doesn't work out you actually feel quite devastated you have an emotional connection the number of times I just wanted to dig a hole or a tunnel to get out of the court without being seen is huge and that emotional connection to making mistakes has helped me improve even more because then it was even more important and I worked harder on fixing those mistakes and companies there is I think we're actually getting quite good at this this is a company where currently work we have a concept called trial balloons it means everything goes and you can try something and when you try something you put something you put the sticking out in a trial balloon and some of those ideas are going to fly and some of them are going to die and they go on a fail wall so what I'd like to say is to just keep evolving there's never a point where you can actually have a stand still because as soon as you do you will almost regress compared to everyone else and if you keep doing this if you do all those things if you pick a good team if you learn from the right people and if you push yourself then what's going to happen is that you have a chance to be really deliberate about your career and in order to be deliberate about your career to try something and to fail you need to be able to do this safely and I've always had a safety net since I was a junior PLSQL developer 15 years ago I've had two months worth of salary on a bank account that I didn't touch ever it's my runaway money it's when I'm in a company doing a job that I don't like or realize I'm not learning anymore I've outgrown this company I need to leave I know that I don't need to worry about quitting my job I can do this and safely assume within two months I can find another job is that something that also holds true here or what's the market like here yep content yep yes yeah I call it my bugger off money contentions in money is probably more proper too I should have thought of that and what that does is that I know whenever there's something that feels risky and exciting and I feel I can learn I know I'm totally in the right place and I can make a good judgment call because I don't have to worry about endangering my life or not having any food on the table so I believe doing all this will get you to a really really good place people will want to work with you and that's how you get the really good gigs and you will have the emotional agility to be really good at what you're doing and to get a really good career that's satisfying sports has certainly made me who I am today I have absolutely no regrets and I'm happy that I have learned a lot and at least it has also prevented me from becoming an Austrian fashion model and leaderhosen which I think is good for the world just to sum up here are my tips to be world-class pick your team wisely no one to go collaboration is hard but it's key be good at feedback never stop learning and be deliberate about your career what about to say thank you no one has made this sign yet so I believe we have some time for questions so my questions my questions two parts one is do you find yourself longing to kind of try and recreate that or in a bit of a withdrawal and knowing that like it's very difficult to get there again and two is that yeah because I'm really good when people ask two questions okay that I forget the second one okay now is the first one you ask cool uh yes totally it's what I miss all the time once you have been on that level you miss it because it's amazing but I also know how much work there's involved in doing this and it's one of the reasons why I do public speaking it's very similar it's the closest I can get because it's real time nobody cares if I can deliver this talk tomorrow or the day before and it's something where you're a bit there doing something right now right here in front of people which is cool and there's some elements of mastery that you can achieve and I know I'm nowhere near an Olympic level of doing speaking but it's the fun being kind of a beginner intermediate person again thank you this the second part to that was working with people who haven't experienced who don't know what that feels like does that make it difficult to relate sometimes to that you're you're striving for this and they have no idea of that this this feeling exists or with that with that's like is that kind of strange relationships at times yes yes I think like any experience this has been this is my story this has been normal to me so empathizing with people who have never ever done this is hard and I'm trying hard to do this and I'm trying to find ways to relate to them what real really good teamwork could be like what mastery could be like and what it could feel like and sometimes I managed to move them a bit in conversations and through working with them in a team sometimes we're just so on different planets that I don't manage to do that okay how did I make the transition from Olympian to software developer first of all what happens is old age at some point you get a stop and I've seen many athletes who turn 35 and they have to stop and they work in a pizza shop and there's nothing wrong with working in a pizza shop if that's what you love doing but they didn't so I knew I needed to do something to make sure that I wouldn't end up like this so I just decided to stop age 26 and I went to uni and I did a master's degree in computational linguistics and got out in the year 2000 didn't know what I didn't know so told everyone I was amazing they should give me a job and then I learned on the job awesome another question that I had was so you know even I have when I worked in that team they use a lot of sports analogies to you know motivate the team and you know try to draw parallels but ultimately you've actually been you know on the ground how how similar or different do you really think that you know we draw some sports analogies but ultimately do you really think that they're software development and playing professional sports are they really that similar that we try to you know sometimes tell our teams I think in some aspects they are in others they're not and the things that I was just talking about they were the ones I experienced are the same and have been the same for me in software development teams as in handball and there is a gazillion things that are totally different but those are the things that I think are a commonality and where to me it's not an analogy but actually the same thing just applied in different contexts okay all right thanks any other questions so it's a kind of continuing the earlier question while we draw you know analogies between professional sports and software development I mean there's one one slide in your presentation where you said about fail early and fail fast but I mean I was all thinking that in professional sports is failing an option because you lose one match you're out of the entire thing right I mean it's always right the first time in every game has to be your A game I mean I don't think we I mean at least that was my understanding that we don't have that option of failing in in professional sports so I believe we do and I think it's how you define failure and I don't particularly like how we use the word failure because to me it sounds catastrophic if you replace it with making mistakes you make a gazillion mistakes on a handball field I made a gazillion mistakes that I know about doing this presentation we all do that all the time but none of those are endangering the whole thing so I can make mistakes and I will make mistakes on the field and we can still win the game and sometimes you make mistakes that are so big that you actually lose the game but life doesn't end there are more games you might still make the next round in a tournament and even if it's the Olympics okay it's a really bad failure four years later there'll be another Olympic Games yeah so it's a kind of extension of what you just said so what do you do to recover from that like logically you know there are more games but when you have a really bad day you're completely down and you feel you don't want to ever do this again so what do you tell yourself in that situation and how do you get back to normal and play the next game that's a really good question because it is quite horrible when that happens and what worked for me is the going away going all then feeling I am the worst player in the world I should not play handball I'm never going to amount to anything at all go through that and that might last max a day and then having a role myself then I really need to get myself together and just look forward is there anything I can learn about this from what I've done yes cool apply it if not just move on but after a day just move on and look forward sorry I had a question not question actually just a confirmation so as to speak so be it this professional sport or be it a software development or any aspect of any professional life are we talking about the underlying human interactions and human principles and the behaviors and then we are trying to tune that up to a certain level so that regardless of the profession that you choose those underlying factors are always present in you is my understanding or correct in that way I don't know if it's correct or not but I would agree take a last question there is always a coach even though the excuse me the players are already pros so can you draw an analogy I mean a parallel between yeah it's a role of the coach in software development versus professional sports I think there's a huge difference there that's one of the huge differences in professional sports you always have a coach and you practice and I think that's one of the places where any analogy probably falls down in software development we need to learn from other people and that can be well it can be a coach it can be any other people you work with it can be books it can be more informal and very often you don't just have a coach but many people you learn from is and I think sometimes like I'm an agile coach as I call it but basically it's being around and helping people learn something some of it is coaching some of it is just having conversations and I think being a professional on a team it can be useful to have a coach but I think they're also really good teams software development teams who don't have a coach that makes sense thanks