 So, my name is Siraj and thank you very much for coming to my talk and workshop. And so for those of you who are curious about the format, it'll be about maybe 10, maybe 15 minutes of conversations and questions session. And then after that it's all exercises. We'll close about 5 minutes before to do like a debrief about what we learned. So, the kind of work I do is called containering and I will explain that. It comes from a Greek word called Temenos. Temenos is an island far away from the Greek land where the Greek gods would go for their personal transformation. So the work we do is primarily with executives and leaders who are in a state of personal transformation while their organization is going through enterprise or even agile transformation. And so when we work with them, we are basically trying to improve their Temenos skills or what we call as their ability to do containering and I will show that in a few minutes. Next slide please. In a nutshell, what I've learned in about 25 years of working with maybe about 2,500 executives and leaders across the world is that unless there is a sense of personal accountability and responsibility, the leader will not step up. There is enough space, mechanism and excuses for a leader to hide himself or herself in an organization. Basically, an organization poses two life challenges to a leader, either step up or hide. And the Temenos work is about bringing this person out from hiding into the light. And so we'll see how that happened but before that I love this quote by Voltaire. What he says is, no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible and believe me most of the agile transformation that I've seen everywhere but especially in India and Asia Pacific have this quality from the leaders. No one really wants to step up and say that this is mine and if something goes wrong, this is my fault. So get ready for this. This is one of the exercises in place, a very interesting exercise that I play with all my executives so you'll get an experience of that. Next slide please. How does it start? There has to be a start for all these executives. And among all the pictures and slides and everything that I took, I think this represents the start for best. This is the baby leader. This is your boss. Maybe this is you or maybe this is the owner of your company or the CEO or whatever. He or she loves to play with large animals, large systems or what we call as large containers. That's the first thing we get when we study these leaders and you'll see how we study the leaders. So we have a profile of about 2,500 leaders now and when we study them what we find is that in their childhood they didn't like to play with small things, they like to play with big things. This is the relationship that they establish and when they begin, they begin as children who know how to play with these large systems. They have a lot of talent and it's all natural and what we call as innate. They don't need to be taught how to play with large systems. And then something goes wrong. Something goes wrong and it's possible it's nature, nurture, competition, greed, whatever but this is the state we find them in. Almost every leader that I've worked with before transformation is in this state. There is an external shell that's very strong and courageous but inside this is the leader that I worked with. This is the human being that I worked with. Basically they know that they have messed up the system and that the system has messed them up. The relationship between the leader and the terminal is what we call unclean. And so we help them in cleaning this relationship through another exercise that's called the clean slate exercise. We'll try to do pre-exercises today if possible. So I'm going straight into the situation now. The leader is suffering. That's really who we are. You might have worked with the leaders and you might find that they're not responsible. They're not stepping up. They're arrogant or whatever. But inside these human beings are just like you and me and they're suffering. They're suffering of multiple, you know, ills and diseases but one of the biggest ones is guilt. And that's because they have seen themselves in a vision where they're able to work with a large system. When they're not able to match their vision and their dream, it produces much more guilt than anything else. Next slide please. And what we have found is that for a leader to be a good servant leader and a good agile transformation sponsor, they actually have to go through that. You know, Rich Sheridan talks about how he broke his heart and then created joy in him. Every leader goes through that. It's that depth that they go through. They find themselves and then they come up. When they come up, they come into a state that we call union. It's a state that they can only experience inside but they cannot share it with you. They know it but they don't know how to say it. When we meet leaders, we wait until they find union. This is the state of readiness of leaders that you can work with. If the leaders don't have union, you can bring any methodology you want. You can bring the best leadership coaches and enterprise coaches until they're ready. They will not be in a state to work with you. And we find that agile brings about union for all the leaders. It's a faster way of bringing them into their own personal transformation. And that's really the beauty of, I think, where we are. We find agile as an excuse for personal transformation. Agile is the reason for the personal consciousness. Hi, guys. For the personal consciousness and the personal transformation of leaders. I want to introduce Ellen here. Ellen was actually in my first talk about this in 2010. Thank you, Ellen. You're back here after six years. So these leaders, they go about doing things. And it looks like they are intentional and they have a direction. And they know where they want to take their life. But my experience tells me they don't know. What they do know and what they're doing subconsciously is going toward union. They are subconsciously doing things, working in companies, job hopping, going to classes, calling in love, having kids, whatever, making mistakes, making companies profitable and bankrupt. But it seems the real purpose of this activity is to make them face themselves and experience union. It's through union that we find the good leaders begin to understand what is their role. And their role is to offer supplication. So this is the same picture. You can imagine those big cows and the bull that I showed. And that's the leader. But the stance of the leader is completely different. If you remember in the other picture, the first one, the kid was facing the cow. In the second one, the man and the bullfighter, he is in a state of regret and guilt. But it's the third step after union of being in supplication that the leader really understands how to work with the feminists. It takes these three stages of life and of experience. It's when they come to the state of union and then supplication is when we can work with them because now the leader has started doing what we call as continuing. So if Susan and others can draw the same diagram in other places. So this is the leader. They've gone through those three stages that I described. Now they are beginning to do what we call as building containers. That's the maturity of leaders we are looking for. The best leaders, they can create the largest container. When you say this leader has gravitas, presence and charisma, it basically means that this leader can build a virtual container that goes all the way around. So we look for two things. We look for the shape of the container and we look for the face of the container. A good leader who is mature, or she can build a container, a virtual container around this entire room. So that's the shape and build it fast, that's the face. Those are the two skills we are looking for when we select, like most companies come to us to help them select agile transformation sponsors. So we interview a bunch of people. And this is what we are looking for. How quickly can you fall down? How quickly can you experience union and understand that your role is supplication and the way you are going to offer supplication is through container. So we put them in various situations and it doesn't matter what it is. It could be a release planning, demo, retro, daily standard, whatever. What we want to see is how you build the container, that's the shape and how fast you build it, that's the face. Good leaders are able to include everyone in their container. So now good leaders are about inclusion and exclusion. So we watch out for that. Those leaders who have this tendency to exclude people, they are still immature in their containering practices. We would not recommend them. Those leaders who are really open to everyone and are able to build that container all the way abroad. In order to do that, we have found the secret. The leaders have to begin their sentence with, it's my fault. It's magic, it's magic. And I'm going to give two examples of leaders, actually one example of one leader and one example of the whole set of leaders who essentially started the day that it's my fault that this is broken. When they own it, the container expands. When they're able to save, the pace of the container goes faster. Let's see some examples, next slide please. This is our basic vision and agility model. We want to understand every leader and every change agent in the company. So that's all the individuals around. That's our vision lab process through which we study individuals and change agents and then come out and understand what is their vision and what is their continuing ability. Next slide please. All the leaders we work with work in a context of an enterprise that is changing. So we do not walk into a company and say that we will transform it. Our approach basically is called approaching the transforming enterprise because the company and the enterprise that we're working with is already transformed. We are going to participate in their transformation. So when we work with them, we basically tell them that our job as a terminal facilitator is to help your organization eat agile. Mark those words. Because every organization that we've worked with over a long term, maybe 10 years or so, basically takes agile, breaks it up, eats a few pieces of it and then throws the other thoughts. After some time, it's no longer agile, it's called the enterprise way. So that's what we help them do and the way we help them do that is through the executives. Next slide please. So here's an example of a leader who I would say probably created the best transformation at an enterprise level that I've seen. His name is Mike Long. I met him in 2012 when he was the transformation champion of a relatively mid-sized division of maybe about 3,000 people at a bank, Capital One. Ellen also worked there and he and I got into this coaching relationship and basically I was mentoring him as he was growing in the organization and his challenge was he had not experienced Ugen yet. He had just one step before and he needed someone to push him gently into Ugen but then he also needed someone to catch him when he falls. Do you understand that? So if you are aspiring to be a leadership mentor or a leadership coach then you've got a sense, is this person going to jump or do I need to push? Regardless of what decision you take, you have to be at the bottom to catch. It's another human being that's falling. When you catch is when you can lift. Please remember that because you're dealing with another compassionate human being who's got a lot of ideas but is looking for the right spot and maybe that right spot is you. So luckily for me I found myself to be in a very good place with Mike and I was able to offer him supplication and these tools of continuing and he was ready to lap it up once he had his first failure. Eventually he ended up launching several divisions into Agile. He became the head of Agile transformation for this bank and then went on to do great things. We are still great friends. I've got a lot of people who are good friends at Capital One and I think they're doing good things. But I think the lesson he taught me was how easy it is to get into Ugen and then supplication and then begin your meeting with it's my fault. It was classic. When he started doing that, everyone in his team started doing that. So a lot of his people are here. You can see that. You can see Susan Gibson over there. You can see some of these people. Where is Matt? I was talking to you about people from HSBC. He's gone. He's there. There are some people from HSBC there because Capital One had just bought HSBC at that time. All these people, they're trying to learn how we can work with each other in a state of Ugen and supplication. So we began teaching them these continuing skills and it was just a remarkable experience. Next slide please. As I said, I'm just going to give a little bit of ideas to you and then we'll do some exercises. All right. This is a small company which is now worth more than, say, about 200 million. It's LeanKid. I started working with the leadership team of LeanKid when there were these four people. Exactly these four people. So I took them through all those processes that I was describing earlier and then helped them to build these continuing skills and again the same thing. It's my thought. It's like a magical mantra that just opens up people's hearts and makes them compassionate towards me. We'll talk more during the Q&A, but next slide please. All right. Are we ready for the first exercise or do you have any questions? Questions or exercise? Yes. Just say your name and be loud because there are a lot of people. Hello. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen cases like this and basically when a leader comes into this state. Right? So this is the state before Eugene. They have done amazing work, but they have complete destiny. Okay? They take two paths. The best leaders go into the path that we are describing, which is Eugene, supplication, and then continuing. The other leaders do what you're doing, which is I want to push back away from this. I don't believe this is my state. I believe this is my state. And they go back into a life of comfort. The magic happens in this company. The magic happens when they go into this, when the bullfighter becomes the bull, is when he and the bull can play with each other and not hurt each other, they just enjoy the game. Okay? Yeah. So most executives that I've worked with are problem makers. We call them anomaly and change agent, but it's how they channel that problem and that energy of the project. Okay? One more question and then we'll do some exercises. Anyone? No? Last chance? Okay, good. All right. So what I said was the skill we are going to acquire is the skill of continuing. Okay? So you're an individual leader and you're going to start practicing how to build your containering skill. You're focusing only on two things right now. The shape of your container. Okay? That's as broad as you can go. And it's not reduce the scope. Okay? Know your presence. Know your gravitas. Okay? The second is space. Why space? Because you're in an enterprise. It's big. It's large. And it's going to happen right in front of you. Okay? So in order to do the continuing exercises, we'll do two right now. And then if possible, we'll do three. We've got to look at the next exercise. We should just go back to the exercise. Okay? Yeah. All right. So Rumi said tell your cleverness and buy development. Okay? That's what good leaders do. That's how they build their container. In order to build your container, you've got to let go of something. And then you've got to acquire new skills. Okay? So I will break down how we do it. It need not be how you'll do it later on. But for the purpose of exercise, the way you buy development is you do three things. You acknowledge, you appreciate, and then you admire whatever container you have. Right? That's when you can start to begin building the container. Okay? You cannot build a container if you don't admire where you are or appreciate or acknowledge. So for those of you who are looking to improve your skills as an executive leader, it's important to really fall in love with that container, to fall in love with that enterprise. Okay? So you have a table facilitator in every table who's going to help you with this. You'll time it maybe, you know, there's how many time in the back? You know, maybe about five minutes initially. All right? Three steps. Acknowledge, appreciate, and admire. Okay? Easy? Is the exercise easy? All right. So now the way you're going to do it is three steps. Introspect, visualize, and articulate. There are a lot of pads that tend in front of you. You're going to talk about your home container, whichever one you take. That's the container you want to change. If you are an executive, then take your company. But if you're more interested in personal life, then take your first piece. That's your basic context or the container. Then you're going to introspect on two or three things. What is it about my container that I want to acknowledge, appreciate, and admire? Okay? And then you're going to articulate within your table. It's a table exercise so that it's, you know, intimate and small. Introduce yourself. Say hello. You have a facilitator on your table to help you. And we'll give you five minutes. If you need more, we'll come back to you. All right? Let's go. All right. Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment. Let's go. Don't kill yourselves after this class. All right. So who wants to present? I have one nice case here. Do you want to present? Okay. Listen. What is your name, please? Vivek. Okay. Let's listen to Vivek. So talk into me. Yeah. Come close. So, I mean, I look at my company as a son, which is trying to go, just trying to come up. But there are mountains in front of us, which is where you can see a lot of things from the sun and you can't see the light. And I'm close to the planet coming up, because one day it will come up and you see a bunch of clouds there over and a bunch of clouds. That's why I see, I mean, I admire that it will come up out there or maybe today. All right. I'll also share with you his picture and you can come and see this. That's the reason why we have those three steps, I said, introspection, visualization and articulation. Every good container creator is a visualizer. Remember, I was asking you about your drawings, right? Every good leader knows that he or she will not be able to communicate the full picture by word. There has to be a visualization. All these guys' examples that I showed you, Mike Long, he would draw all the time. You know, most of his presentations were stupidly doodles and things like, look at this funny cloud and, you know, mountains. Great work. Please give him a hand. Okay. Do we have one person there? Who wants to show up? Oh, my God. Okay, come on. Let's see. We'll do one or two more, okay? Because we've got to go to the next one. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. Fantastic. So the best leaders that I know, they talk to their organization. Believe it or not, they talk to their organization. When they have experienced this youthful application and continuing, they are able to have a dialogue with the enterprise. And the dialogue, the first part of the dialogue is this one. You are beautiful. I admire you. And then the next part is the one that we will go to. It's a very, very beautiful and gentle exercise. So if you're able to play, then play. And if you're not interested, relax and watch. Next slide. So the next exercise is basically something that some leaders play and some leaders don't play. It depends upon the amount of depth of their personal content. We call it the snowflake exercise. So what you're going to do is again in the same container and again with that same container that you admire. That's the relationship. There has to be admiration for this exercise to work with you. You're going to again do the same three things, introspection, visualization and articulation. When you articulate, you'll have to draw a picture if you can. When you articulate, your sentence should begin like this. It's my fault. And then something. Like in this case, you know, you might come up with, it's my fault that the organization has still got these clouds over it. We still have all these challenges that we've been talking about for 10 years and it's my fault. You got it? Easy, right? All right. Five minutes now, please be gentle on yourselves when you do this. It's like a retrospective for self. All right. Let's do it. And then if you have time, we'll do the third exercise. Come on, please. Let's go. One sec, please. Before I go into the presentation, two things to caution you if you're going to do this exercise on your own without training with one of us. First one, if someone is saying it's my fault, be gentle. Don't allow people to say, yes, it is. Okay. So just be careful with that. And then the second one, this is the more dangerous one. Don't do, it's your fault. That's not this exercise. Everyone can do that, you know, blame culture. You know, that's the anti-agile. In agile, we share the responsibility for whatever is not working. And then be gentle on yourself. Okay. I have one or two volunteers. Would you like to come along? Okay. Come into me. Again. So, yes, yes. So, should I go ahead? Okay. So, it's my fault that I did not get on the chain by the bandwagon early on even when I was performing at the company. So, I knew how things happened. But then, you know, I was waiting for the big bang thing, you know, let's bring out the bigger change. So, what I did is, you know, I started taking a small step and then I was able to break the barrier for the blockers to just stop it. So, now it's a new reality, you know. So, this is my draw. That's more. Do we have any more volunteers? Come on, Rishi, come on. Sir. Sir. So, I have a picture of a person who is standing on a cliff and is trying to jump high up there. And the text is both, it is, it's my fault I was slow in noticing the change the nature of what my team was doing after. And I continue to use my old ways of searching to solve a very different new relationship and that whole process, I think, has led to a lot of turnouts and that's known from my observation. I could have made this earlier. You know, it takes courage to do these things. Okay, do we have another volunteer on this side? Yeah, come on, come on, come on. Let's go fast. So, I would say it's my fault that a lot of liberty was misused as a privilege, a de facto privilege that I have ended up in a highly bureaucratic environment. So, the picture of fear, it says, I've been going that way all around. And now there's so much of policemen around one person that it becomes so difficult to even do something like that. Thank you, sir. I really appreciate that. Last volunteer. Come on, come on. So, it was some unknowns and assumptions were always there. So, I have planned all the things, the release and all those things, but as we know that resources are like, we cannot define so, they ask for vacations and all those things. So, for that the project has to suffer. So, that is the one thing I noted down and the next project I made a list and added on that thing. Thanks a lot. All right, this will take you exactly two minutes, right? After you've done your admiration and the ownership of the problem, you can now ask for permission. Good leaders, as I said, they talk to the enterprise. They ask for permission before doing the change. So, come on. It will take you two minutes to write down. Please give me permission through. Then you can define it. Okay, come on, let's go. You already did it. Oh. Okay, just two minutes. We don't have enough time. Yes, maybe. One sec, one sec, one sec. Yes, please. Sure. Sure. Which is asking for permission in a different way. Okay, let's do it. And then I'll take one or two volunteers for this exercise. All right, let's start. Who's got an example? You're ready? Okay, please just introduce yourself and give your permission example. No, no, no. Too many people. All right. So, I'm Abhishek Mansar. I'm from Fidelity. I'm putting across, I will state both the statements because those scores, hands in hand. So, it's my fault that even after trying my level best, the team still is struggling to adopt complete agile. And I request your permission and support to guide your best, better, and work with you to the next steps. Whoa. Fantastic. Who's next? Yeah, just pass the mic, please. Ajo, Ramesh, come on. Let's do it. We start with the fault part. It was my fault that we did not set expectation with our customers right up front. And I started working on projects as per the contractual agreements. Now, I need your permission to bring a change wherein we adopt more of agility all across throughout the ecosystem where our contracts, our work, and expectation setting is up front with the customer and also our internal teams so that we can do better job for our customers with higher value delivery and satisfaction. Thanks a lot, Ramesh. Great. Go on the three exercises. One is the admiration exercise. Second is the exercise to declare yourself in a state of fault. And then the third one is to ask permission. All right? That's all that we have. Do you have any questions first? Yeah. Come on, Alok. Permission part. You know, I've done it a few times already. I gave this example over here. This was the entire leadership team and then the previous one was I just gave the leader and gave it his own team. People are always ready to confess if you provide them a safe container. And if you are that change agent who's facilitating, it depends a lot on you. Are you ready for this? Are you ready to admit your fault? Are you ready to ask for permission? So, you know, the quality of enterprise transformation will always be as good as the quality of the change. If you can improve yourself, I bet you will be able to take the leadership advice. Thank you. Thank you. Next question. Yeah. So, how are you handling that? Not sometimes. You will always get the lead. You know, and it's always a state of imbalance because you're always going to fall and then pick yourself up. That's the resiliency factor on Agile. It's true for the company and it's true for the executive. It's true for the leader. I feel we are very harsh on leaders. We don't give them a chance to fail. We don't give them a benefit of doubt. Like, they're always expected to be perfect, which is impossible. Yes, Rishi. The leaders of the top have an extremely political construct which is extremely cutthroat. So, while I think somebody accepting his fault and coming out and saying, I want to make this change, how many organizations' ecosystem do you think will support it? Because currently the biggest issue, which I see, I currently work with an organization where we have, I like those leaders. I think they have done an extremely good job to reach where they are. But they just, even when they know what errors they are making, it's very difficult for them to come out and open and say, okay, I have made this mistake or I would like to correct this. Because the political construct, the whole ecosystem would not let them do that. But you just saw an example of multiple people saying it's my fault. And I just gave you an example of one person and a small team, but we actually work with the whole company and we get the whole company to do this. In one company we used to call it, it's my fault Friday. You meet on a Friday, in a agile team, you basically do a retrospective every week or two weeks or whatever. This is how we begin. It's my fault that this happened. And then we clap, we celebrate the lessons learned and move to the next one. Where, yes. That you come and say, it's my fault. It might backfire on you. Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. All the exercises that I would call are high risk, high return. All these exercises are basically high risk, high return. All the agile coaching, I would call it medium risk, medium return or low risk, low return. So if you want to up your game as an agile coach and a dedicated coach, you've got to move into high risk, high return team and then before you do the exercise, like this one, you've got to neutralize the risk. And that's what I said. It's my fault exercise. There are two things to watch out for. One is it's your fault and yes, it is your fault. So watch out for that. So you've got to prepare the work. You can't just go and do something like this. You've got to go, prepare, interview and study the people and then decide if the organization is ready for this or not. Maybe one or two questions or last, last. Okay. Yeah, please. Hello. Yeah, this workshop is about an organization leader and where they can take risk and all they can appreciate and admire and take the fault. But will it be applicable for whole company, each employee? Yeah. How it will be contributing to the organization to change transformation and all together transformation? Because single, single means person who is working at very low profile job. How he can contribute to the transformation changes within an organization? That's a good question because as you go into the theme level of the organization, I find that when agile practices are there, basic empowerment and basic ability to take decisions is not there. And I've especially found that in the themes that are offshore, the sort of like the control and the ownership is outside of the theme and the doing and the execution and even the failing is inside the theme over here. So I think your question is very difficult. It will require some really good change agents to come and transfer power in a very explicit kind of a way saying that we are now moving to self-empower team, self-organizing and self-managing team that know how to take decisions and may make risks and may make mistakes. It's a long journey that you are asking for. Here we are focused more on leaders who know how to give and who know how to let go of power. This is the beginning, that's probably the middle of where you want to go. That's it. When you leave, please give us your, it's your fault stories on the flip charts. Susan, Nelson and others are there. Thanks a lot. You've been playing very well.