 There's a lot of people, especially if you're in a good team, that would love the opportunity to help you. They actually get a good feeling, a warm feeling, by being able to help. And so by asking to help, you're giving people the opportunity to feel good about themselves. So be generous. Ask for help. Hey, what's up, everyone? This is the Optimal Tribe podcast. My name is Michael Davis, and today my guest is Jeff Watts. Jeff is one of the most experienced and respected scrum coaches in the world. He is passionate about promoting servant leadership and self-development. He has also authored a number of books, including Team Mastery, which is one we'll be talking about today. Jeff, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Michael. How are you doing? Good. All right, so let me just sing your praises on this book for a little bit. Really enjoyed it, really unique. There were some things about it that I want to mention and talk about. Well, first off, the references are really good. You reference a lot of different methods and techniques, and the references give people an option to explore those more. So it's just jam-packed with good info. The other things that you write this in, a lot of it is in a narrative-type form. And also you have these illustrated milestone cards, which help reinforce the ideas. And you also have good summaries at the end of each chapter. And so I'm just curious, how did you come up with this idea to write it this way, or why did you write it this way? Or just tell us a little bit about the genesis of this book. Yeah, so as you mentioned, it's not my first book. So I think it follows the same thread, really, as my other books, in that they're all very much narrative-based. And I think that's really just how I've really learned the most throughout my career, is through stories. I remember part of my job was training, and I always had a terrible fear of public speaking. And I had a massive respect for a trainer that I went to see once. And really, he stood at the front, and he just told stories for two days. And absolutely, first of all, just captivated the audience, but every story had a really relevant message to the course. And I thought that was such a powerful way of helping people stay interested and bring it back to their own experience. So while all the stories are based on my experience, I think there's such a generic truth to them that I think a lot of people reading them think, either I've experienced something very similar, or I can really imagine that happening. And I'm not a massively academic person. I just tell stories from my experience and other people's experience. That's good. So a lot of it's kind of autobiographical and just real events that had taken place that you experienced. It's not just made up, like you said, academic scenarios. It's something that's actually been experienced. Yeah, so in my first book, there were very much direct experiences of mine, and the coach's case book that I wrote was very much people from my own direct experience. This is more teams that I've observed and coached. So I actually took a different slant on this one, and rather than just do it completely on my own, I invited people to collaborate with me. So I had about 15 people who were. And I opened up my writing process to strangers, which was quite scary, but they were sort of taking the seeds of my experiences and saying, well, yeah, well, I experienced something similar to that. And this is what happened here. So we kind of merged a couple of stories into one. And I really liked the way that went. So while you could look at each of the stories in Team Mastery and actually see that specific story didn't happen, all of the aspects did, I just merged them into one to try and make more points in fewer stories, if that makes sense. Okay, yep. Okay, so your book kind of centers around an acronym, which is squad. Can you kind of take us through that, just kind of summarize, overview of what that means? I'm just a bit of a fan of acronyms, so I don't know why really, just one of those things. It's a little bit embarrassing, but I was found it helped my memory, I think, just right from school. I remember things like that. And yeah, so trying to capture all the things that the really, really great teams that I've seen over the years had in common. I just sort of started writing them down and clustering them and looking for synonyms and things and squad turned up, really just sort of smacked me in the face in a way. So it's not an exhausted list, but it is. It's enough of a list to say, well, if you've got these five going, there's a pretty good chance you're a great team. So the first one is around self-improvement and not saying that all great teams that I've seen actually want to get better. They don't get better because someone tells them to get better or someone gives them an improvement bonus or anything. They just want to get better instead of in their psyche. So self-improvement is definitely a common characteristic quality. They take their work seriously and they take pride in the levels of performance and it's not that they gold plate things, but they're proud to have their name attached to it. We always used to say when I used to work at BT, if you're not happy to have your cell number attached to this release, then you're not confident in your work. And so that's the kind of thread there. Unity, I think in some ways it was possibly the easiest section to write because I think most people realize that a great team has great togetherness, great bond, but in other ways, it was arguably the hardest because it's always the most surprising for me in how many teams and organizations there's not enough time spent on building up those bonds and those relationships and that strength. So unity is the third thing. The one that I think a lot of people find the most surprising, I suppose, is audacity and I find great teams that I've certainly been part of and seen. They are quite brave. They're prepared to stand out and be noticed and ask questions and challenge the status quo because often a great team will be successful in spite of the environment they're in, but that's not good enough for them because they want to change that environment so they don't have to fight the system. The system supports them and other teams and they'll take risks. They'll take gambles. They'll be prepared to fail. They'll challenge themselves and others. But finally, D stands for delivery because you can keep improving. You can have high levels of quality and you can be the most together team in the world and really, really brave. But if you don't deliver anything, you're out of the job and your company's going bust. So great teams always find a way to deliver and they enjoy delivering stuff for people. They enjoy giving people valuable stuff. That's where they get their kicks really. Yeah. Do you see that as being complementary to the Scrum values or the 12 Agile principles or do you see them encapsulating those values and principles or how do you see it in relation to those? That's a good question. I've never really thought about that. Off the top of my head, there's probably a strong overlap because I think if a team, I've worked with teams that actually use the Agile principles behind the Agile manifesto as their almost team values, if you like, and their definition of what they stand for as a team. So they've been great. I wouldn't say it's a replacement. I wouldn't say it's certainly not contradictory. It wasn't meant to be a simplification or anything like that. And yeah, I'm a big fan of asking teams what their definition of great is. So I mean, I've seen a lot and I've grouped together what I've seen into what is quite common. But I think every team is unique. And that was where the idea of the milestones came in because over the years, many people have asked me about Agile team maturity models and things like this. And I found it really hard to give them a good answer because every team that I've seen become great have taken a different path. And that's because the challenges that they're facing were unique to them. And what they did was they just worked out what they needed to do next to get better. And once they've done that, then they'd work out what they needed to do next, what was most important for them. So the idea behind the cards was that these are 50 things that I've seen pretty regularly within great teams as sort of those milestone moments, things that you look back on and think, yeah, that was actually, now we look back on it, that was a significant point in our growth as a team. We might not have noticed it at the time, but we do now. And sometimes you notice it at the time. And so that was, I think that's quite important for each team to think. What kind of team do we want to be? And then work towards that. Yeah, you talk a lot about getting teams to go from good to great. And it got me thinking, is there ever too much risk in trying to go from good to great, or maybe great to greater? So let's say you have a pretty great team, and then you're like, hey, we can go greater if we switch some people around, add a new team member. But there's also a lot of risk there, because that could really screw things up. And how do you manage that risk, or how do you deal with that type of thing? I can only speak from my experience again. I can definitely see why that could be a risk in certain circumstances. But I haven't seen it to be too great a risk in my experience. And I think the reason why is that you don't really get to be a great team without being able to experiment and to take risks with a fallback plan. So great teams take risks, but they don't take gambles, if that makes sense. So they'll bet that they want gamble, and they'll think things through, and they'll use their experience. They'll also have what I call bounce back agility, this ability to whenever they hit a roadblock or something doesn't go right, they think, okay, that's interesting, we can learn from that. And they can almost become better because of it. So I think the bigger risk really is going from what you might call mediocre team to the good team, because that's the point where you actually start needing to be vulnerable with each other, where you actually need to start trusting each other, where you actually need to take some gambles, and you haven't got that experience as a team to know whether you've got it in you to come back from that. And I talk quite a bit about trust, and it's nothing new, we all know that trust is important. But one of the things that I've found over the years is quite a lot of people assume trust to be binary. Either I trust you or I don't. And I don't think that's the case, I think there are different degrees of trust, right? I trust you to a certain degree, even though I've never met you, because I've listened to your podcast before. But would I trust you with my car keys? Probably not, no offense. So there's different degrees of trust, and the teams that are acting at sort of mediocre level, if you like, they can get away with low levels of trust, but to really start that proper journey, they need to start opening up with one another. And that's, I think, the bigger risk, where you find out where more teams fail than not. Let's go back to values a little bit. I'm just really, I've been focusing on values a lot and really realizing how important values are to a team. And you talk in your book about crafting common values for a team. I'm just wondering if you can kind of expand on that idea a little bit. And the scenario I have in my mind is clashing personal values. So let's say a team member has, he's really, he really wants speed. And the other person really wants quality. And maybe it's not just to the person, maybe it's a team, you know, maybe it's half the team values something other, the other half the team does value something else. How do you craft something that unifies the team? So this might well sound, as we say in England, quite cheesy. I don't know, would that be corny in America? I'm not quite sure. A bit trustworthy. I look at those kinds of situations as a good thing. Because I think you've got the whole team that were focused on speed, then quality would suffer. But if you've got the whole team focused on quality, then speed would suffer. But actually, I think you need those kinds of tensions within the team. I think the phrase diversity is important in team strength, I think is generally well established. You don't want everybody the same with similar opinions. You need to be able to have that composition of strengths, those complementary skills, but also there's complementary preferences with complementary mindsets. And when you don't have them, it's important to have people who are willing to almost step into them and say, all right, I'm not really normally a speed person, but I'm gonna play that role because I think that's what the team needs right now. And so yeah, there's an element of compromise, but it's not necessarily compromising halfway between both. It's being able to say that as a team, we know there will be times when speed slightly trumps quality. And we know there will be times when quality slightly trumps speed. But we know both are important. So as a team, are we happy to do what the team needs when the team needs it? So that kind of conflict, I don't think is too much of an issue. I think it's framing it. There may well be times when personal values clash and people don't get on. And I think that's really important to bring up as early as possible without judgment. It's not that that person is a bad person. It's not that that person is a bad team member. It might just be that the chemistry in that team just isn't working out and the energy needed to make it work. Possibly sometimes isn't worth it and it may be better for everybody's sake for certain people to go into another area and find a different chemistry. Yeah, that makes me think of, so I've been thinking about personality theory in teams lately, something like the big five. And there's a couple instances in your book where we kind of tangently talk about that. One is when you were talking about if you have one person who can be disagreeable on the team, they can help other team members to express their disagreeable opinions. And that's kind of counterintuitive because if you're a building team, you tend to want to look for people who are just agreeable. And the other instance was when you were kind of how you just mentioned is that some people just don't fit on a team. And so when you're crafting a team or when you're dealing with a team, have you ever looked into personality theory? Like the big five or Myers-Briggs is probably a popular one of all. I'm not a big fan, but what are your personality theory and crafting a team? So I'm a big fan of anything that will start a good conversation. And one of the stories that I tell in the book is I sent it to the other team that did use a little bit of a personality assessment, but they took it a little bit tongue-in-cheek because they knew it was an oversimplification, but there are a number of truths in there and it starts a good conversation because it starts a little bit of visibility. And if you can take it with good humor and a little bit of a reflection, a reflective attitude, you can say, yeah, that probably is true of me. And I can see how that would clash with someone who has this kind of preference. So let's just be aware of it and see if we can manage it wherever we can. I don't prescribe to taking them very literally or finding the perfect balance by taking a scientific approach to personality. I don't really prescribe to that. But yeah, I mean, I'm certainly open to anything that looks at certain characteristics and brings it up for the team to become more aware of as a unit. Yeah, that reminds me of like in sprint planning when you're doing estimates, the estimates aren't always about figuring out the time. It's really just getting the team to talk about the PBI. And you kind of would say the same with personalities. It's not, you know, you're not trying to nail down exactly the personality of the people, but what's more important is to get people talking about each other personalities and understanding each other. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I mean, I had done, I did a kind of crazy thing a few years ago. Do you know who Bear Grylls is? Like so he's like the head of the Boy Scouts. He's like a former SAS guy who's sort of become a bit famous for TV shows and books and things. And he does these sort of wild extreme things. And I booked on a Bear Grylls experience. So where you basically go live on an island with nine strangers and have to find your own food and shelter and things like that. And it was a bit of a test yourself, midlife crisis, I suppose you might call it. And so we didn't really have the luxury of going to any team building exercise or anything like this. We were thrust into it pretty quickly. Find wood to make a shelter, make a fire, you know, that kind of thing. Find some food so you can eat tonight. But given that none of us knew each other, and we had a conversation early on of, you know, we're never going to get to the point where we're perfect teammates. And we're all aware that when you're under stress, temp is flaring, you get a little bit more irritable. So let's just find out one thing that really annoys you, each of us, so that we can try and avoid that. So we're never going to be perfect teammates. But if I can do it while I can, to try and avoid that one bit really, then you know I'm making an effort and I can make things slightly better. And I thought that was a really interesting conversation to have, and that sense of, you know, getting on is great, but trying not to annoy each other is the first step, to be honest. You mentioned, you know, some team members just don't work on a team. And what if you don't have another team to move them to? Do you just fire them? Or how do you, I mean, because that's somebody's livelihood, how do you deal with that type of situation? Practically speaking, mediation. And so, but it's got to be willing. It's got to be something that person's agreeable to. And the sense of, can we agree on what a desired outcome would be? If we can agree that what we would like, the result we would like to get to is a civil slash productive team environment. We can agree we're never going to be the best team in the world, but can we be professional? Can we be respectful? Can we allow each other to do their job and contribute to what we want to contribute? And if that's agreeable, then we can get someone neutral that's respected by all parties to have a conversation about what we're willing to commit to, to give ourselves a chance of making that happen. And it's a little bit of give and take. In some cases, there's just too much history and it's very difficult to get a team environment, isn't it? To be honest, I haven't had the situation where there wasn't another team for them to go to. So I'm going to have to imagine. My imagination would be there would be some individual work that that person could do. How sustainable that would be for that individual? I'm not sure because I think they would probably feel isolated and they'd probably want to find a new environment relatively quickly. So I mean, my fear, if I can be honest with you, my fear when I first started with Scrum at the turn of the century. So I was a project manager. And my fear was that it would be the inmates running the asylum, that it would be at the end of every iteration, if all the team members would work out who the weakest link was and they'd vote them off. And I was worried that it would be sort of this sort of Lord of the Flies scenario. And I mean, thankfully it wasn't. But I do, you do have that sort of worry that can we be adults about this? And thankfully, in my experience, the vast, vast, vast majority of it, it's been, it's been better than it was. We have the odd exception. And you just need to handle that as adults and professionals as best you can. It's never pretty. You talk a lot about equality on teams and on partners, things like psychological safety. What if you have a, I know of a situation where there is a small company and there's two co-owners and those two co-owners are part of the dev team. How do you get equality there when there's always that, the owners can always fire you. They can always pull rank on you. How do you deal with that? So I have seen it and I have seen it work and I have seen it not work. And I think to me the difference is the honesty and the transparency about it. So acknowledging the realities, the relationships but also the fact that I wouldn't have seen that if those owners weren't open to the conflict of interest that they were creating by being, effectively having a dual role. And so because of that awareness, they brought in someone neutral myself to coach the team. And so I can hold up the mirror with a little bit more confidence than perhaps the more junior member of staff. And again, it's acknowledging what's often unspoken. And I think that's the most important thing. If you can get your cards on the table, so yeah, at the end of the day, if you don't like what I'm doing, you can fire me. And that's the truth, that's the reality. We're adults, let's just acknowledge that. Does that mean I can't have an opinion? Does that mean I can't challenge you? No, do I need to be respectful about that? Yeah, but I think you should be respectful about that whether the co-owner is at the company or not. So I don't, on one hand, I don't really see any difference there. It's whether that the co-owner chooses to play that trump card. And I hope I'm not belittling the point or the example, but it's not too dissimilar to just being a product owner because the best product owners that I see work really closely with the team. But everyone knows that they can call the shots on priority. And it's a case of you've got a certain amount of goodwill and the more that you use that or abuse that, the harder it's going to be to generate the enthusiasm, the buy-in and the engagement that you need in order to get the best out of an agile team. So I think there's again this sense of being an adult about it knowing that at times, this person, it's their company. So they're going to need to make some decisions that I might not like. But can I see the logic in that? Do I trust them to make the right decisions? I think, I've seen it work more often than not. So as I was reading your book, I couldn't help but think it was sometimes idealistic, like leave it to be very bad person, kind of popular over in England or what? Leave it to be very, have you ever heard of that show? It's an old black and white TV show and from like the 50s. But... There's always a happy ever after, isn't there? Right, right, right. So your book, it's similar and has a problem solution happily ever after. And I'm thinking, well, has anything ever happened where you tried to fix a team and it just blew up in your face? Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, I've made plenty of mistakes. Some of my earlier books, like I said, were about my experiences. And so they weren't always happy endings. One of the journeys that I've sort of gone on personally is when I say about stories have been my primary method of learning and I've tried to incorporate that into how I've shared my learning, is I found it's very, very easy to share an anti-pattern. It's very easy to share the failure stories. And they're interesting and it's nice to hear about how other people are feeling because relatively you feel good because you haven't failed as bad as them. And some of them are quite funny. And some of them can be quite useful because I'll avoid that mistake. But those failure stories, those anti-patterns don't give you a way of being successful. They just give you a way of avoiding being unsuccessful. And they're not the same thing. So what I try to do is I'll try to highlight the risks and I've tried to highlight the ways that things could go wrong. But also said, well, and this is how this team avoided those risks and got to their definition of success. I am aware that it can seem a bit too sort of Hollywood. But as again, genuinely, I'm trying to explain good to great and so great teams generally haven't blown up. They'll have had mistakes and they'll have got through them but they will have come through them. So I made a conscious choice to focus on success stories rather than anti-patterns in 30 years. So you also talk about cross functionality and team flow and the trade off has ended with individual flow. This is something I talk about with Ryan Ripley too and the episode I did with him, he mentioned about team flow. Yeah, individual flow may suffer a little but team flow overall is important. And so to focus on that, but what if a task not only prevents flow for an individual but it's actually draining to an individual or if they just suck at that task? How do you, at what point is a trade off not worth it? There's actually quite a lot of questions in that. So I think the first one that stands out for me is the trade off to begin with. So it's something that I, it's a conversation that I don't really see happen enough which is acknowledging again, there's plenty of cards on the table but to be part of a successful team, I have to let go a little bit of my personal selfishness, what I want from me. Not completely, certainly not completely but I can't be completely focused on me. And hopefully what I get in return is worth it because I am letting something go. Now, because if we don't have that conversation then at some level people are expecting to be able to do what they want to do and get the benefits of being part of the team. And that's the lot where this this sort of dysfunctional nature comes from. So having that conversation about, all right, I'm gonna have to do something perhaps I don't wanna do or I'm gonna not be able to do something that I do want to do if I was just working on my own but these are the benefits I get from it. And what I find then coming onto the, well when is the trade off too great? I think if that's, again just from my experience, I think all of the teams that I've seen do this well that knowledge when that's happening and so they will plan together as a team and make sure that no individual is in that place or in that state for too long. So there's this sense of caring and this sense of looking after the whole. And now as an individual, if I know my team aren't going to abandon me and I'm not going to be the one doing the photocopying all day every day or making the tea all day every day or whatever, then actually I'm happy to do that because I know I'm helping my teammates and I know that other people are going to do that for me as well. So it's a bit like doing your chores in the house, right? I know that if I do the dishes one day then I might have three days where I don't have to do it and the household is better off as a result. I feel there were more questions in there but this is what happens when I start to waffle. I forget where else I was going to go. No, that's good. I think you covered it pretty well. What if the team perceived someone as not doing enough work and I'm thinking this specifically in like a remote setting because you're not integrated as much as a team when everyone's not working together in the same location. So how would you deal with that? Because they may or may not be. It's hard to really, a task might take, everybody might think it takes five minutes to blow up an hour. It's hard to really tell but I did notice that once teams start to split once there's a disagreement between the parts of the team that becomes more pronounced. It's like a tribal thing and they start coming up with excuses of why the other part of the team is bad and so it's like, oh, they're not doing enough work. And so how do you, how would you deal with that? Well, I think, so what I found interesting over the last two and a half months is that I think, although remote teams and distributed teams are nothing new, I think what we've done or what's happened is that everybody's had firsthand experience of being that remote person. And so they've experienced and got empathy for the people on the other side. So what I mean by that is because we've all been in lockdown and working from home, now they know how other people are thinking about them because they've been thinking about other people. And so what I've seen, and this is only recent and it does relate back to some of the practices that I saw before as a lockdown, the pandemic situation is that as an acknowledgement that the further away you are and the longer you go between actually seeing people, the more suspicious human beings become of each other. And that's not just a team thing, that's just a human being thing. So if we naturally become more suspicious, then the only way to remove suspicion is transparency. So I'd ask the team, I'll get into this point, if I'm a coach then I'd ask the team, so how are we dealing with regards to our levels of trust and productivity and so on. And it's often, I can think back to one specific example where the team actually moved their daily scrum to the middle of the day, okay. So rather than have their call in the morning which they found to be a really good way to keep the day off, they deliberately moved it to the middle of the day. And I thought that was a really interesting choice so I asked them to explain what they were thinking about. And they said, well, we found that it's easier to get your head stuck in something when you can't see people. We found the people who are physically close to one another, you can sort of just pick up on that sense of frustration. Maybe you see someone get up from their desk and walk around or maybe bang their head against the desk or something. And so you can say, what's going on? You tend to solve things. But we found when we're working from home, we don't have that. And we don't really want to bother somebody by messaging them or calling them and asking for help. So we tend to just sort of get stuck and before we realize it, a few hours have gone by and then we've got nothing to show for our time and we don't really want to admit that. So we're going to double down our efforts. As we followed the day in the middle of the day, then that forces us to say, either we've made some progress or if we haven't, then it's our opportunity to say, I might need a bit of help on this one. And I know I'm not interrupting anybody. And I mean, that's just one way of dealing with it. But that was a mature team's way of dealing with something that was kind of a taboo subject really. Now I found different cultures to be more and less open to asking for help. And I was surprised by, so I tweeted something or maybe it was an Instagram post or something. It was kind of a throwaway comment, but it picked up a lot of traction, which was to be generous and ask for help. And what I meant by that was, actually there's a lot of people, especially if you're in a good team, that would love the opportunity to help you. They actually get a good feeling, a warm feeling by being able to help. And so by asking for help, you're giving people the opportunity to feel good about themselves. So be generous, ask for help. A lot of people see asking for help as an obligation, that you're putting on something or a sign of weakness. But not only is it an opportunity to make someone else feel good, it also makes it visible that it's okay for other people to ask for help, which is great. How do you feel about remote teams in general? I mean, we've kind of been forced with COVID-19 to move in that direction, but is being correlated, co-located preferable? Is the remote team benefits worth it? How do you feel about that? I think it's a case of the pendulum swinging to another extreme soon. When a team's co-located, everybody's in the same space. That can be quite intense from a sustainability point of view. It's great from a collaboration point of view. It's great from getting things done really, really quickly point of view. But actually it's quite draining, especially for the introverts, it's quite draining. Continuously. And so those people need to be able to find a, I need to get stuff done in space, I need a focused space. What we've done is we're on the other way. So now everybody's got as much quiet as they want, really. But they don't have the conversation, they don't have the opportunity to bounce things off each other to really pair on something at the same screen. Of course there's technology, but you've kind of gone to the other extreme. So I don't think necessarily either is necessarily better. But so where I'm going with this is, I think you hear this phrase new normal a lot. I think what we're sort of evolving towards, I think a lot of organizations are starting to think, and teams are starting to think, is that we probably want a little bit more actually conscious flexibility and a conscious balance. So for example, we'll have some space where when we want to co-locate, we can. And if we wanted some breakout rooms, we can, or we would work from home sometimes. And actually consciously design our working week, maybe even our working day as a team to work out when it's most effective for us to be physically together and when it's most effective for us to be physically apart. Because I think all the great teams have that balance. They will have really dedicated all hands on deck, talking to each other and they love it. They absolutely get so much done. But equally, they want that quiet focus. I need to concentrate and really just work something through. It's good. You talk about switching from managing results for results to designing environments where teams can create results. And I really like that keyword in there. Keywords, designing environments. Because I'm big on evolutionary theory and I know if you can design an environment that takes advantage of how you're built, how your ancient brain is built, it's good. Can you expand on how you design an environment for a team like that? Starting relatively simplistically, yeah. Simply, I'll do. It's around giving the team something to get their teeth into. Yeah, an actual sense of purpose, a problem to solve, something that is meaningful that when they put their effort in, they can see the point in putting their effort in. The opportunity to achieve something greater than if they were just working on their own. So making sure that you've got a problem that's worth solving and the problem that it makes sense to have a team solve. Because not all problems are like that, and that's okay. So don't try and force a team on a problem that doesn't need a team to solve it. But if it does, then give that problem to a team. Give them the tools they need, the support they need, the confidence they need, go back to our gel manifesto principles. The game, and the protection they need, but also the challenge that they need to actually want to solve it. And ask them to get involved in coming up with the solution rather than just delivering a predefined solution. And so when I talk about designing an environment, I'm not necessarily talking so much about the physical environment, although that's going to play a part. And I said that would probably be different in whatever new normal we have, we evolve towards. Then, but more the psychological environment and the, I suppose the contextual environment. Does that make sense? Yeah, that's good. Well, speaking of evolutionary theory, are you, have you looking into that at all or evolutionary psychology and how that could help teams? Like I said, I'm not particularly academically clever guy. I mean, I've got a degree from university, but I'm much more on the sort of empirical side of things I love to observe and that kind of thing. But I was fascinated by your last podcast episode to sort of multi-level selection. This idea that one behavior is great for the group to survive, but different behaviors is important for the individual to survive. That sort of, that trade off, I might have got that slightly wrong, but that's kind of the message that I took from it. And I think the same is true within organizations. We have that sort of, it's not as life or death as perhaps it would have been for our great ancestors. But that combination of altruism and selfishness, I think is definitely something that's in there. And yeah, that's it. All of these teams evolve and I think the individuals within the teams evolve the longer they're part of the team. Yeah, and it's not something that can be consciously designed because people grow, people change, teams change. And the best teams that I've seen, you see this a lot in sports, although I'm careful, I try to be careful not to use sports as an analogy too much because it can be quite divisive, but a lot of sports teams, they talk about the badge or the club. So the badge, the jersey, the club outlives the players. And you know what you're playing for, if you like, and that sense of the club will evolve slowly, but the players can help shape the new future of that club that they're only a part of the higher level of evolution that makes sense. And the people in the organizations that I'm working with now are actually, even this might sound a very patronizing phrase, do you want me to think about that a bit? We're level, we're more junior people. I've seen that they have a part to play in shaping the evolution of the corporate culture because without their behavioral change, without their mindset, buy-in, then it's all for nothing. And I think that's a really empowering thing for people really, is that they're not just going there to do their job, they're part of reshaping this organization. And as well as during our working lives, we're gonna be working for more than one, two, three, four companies. And my father in law, for example, joined his company at 16 from school and stayed there until he retired. I just don't think that's going to happen much these days for my kids. So as well as that, you're actually gonna see all of the organizations you've worked for reinvent themselves multiple times or they die. I think that's quite an, okay, you can look quite a scary thing at times, but it's also quite an exciting thing to be part of. You say you're not an academic, but you're obviously very widely read and extremely knowledgeable. And like I mentioned before, your reference section is just packed with just awesome stuff. I think some people may get overwhelmed by all that information or even by your book, even though it's very simply written, but where would you suggest somebody to start? Let's say that this is all new to them and it's like, oh man, there's just so much stuff I need to learn and implement. Like where would you say, where should they start at? So I'd actually say, but start by not reading the book, but start with the cards. And so what I mean by that is it's a front of the book, there's 10 stories. And yeah, you might read those stories and think, do you know what, that's where my team is at right now. And maybe I can pick some of those techniques or have you from that story and play it and my team will be beneficial straight away. But like I said, I'm a big fan of meeting the team where they are. And every team is different and every team has their own challenges. So actually since I've developed the milestone cards, I've said to the team, have a look through them and just tell me which ones you think you've already hit. And if you could pick one to achieve in the next couple of weeks, which one would you like to work towards? And it kind of plays into my, so as well as being an agile coach or a professional coach, a leadership coach, but I'm also a sports coach. It's one of those things that I got dragged into as a dad. So my son was playing for his local team and they need parents to help out and they paid for you to go meet some coaching. So I never played sports at a very high level, but I went along and I was coached by some professional sports coaches and they taught me about a player-led coach. So historically in England, we've trained our sports people to follow what you call textbook orthodox sporting technique. So if you wanted to play a shot and cricket or play a line drive in baseball, there would be a technique to it and you'd follow the technique and you'd get it right. And what they've done is they've changed it and said, well rather than follow the technique, here is your goal. I want you to hit, we're going to throw 50 balls at you. I want you to hit that ball through these two cones as many times as you can. However you can do it. So forget about technique, just focus on the goal and however they do it is okay. And then they said, you had 50 goals, you got 10 through. What do you think you'd need to do differently to get 15 through? And then they'd reflect on their technique and they'd do that. And every time you run a training session, rather than plan in advance what you want to do as a coach, you'd say to the team, based on what you did last time, based on your performance in the last match, what would you like to get better at? As you're getting the team to pull how they want to improve and also then reflect on their way of solving a problem. I thought it was really, really powerful, especially when you're talking about nine, 10 year old kids, giving them the autonomy and the control over their own development. I thought it was amazing. And so we can do that with kids. Why wouldn't we do that with professional teams? You know, adults. And so, yeah, it's a very long-winded way of saying, I would probably start with the cards and say, which would you like to pull? Yeah, I love it. Love that idea. It's great. How do you, obviously, you know, so much in your widely read, but how do you discover new information and new things to try? I work on the assumption that everything's been done before. So it's just a case of finding it. And so, yeah, I will proactively go out and try and find stuff. So I'll look at what books have been released or I'll get recommendations from people or I'll see what's been positive, what's hot. I would often go to conferences or I go to meet up groups to still do that online. And I just try and talk to people as well, people that I respect and just have conversations. But my, so I do a podcast as well, but we call it a pubcast because we used to do it in a pub. And my colleague Paul Goddard and I, we don't really have an agenda. We just talk about stuff that's going on. And it could be the film that we've seen recently or it could be a fact that he was cutting his garden, cutting the lawn in his garden in a different direction this week. And what does that got to do with agile? So we're constantly trying to pull something relevant from the seemingly obscure. And my family are absolutely fed up with me. You know, they can't sit down and watch a TV show or a film with me without me saying, oh, that's a bit like camp those two I was with. And you say, Dad, stop talking about, stop talking about agile. Just watch the film. So it's that kind of curiosity I think that I have. And I think there's always a parallel there, but I guess that's kind of my storytelling thing. Can I get a response? That's good. All right, well, we have a few minutes left here. So I'm going to do some impromptu questions. I'm going to make them personal because I just passed my PSM1 assessment last week. Thank you. So what are your, what's your advice? What would you say to scrum masters, new scrum masters who are just starting out? What would your advice to them be? Interesting, you should ask that question. And the reason it's interesting is because I've actually just set a challenge to a number of scrum masters. The challenge I set them was you've got 60 seconds to introduce yourself to a brand new team. How would you introduce yourself? And I'm interested to see what they focus on. And to me, I think I'd lean towards this idea of that you know your situation a lot better than me. And I'm here to serve. I'm here to make your job easier. So tell me how I can help. And while I'm doing that, I'll just see what information I can absorb around the organization, around you guys. And if I can give you any feedback on that, that'll be useful and you want it, then great. But you tell me where I should be focusing right now. So you would say, so let's say a scrum master, the new scrum master gets put on with a team. It's okay to be quiet and not say anything for a while because you're learning how that team is working. Would you agree with that? I would, yeah, I would. I think there's a massive danger of wanting to make a good impression. And so taking your knowledge and your previous experience and overlaying it on what you're seeing in front of you. And the chances of that being a perfect match are next to nil. And even if it were, you're really undermining the team's experience and history and presence by coming in and looking like you need to be the savior. So yeah, I'm a big fan of scrum masters talking less than they listen, listening more than they talk. If you're a new scrum master and you're looking for a new job, what would you look for in a company? Personally speaking, I don't know what I was doing that got my juices flowing as it were. But so I think having spent quite a bit of time in various sort of financial organizations and technology organizations, I'd be looking to work for an organization that was looking to do something different and disrupt something, but that would be me. If I was giving some advice to scrum master, he was looking for something. I'd try and get them to look at what they value and try and find an organization that matches that because I don't really think there's anything more draining than working for an organization that has conflicting values to you. And so that's effectively why I would look for that kind of organization is because I value different. I value challenge, I value that kind of disruptive element. And I would want to be part of an organization like that. Yeah, so what's next for you? Any more ideas for books to write or what do you got cooking? Well, I promised my family I'd have a little bit of time off from writing. So actually at the moment, there's a couple of translations that are ongoing. So I've got a couple of people translating. So first of all, scrum mastery and maybe some others into other languages, just trying to make them more accessible to other people in their native tongue. So I'm trying to support that. Yeah, I mean, recently it's just been trying to, trying to help people through the lockdown. So we've been doing a lot more free content, a lot more of these podcasts, a lot more competitions and sort of shows and videos and things, just speaking at things, just to give something to people that gives them something to focus on. And actually I'm doing a lot more leadership coaching, which is sort of, for me, the biggest kicker part of my job. So I'm working with young upcoming leaders in organizations looking to break the organizational. Old-fashionedness, I suppose. And just watching them create new ways of working and new places to work is quite cool for me. So I'm doing a lot more of that. Well, go ahead and give out your website address and any other ways you'd like people to connect with you. Cool, I mean, I'd like to think that I'm pretty easy to find. I was out there as I can be, I'm on Twitter, I'm on LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram and all sorts, but the easiest way to find me is my website, which is inspectandadapt.com. Very good, we'll link the website and I'll touch your book as well in the show notes. Jeff, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it. Thank you, it was fun.