 All right, we'll get started. Good morning, everyone. My name's Sean Dunn, and I'm with IHS. So we actually have an office here in Bangalore. I'm from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. So it's significantly warmer here than it is back home at the moment, which is OK. I don't mind. And I'm an internal agile coach with IHS, which is actually quite interesting and unique because it means I'm an employee of the company. I'm not a contractor. I'm not a consultant. But I have the wonderful opportunity to work and work with teams, internal teams across the globe on a daily basis. So I kind of fell into that position. This wasn't something I looked to, I thought I would ever be doing in my career. I kind of fell into it by accident. But I absolutely love it in being able to interact with everyone. And thank you to my local colleagues here. We've been so hospitable. It's been a great experience. This is my first time to India. So what I'd like to talk about today is building a self-sustaining agile organization. And what do I mean by that? With my experience over teams in the past few years, despite all the difficulties, it's actually not too bad to get teams from whether it's waterfall or just anarchy to, OK, let's get them to do some basic agile practices, whether it's Scrum or Kanban or something like that. That's actually not too, too bad to do. But then when we start thinking about, OK, how do we make sure that we don't lose those gains, this new found agility that we've discovered? How do we make sure that it isn't just the flavor of the month or the flavor of the year, that for one year, five years, 10 years from now, beyond my current tenure, how do we know that it's going to persist? And so this is kind of the question I started out trying to answer as I was working with teams. And they were getting quite fluid and quite proficient with the understanding of the principles and the values. They say, OK, well, this is great. We've got people who are really, really understanding the principles and the practices and the values and putting them to use and experimenting the methodology. But that's today, how do we know that's going to last and not end up like our Leaning Tower of Pisa here, where centuries from now it's off-center or even worse? Unfortunately, there's actually several examples, at least one I can think of, of quite large companies who've invested millions and millions of dollars of getting agile coaches in and doing agile training and really being invested in it and actually a few years later, five, six years later, they've ended up kind of regressing entirely. So how do we actually prevent that from happening and how do we do that very deliberately? So consider for yourself and your own organization right now. If you were tomorrow to say, OK, I'm going to fulfill a lifelong dream, I'm going to go travel the world and do that and you do that for 10 years and then you finally return 10 years from now and you step back into the same office and you discover all the people you worked with are no longer there, they've moved on. In fact, the people who succeeded them are no longer there. In fact, maybe the people who succeeded them are no longer there. You're two or three generations in, so you walk around and look around the office, what do you think you might expect to find? What will people be doing? What will be their behaviors? What will be their methodologies? What values will be exhibited by the decisions they make on a daily basis? And how can you today plant the seeds to influence what that'll be like 10 years or more from now? And then we talked about Jim Shore this morning and then I think himself and Ward Cunningham and a few others kind of have it. This is a really, there's been a few blog posts lately about the potential devaluation of the word agile or we're not exactly sure what agile means or we use it and we're not necessarily clear. And I think it does have value, but I'm gonna give you my own mental model. So when I'm talking about agile, this is my own mental model and it's not necessarily saying it's right. No model is right, but some are useful. But this is what I'm thinking in my own head and I think there's some benefits to it that help me. So when I think of agile, I think of it along these three dimensions. The first is technical excellence. We wanna be really, and it goes back to Diane's talk this morning. One of the dimensions is we wanna be really good at what we do. We wanna be really good coders. We want to design software to accommodate change. We want a good development ecosystem. We wanna be practicing TDD. Let's get really good at what we do. Another aspect, another dimension is lean. The lean product management, the economics behind our organization. So incremental value delivery, short feedback cycles, whole system optimization, validated learning, all the lean, Eric Ries's lean startup, a lot of what he brought to light. And finally, there's this human dimension, a transformational leadership. And so this is what agile tries to talk about in terms of the servant leader, right? And if you look at the transformational leadership model and there's books and materials on it, but we've actually read what the transformational leadership model says. It's exactly what we're trying to achieve in servant leadership. We want to inspire others, give them a sense of purpose, challenge them, build them up as a team, lead by example. This is what we want to achieve with our agile teams. So I think by breaking it down to these three dimensions, there's some benefits to it. One, it allows us to have better conversations. Because now I can start saying, well, how do we improve the technical excellence of our organization? Now, how do we embed lean principles in our decision-making across the organization? How do we improve transformational leadership in our organization? And you could look at each of these independently. You could just focus on one. But I think the real value comes in, they're mutually supporting. As you improve one, as you really get a transformational leadership, you will see impacts in your technical excellence. Your technical excellence will enable your ability to operate lean. And it's this whole of organization approach. This is no longer about software. You could apply this to any type of organization in this model. And you can now start having conversations about how these interact. How does one impact the other? And so you could even take agile out of the vocabulary entirely if you never used the word agile, but you were constantly working and improving on all these three dimensions. I think you'd ultimately achieve what agile was setting out to achieve. So I wanted to bring that up. That's my own mental model of agile. So whenever you hear me talk, this is what I'm thinking of. Yep. Okay, I hope I'll address that. And then if I don't, ask that again at the end, please, okay? All right, thank you. So I've got 13 years in the army, in a Canadian army as a officer. I've also been a programmer. I've also been a product manager. So I like to think about, okay, a lot of the challenges we have are in the human dimension, individuals and interactions. So they're not necessarily unique to the software domain. So how can we look elsewhere? What other domains can we look at? And the one I'm familiar with is my time in the army. So what can I learn from the army? Well, the army and the military has a few unique characteristics which are very similar in this respect. One is they've got a rich culture and history. In Canada anyways, our army's culture is largely influenced by British colonialism, just like yours in India. And that's been passed on from generations to generations. We also have a very specific and unique domain knowledge, the profession of arms, right? That's a very unique set of, and specific set of knowledge. And certainly we've got a very strong value system. The warrior ethos, it embeds everything we be and do. We also have a unique challenge in the sense that our attrition rate is very, very high. So how do we persist all these things when you're losing people all the time? And by losing people, I mean it's physically demanding. It's demanding on your family. There's a very high turnover rate. And so how do we manage to do it? How did we manage to do it in the army? How do we make sure that we are responsible for our own self-determination over time and how do we sustain? And so I'll ask the question, where do generals come from? Where, you know, the top rank, where does a general come from? You know, if I only have an empty general position, how do I feel that? Well, I can't, you know, does the stork come and bring a general on my doorstep? No, unfortunately not. Can I put an ad in the newspaper and start interviewing for generals? Well, that doesn't exactly how it works. So where does a general come from? And the answer ultimately is, they're made. There's a very deliberate system in place to take someone from day one of their career all the way up to the highest rank possible. So all the training and the experience and the development opportunities and the opportunities for risk and learning are more or less all laid out. Now, everybody's gonna be a little different and of course not, everybody's gonna make it. But the point is that systemically, as an organization, there's been an enormous amount of thought to making sure that we can continue to produce people up the highest rank who share the same values, who can make decisions that exhibit these values, that have the right technical skills. And an interesting example. So I was a signals officer, which is basically the IT of the Army. We managed the communication systems, network servers, radio systems, so IT of the Army. And if I took a recruit off the street at the age of 18 and he or she was gonna be a technician, I put them through basic training. I, you know, and then they do their technical training so they learn how to administer a server. And then they do their job for about four years. They might be working at a help desk or an admin desk, doing their job, learning their craft. And then at about year four or five, for almost anybody, we send them on their first leadership course. We send them away full-time on a leadership course very early in their career. Guess how long that leadership course is? Take a guess. Oh, hold here, well, that's really impressive. In Canada anyways, the first one is two months long. So, less impressive than a year, but still, how many organizations here at year four or five someone's career sends someone on like a two-month long course on leadership? In fact, you probably have a hard time finding CEOs in their entire career, who have had that much focused training on leadership. But what they do do on that course, there's some classroom and there's some field work where it's very challenging situation. But one of the things they'll do is they'll teach them how to teach. So very early in your career, you're given the skill set of how to develop and teach others. And that foundation means that you now have an intellectual and a theoretical foundation that you can continue to develop and learn and experiment and make mistakes as you go on throughout your career. So when they come back, they'll end up maybe managing a team of three or five on the same IT desk that they were at before, but now they've had this opportunity to learn how to teach their knowledge and pass it on to others. So what I take away from this is leadership is consciously developed early in the career and then continuously developed throughout the career. And training others is this critical skill that must be taught and practiced. And it's something I think we often forget about. We don't teach people how to teach. And that personnel development is a top priority. If I waver for one year and lose focus on making sure that the next generation is being developed, I put the entire organization at a huge amount of risk. It means that some point in time in the future we won't be able to fill that general position because we lapsed and making sure that people were constantly progressing and constantly learning and constantly being developed. And then when that happens, we have to sacrifice. We have to go for someone who doesn't have the skills. And this can have trickle down impacts in the whole organization. If you want a good example of this, it's actually how the US Army, after World War II, their general development program for generals actually massively failed in developing generals properly. And the impact of that was Vietnam. And there's a book by Tom Ricks on that. So everybody's familiar with the term hack, right? And software terms, a solution that solves an immediate problem while potentially sacrificing long-term consequences. So we're familiar with this in the technical realm. Now, do we do this in our organizations? Do we implement short-term solutions? We've got an immediate problem. We need to solve it. And potentially, there might be long-term consequences to that that are less desirable. I don't make a bold statement, and this will be very controversial, and I'm okay with that, but is scrum a collection of organizational hacks? And I'll suggest that maybe it is. And that's not necessarily a bad thing because there was immediate problems that needed to be solved. If you look at Schwaver and Sutherland when they were developing scrum, they had dysfunctional aspects of the organization, and they found specific solutions in pretty much every element of scrum. You can look at scrum and you can see how it was solving specific problems. Product management was broken. You had teams that didn't know how, technical teams that didn't know how to collaborate. You had managers who were bad leaders. So what do you do about it? You can look at scrum and you can easily see how they were trying to answer those questions. And it's not bad because they solved those challenges, and in fact, many organizations have the same challenges. That's why scrum's so popular, and in fact, the short-term solution is the right thing to do in almost all cases. But now that we've done it, now that we implemented the short-term solution, we've bought ourselves some time, let's go back and look and think, hmm, maybe what were some long-term consequences that now we have some time to go back and address and see if there might be a better solution. And here's one example. Scrum Masters should not be managers. Are we familiar with this? Why is this? Everybody seems to be taught this. Why do we not want them to be managers? Sorry? Okay, why can a manager not be a servant leader? In fact, don't we want our managers to be servant leaders? Because they're going to be promoted to be directors, and then they're going to be promoted to CEOs. And don't we want our CEOs to be servant leaders as well? Because that's good leadership. And then here's the questions we need to start asking ourselves. So is this an example of an organizational hack? And I think it might be. What if managers are leaders, are Scrum Masters? What if it's the same thing? If we develop good leaders that become managers, what's the problem? And I'm not saying this has to be the case. In fact, I'm sure there's many cases where it's not. But let's start looking at, why did we think that they couldn't be Scrum Masters in the first place? And a lot of the reason is we had managers who were bad leaders. So one solution is to marginalize them and then we'll recreate our own version of leaders. Right in the form of the Scrum Master and we'll teach them servant leadership. But is that the best long-term approach? Now consider, where do all these other rules come from? Vice presidents, managers, CEOs, leaders, product owners, directors, we want them to exhibit certain behaviors, have certain organizational values, but where do they come from? And the answer again is they're made. And we are making them today, whether we're deliberate about it or not. Because you will end up with people in these rules. But if you're not being deliberate about it, you'll end up with, through negligence, people who necessarily not being what we want to exhibit in terms of organizational values, in terms of our agile values. So if your leaders can't teach it, how well do they really know it? If forever and ever and ever and ever, every year we have to have outside consultants come in and consultants do a great job. But if perpetually, we don't have people in leadership positions, whether it's managers or directors or so on, who understand these values well enough and these behaviors and practices well enough to pass them on, how well do we really understand what we're doing? And I think we want to get to the point where leaders at all levels, all the way up to the CEOs, really do understand this stuff. And we have to start building those people today. And it's going to take time and I understand that. But this isn't just a technical skill. We talked about how this is, again, we talked to this morning about how this is organizational. It's across the system. It's not just agile values is something the team does. No, those are organizational values. What behaviors do we want as an organization? How do we make decisions as an organization? And so consider that same question again, 10 years from now you return to organization and discover a practice that resembles neither scrum ban, nor can ban, or anything else you're familiar with today. How do you react? Let's say your team today is doing scrum and they're doing perfectly. And you come back 10 years from now, you discover a different set of people and you don't have a clue what they're doing. Is that scary? You don't recognize it at all. Would you assume that that's a failure? The organization has lapsed. Exactly, maybe they've progressed. And I think that this would be scary to some people and perhaps even some people who are really, really invested in moving towards agile. But really, what ultimately do we want at the end of the day? What's our acceptance criteria? And if it is teams and organizations that can progress, we have to be accept or even be trying to get to the state where we want that to happen. And it might be something, it might be generating the body of knowledge which we don't even understand today or know today. So ask yourselves, what will self sustain in your own organization? Or where do you want to be? What do you want to self sustain? I think at the very basic level, the methodology, right? I mean, this is kind of the, you know, you can pass on the very basic methodology. So you can do scrum and then in the next generation, they can do scrum and the next generation, they'll do scrum. But what's the problem with that? Why would you not want to do that? Like, is this, it's okay, but what's the problem? Sorry? Wait, yeah, right, there might be some. Think, things progress, right, right? I mean, this is where we get into dogmatism, right? You know, we're doing something, but we don't really understand necessarily why we were doing things, right? And James Shore had the cargo cult agile blog. Basically, he talked about this phenomenon. So okay, what can we do about that? What can we want, what do we want to sustain? What do you want to pass down from generation to generation? Methodology is the start, but more importantly, I think we need to pass along the principles, right? The actual reasons why we're doing what we're doing. And I think that's better, for sure, but it's not perfect because we can understand what we're doing, we can understand why we're doing it. But from what you should have observed, there's this culture, aspect or organization of, okay, that's good, but we want to get better, continuous improvement, and there's this passion for discovery, right? How do we make sure that we know 10 years from now we're still going to have people in the organization that have that same passion for discovering new and better ways that we have today? And leadership, how do we pass on leadership? How do we develop the next generation of leaders? Not only that, not just leaders who can lead for today, lead the people in the organization of today, but have that ability to train others, to develop the next generation, and develop them to develop the next generation. Then we start going on and on and on. And this isn't a maturity model, but if I were to look at an organization, I would look at them and ask them questions, but like, well, how do you do this? How do you do it deliberately and mindfully? What things do you have in place that you know, this is what you're trying to achieve? You're just sustaining the methodology, or do you have systems in place so that you know confidently that you're going to be passing things on. Explain to me how you do that, and it should be very deliberate, and people should know about it. So my success criteria as an agile coach is I want to successfully walk away from an organization knowing that they will continue to discover new and better ways of developing software. I want to be able to come back in 10 years and see something different, right? I want them to have pushed the body of knowledge and experimented and tried new things, and if I don't recognize it, that's okay, and I will have been so confident that when I left the organization that there was this embedded systemic ability to pass things on, that as they were making decisions and experimenting and trying new things, they were doing so with full understanding and knowledge of the principles and where we came from. So they were making the right decisions along the way. Okay, so that's all good. That's all nice and good theory. What are some things that, what are some things that I've seen working with teams, what are some things that we're trying? And these are actual things that I'm working with teams on back home that they are developing at this moment. And I'm sure there's more to it, but here's some things. So we've started to focus at the leader level, like the sort of scrum master, the team lead level on focusing on behaviors. Let's look really deliberately at what people are doing. And we just talked about that with the gamification as well. Let's be really, really deliberate about what behaviors we want and what values are going into making those behaviors. And it might be very tactical as a coder. How do I decide whether to spend a little bit more time refactoring this or making it a slightly better technical solution or not? How do I decide whether to go talk to someone about this design? How do I know when to collaborate? How do I know how to interact with other teams and other team members and communicate my ideas effectively? And with the idea that if we're, we develop people and we're focused on developing people who exhibit the right behaviors all the time, where if we're constantly doing the right things, then delivery will be this consequence of it. If we're doing the right things, it's not to say we don't wanna be transparent or track this, we definitely want to have an eye on delivery, but it's gonna be more of a second order effect. And if we're not able to, well, it's because there was legitimate technical risk involved in our project, which there always is and there always should be. So by focusing on behaviors, because the converse is not necessarily true, right? You start focusing on development or focusing on delivery, you can potentially start creating the wrong behaviors. If you're not paying a lot of attention to them. And I think this is one of the traditional problems many of us have seen in organizations is the focus on delivery incentivizes poor behaviors, or ones that don't serve us in the long term. But to focus on behaviors first, you have to have a really, really clear sense of what those behaviors you want, right? What things you're looking for and how do you develop those people? So develop leaders at all levels to be agile coaches. I mean, I think we kind of, this kind of came up in a conversation at breakfast this morning with Jeff Patterson. You know, if I could have my way, and it's funny that this came up because I was thinking about it last night, if I could have my way to do an agile transformation in a company, I would first go to the CEO and teach him, I would teach him lean, and then I would teach him transformational leadership and make sure he understood it really, really well from a theoretical basis and how to apply it and evaluating his own company along these principles. And then I would teach him how to teach his vice presidents. And then I would watch them teach their directors and I'd watch that trickle down because at that point in time, you know, this is, you know, the organization at all levels actually buys into the same principles because now they can develop the people below them, right? Now it's like, okay, I know this stuff. I'm gonna help you understand it better so you can develop because this is, again, it's a whole of organization approach. Now of course that's not possible, but think about what you can do, right? Where can you influence these things today? You know, you can't talk to CEO, but you can start developing, you know, maybe your team leaders and thinking this way. And so that when they progress through their career 10, 15 years now, we will have a whole industry of people who get it and understand it. And a good way to do this is creating training materials and development plan and your own. There's lots of great ones out there and I'm not saying they're not good. In fact, they are. But again, how well do you really know it if you can't train it yourself? If you can't express it and train others? So we've got a team of skirmasters back home who are of their own accord are developing, you know, a wiki with training material. They're developing their own TDD workshop so when new employees come on board, you know, you take, one of the team leaders will take a week, you know, a week or more to then take new employees through a whole workshop. And so they get the opportunity to practice teaching it and expressing it. And of course, new employees will have great challenging questions that then will challenge the teacher's own understanding, right? So then when they get further up in their career, they build this depth of understanding. So that just the exercise of doing this is hugely valuable. And we value developing others. You know, how is this on our performance objectives? And rewards and promotions should be based on how much do we invest in developing the people below us or developing the people around us for that matter. In fact, I would consider if I've been in a position for three years, and by the end of three years, there's not someone or multiple people that I have been actively developing who could take over my job and potentially do it better than I can, then I would consider that a failure on my, an individual failure on my part, right? If after three years I can't bring someone up to do my job, then I personally believe I failed. I should be putting myself out of a job all the time. You don't mean literally putting yourself out of a job. I trust that if I'm doing this and doing the right thing, well, I've just created extra capacity for the organization now, right? I mean, I can go up and do some R&D project, right? Or move on to bigger and better things. I can't be promoted unless someone can be promoted into my position. And be very deliberate about your hiring strategy. Think about what kind of people, culturally, what cultural fits do you want in your organization? You know, we talk about change over following a plan. Well, what kind of people can live and work and adapt in that environment where there's collaboration and a sense of uncertainty, you know, dealing with a sense of uncertainty and a bias to action. How do you work that into your hiring strategy? So these are all things that are practical examples of we're working on with teams back home right now. And I was very quick this morning. Okay, so in conclusion, you know, build a self-sustaining organization requires deliberate thought and investment. And if you get nothing else out of this talk, I hope you walk away with that, that you go back to your organization and just think, or say, think, gee, what would happen in 10 years from now? If everybody else has gone, where will we be? How can I plant the seeds today? And I guarantee it will impact everything. It will impact your hiring strategy. It will impact your promotion and reward strategy. It will impact how you behave and you're technically on a day-to-day basis, interact with your teams. It should be cross-cutting. And I encourage you to sustain the values and principles, not the practices. You know, know the practices, of course, know why we do the practices, but ultimately if we want to evolve and we want continuous improvement, we need to make sure that those values are really embedded in the organization and they do actually represent organizational values. It's not just the dev team has this agile values thing, but the rest of the organization really values something different and you can see it in their decisions and their behaviors. No, no, they have to be aligned across the organization and these have to be embedded so they persist. And culture is leadership-driven. I had a mentor one time say to me, what did you do with that? Everything you do or say, whether in seriousness or in jest, has the immediate impact of becoming policy. Essentially the eyes are watching. People are always watching what you do and what you say when you're in a leadership position and it will impact and will have an influence on the culture, your creating culture that way. Well, what's acceptable? What's not acceptable? What behavior do they want me to do? What would I be rewarded for? What's expected of me? Those are all the sum of millions and millions of little interactions and behaviors that happen throughout the day, throughout our day. That we have to be very, very aware of because otherwise we'll be creating a culture unconsciously and not necessarily the one we want. And finally, lead by example, model the desired behavior. So even if you're not in a leadership position, like in an authoritative position, like you're a people manager, but you're just a team member, that doesn't preclude you from leadership. You can still lead by example. You can still understand this. You can embody the principles and exhibit the behaviors and you know what? You become a natural leader and your teammates will follow. I'm trying to think of an example of this. So I've got a colleague whose name's Chris and we're peers in the organization. He's not an agile coach, but he's more of an architecture design type role. But I mean, I'm pretty sure he's destined for bigger and better things one day. He's a very bright, smart guy. But one of his challenges is he's not comfortable with public speaking. Very, very smart, not comfortable with public speaking. So that's an area of his growth. And I can see that maybe there's something I can do. We want everybody to grow around us. So what can I do to help him grow because I want him to be successful someday? So I say to him, let's put a paper in for the Agile Conference and then I will work with you. And then this is a great opportunity for you. And you know what? Just the other day we found out the paper was accepted so he's gonna be going to the Agile Conference this summer and then I have an opportunity to help him grow. And by doing all of this, I'm hoping that just as on a peer level that I'm hoping that I'm demonstrating the behavior that we want others to have. And you do this often and often people will notice and they'll pick up on it. And this can be really, really powerful. I've had the benefit in my career of having at least three leaders who are also my managers who I have the utmost respect for. They've become mentors to me. I listened to everything they did. They had utmost respect for them and they earned the respect from me to the point where I would literally fall into a hail of bullets. And they worked with me and developed me and worked on my strengths and they knew my weaknesses and they knew my work on a day-to-day basis. So they were a coach, a mentor, a guide and they think about it and at the end of the day why would I want anyone else writing my evaluation report, right? I've got such immense respect for these people. They know me, they know my strengths, weaknesses. I know they're working to develop me. You know, I would feel cheated if anybody else wrote anything about, well, this is who Sean is because they knew me better than anyone. And I hope that, you know, I personally hope that I can help in some little way to generate organizations that can create those type of leaders. Because I don't believe that I am one myself but I hope that with the right potential and the right encouragement and in some little way I can help other organizations create those type of leaders that I've been so blessed to have in my life. And that wraps up my talk. So thank you. This was a lot of fun. I was very brief but hopefully worthwhile and maybe we have some time for more questions and we can all go eat and I love Indian foods. That's so fun. Questions? Yes? Sorry? Yeah? Yeah? Yeah. But typically what the problem we see with the managers is they love the command and control it. That will never allow the team to self-organize and self-tubate. Meaning it's not a sustainable movement. Right. One thing. The question to you, Ian, I quickly agree with that. It does allow the innovations, the sustainable and as well as a self-driven team. But in the long term, what I see is that the team picks up some of the tasks in terms of user story. They finish it up and then they mix up something else. They pick up from the back. So in actual, the innovation never happens. They look at the user story and finish it up and pick up something else. Whereas if you look at the waterfall, they have time to do some innovation, spend some time to get something, do some identity and come back. So what do you do with the innovation? Okay, I'll answer your first question first. So the question was essentially why is this, why would you not want the Scrum Master to be a manager? And you've seen a specific example and this is the one that Schraber and Sutherland had was basically have managers who are exhibiting bad leadership. They weren't exhibiting transformational leadership. They weren't being servant leaders. They weren't empowering the teams. So we've systemically as an organization we've somehow enabled someone to be in a manager position without exhibiting the leadership qualities that we bowed. So the organizational hack to that, the short-term solution is, okay, let's marginalize the manager because we're a bad leader and then we create our own manager. So that's exactly why we do that in that situation. But let's not just worry about our current situation. Where do we want to be? And where we want to be is that leaders at all level exhibit the type of leadership we want. So you might not be able to solve that problem immediately today but you can start thinking about how we're developing people today so that when they end up being promoted into a manager job they have the right leadership qualities and they're exhibiting that servant leadership and transformational leadership you want. Does that make sense? Okay, so the second question was how do you make time for innovation and continuous integration and something like Scrum because there's this kind of hyper focus on getting user stories done and how do you build them in time? There's multiple ways that you can accomplish that I suppose and often it depends on the context but ultimately the organization has to value it and has to be comfortable with investing the time in it. So really the question is how do you allocate and make this trade-off for what amount of time is valuable or how do we weigh opportunity for innovation against amount of work that needs to get done and that's the real question that you need to answer. Does the organization value it? How much can we invest in it and then how do you do it? You can say you have hackathon days for example where you take a week or you can say the last key of iteration or you can evaluate continuous integration user stories on a per case basis. So multiple ways of doing it but ultimately the organization has to value it. Right, so is there a question? Yeah, you're right. So is that your suggestion time left over in sprint could be used? That's definitely one approach I've seen before. Any other questions? Yes. The leadership happens by a culture when it comes to leaders between unsolvable and without followers. The team has to select and the team knows better who is mentoring, who is going around their way to help someone out and actually the followers will follow or go to someone who is helping who is lecturing them and that's how leadership evolves. I believe you can. I believe you can make a leader and in fact some people will have natural characteristics as you point out. So if you put a group of people together just a random group of people you will have natural leaders who emerge from that group. So you always end up with some form of leadership. It might be good forms of leadership it might be bad forms of leadership but it will emerge. But what we want to do is we want to make sure it emerges we foster the right kind we develop the right kind. So it's great in that setting if you have that opportunity and self-organize a team maybe a team of peers you have the one person who demonstrates this natural talent for leadership that other people gravitate to and they show the spark of exhibiting the right type of leadership characteristics we want. Okay that's great but now how do we take that and make that deliberate? Okay we see some potential there. So what other skills do they need to have to progress all the way up to let's say CEO of the company? How do we get them on that track if that's what they want to do to get there and how do we give them the support structure and the systems in place to make that happen? Or there might be the other person on the team who doesn't have the same amount of natural leadership capabilities but has an interest in it and wants to work really hard at it I believe that they can do that because I think I'm somewhat of an example I'm not going to pretend I'm a great leader but if you look at me back in high school as an early Shia kid and then where I've come in the last 10 years and where just time in the army has taken me I personally really believe that you can teach someone if they've got a certain amount of potential and they've got the interest and they're willing to work at it so I think you can make it for years How many organizations are willing to invest? Sorry? How many organizations are willing to invest in today's situation where the marketplace is changing so fast and to meet up that pace if I try to invest on the people to make leaders some might take 5 years some might take 10 years I don't know I don't know whether I will get a return on investment on the company you will exist So how will I sustain this model? The question is how do I know if it's worthwhile to invest in leadership development because I don't know if my company is going to be around in 10 years well if you're planning on your company not being around in 10 years well then don't It's not the question I'm saying today there's a startup which has proved something like WhatsApp and Facebook acquires it then I have a strategy made for me to make that sufficient but by the time it got acquired boom, gone it's not that my company doesn't exist the pace in which the changes happen and it evolves I don't have much control So I think I just might actually be a good example my company might be a good example of that so I was part of an acquisition and there's other acquisitions before us and a lot of the actual senior people who've moved up through the company were part of these acquisitions so even in that case if you're part of an acquisition you can actually be in a really good position because if you've got strong leaders that you've developed that's often very apparent when they become absorbed into the greater organization and they're more likely to have a chance to move their way up and in fact I've seen it personally and they're more likely to move their way up and then you've got this great opportunity where now you've got someone the fast rising of the organization because they're good leaders and they need no values from that which you had as a startup so you might look at it as well we're not going to pay off and you might not but that's a risk but I think it's a worthwhile I'm not suggesting we send everybody off for a year of leadership training but where is a good worthwhile investment Any more questions? One moment The point of this is I was just trying to comment because it sounds comparatively to the point that it's above and below it but when you see the leaders exhibiting the organizational values and everybody as a team in organizing and doing that would you say the culture would be inspired by leaders but exhibited by everybody rather than being driven by leaders? Yeah, I have supported it better than I did Ultimately, I believe that leaders should understand their responsibility for for guiding culture deliberately What culture do we want to have in an organization? What does that really, really mean? And how does that translate to interactions and behaviors and what high level policy decisions have second and third order effects that influence the culture down in the teams and they need to be very aware of that because if they don't and they have no influence, well culture is going to develop there will always be a culture that develops but it won't necessarily be deliberately and it won't necessarily be in line so there always will be a culture somehow but leadership does have a responsibility of being very mindful and deliberate about well what do we want as a culture and how do we create that and one of the things our culture might value is leadership and leadership development or developing people who are really strong technically in TDD it's very broad a broad scope so thank you for your time this was a lot of fun if you've got any more questions, feel free to come up and ask me afterwards and I've been lucky enough to be a part of the Ask Me Anything panel that's happening later today so that question of command and control is I love that one so I hope someone asks me that question and yeah, it's been a lot of fun so please feel free to come talk to me afterwards and I'd love to meet all of you