 in it and how to become a great Scrum Master and great servant leader. So first question would be Jeff, for you personally, what are the features and who is the great Scrum Master and the great servant leader? How do you understand it? So we understand the goal that we would like to achieve at the end of the road. So I've set unwittingly, I mean I didn't go out to try and define anything, but I identified a number of aspects that seem to coincide with or at least be common with people who were just really really good at that role in the teams that I've come across. And if I was going to have my time again I'd probably try harder and harder to really narrow it down because nine characteristics is actually quite a lot, especially when you start trying to teach a course based on that you realise nine is quite a lot. But there's basically doing the role and then being the person I suppose. So I mean the first thing that any Scrum Master's really got to get a hold of is to just get into new habits about ways of working. So can they get something set up and working in an environment that's probably not going to be very helpful and might even be quite hostile to agile ways of working and just giving that team and the sort of bubble that they're operating in enough time to just establish themselves without getting swallowed up or beaten down by the system that they're in. And that takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of resilience just to do that. But then if they can do that then they can really start working on getting that team and that organisation to a really collaborative enabling state. So you start seeing a lot of proactivity, you start seeing a lot of you see more of a can do attitude rather than a yeah but we can't do that here kind of attitude. And some of the people that really do that well have this servant leadership ethos if you like. This not lack of ego necessarily but they really want other people to succeed and fulfil their potential. They believe in the capacity of other people. You know they don't take the view that people are lazy. They don't take the view that people are selfish. They genuinely believe that people want to do a good job. They want to be successful and they will do whatever they can to help those people be able to achieve that. And so they need to be quite resourceful. They need to be quite open minded and creative and quite determined and thick skin sometimes as we say here. So you know they don't take things too personally. They're quite resilient. They can speak truth to power but without annoying people too much. But if I was to pick one of the things that I think is the most important it would be their ability to listen with empathy. Their ability to hear things from other people's perspectives and even if they don't agree with them or even if they don't see the same situation in the same way they can understand why other people do. And with that empathy they can then build relationships. They can create a sense of psychological safety. They can challenge without appearing threatening. It opens up all the other things that they need to be able to be good at if they can hear people and hear people as as they are and as they see things. It's a bit of a long answer, isn't it? But also the question I think it's it's not the easiest one that's straightforward so wouldn't expect any other answer. How do you begin the treasure that traveled them the pathway? So once we know the goal where would you advise us to take the very first step become a servant leader? Well I mean first of all I think it's asking yourself that almost philosophical question about do you believe in the capacity of the people that you're working with. You know I've been in organisations where people don't. I often tell this story because it's one of the big stories from my career if you like for me personally it was a huge moment for me. I was relatively young and I was teaching a class of very well-paid very experienced very confident managers at a very successful organisation and we were talking about the concept of self-organising cross-functional teams and how it's not about managing them it's about enabling them it's about you know giving them space giving them problems to solve rather than requirements to deliver and one of the people says but Jeff people are lazy and you know if you give lazy people autonomy it's going to be chaos dreadful things will happen people need to be managed and I was really worried about how to answer that question because I could tell it was clear to me that this person had evidence to back that view up they were just saying it to be annoying they had genuinely seen evidence that people were lazy and people needed to be managed now I'd seen other evidence but why would he why would he accept my world view because he'd seen this at first hand so I think well this is going to be a really quite tough day but luckily for me one of his colleagues from the same organisation says well I've got a different experience to that because my people are pretty good so maybe you just haven't hired the right people and we had a big discussion about if you trust people yeah sure they might let you down but if you don't trust people they can never prove you right they can never prove themselves yeah if the only way you can make someone trustworthy is to give them the chance to potentially let you down but also give them the chance to prove that they are trustworthy and there was an argument of what came first you know was the fact that he didn't trust people lead to the people not appearing to be trustworthy or was the people not being trustworthy lead to his view and in a way it didn't really matter because if he's not going to change his view on that people will know you know I could say to you I trust you but my actions will actually prove that or not and and then what happens when something does go wrong do I then say aha see I knew you weren't trustworthy or do I interpret that as you did your best you couldn't have foreseen that how can we make this better so your question was how do you get started and it's a long way around of saying well what is my view on human nature do I think people turn up to work wanting to do the best they can what is my explanation for someone not doing very well is it because they are inherently lazy is it because they are inherently selfish or trust untrustworthy or is it you know they did their best and they want they would like to learn how to get better and if I I can't prove my point of view but I think if you have that negative view of human nature then you haven't got a chance of being a servant leader but once you have that then it enables you to to actually start from where you are you can start looking at your situation differently does that make sense so uh of course if there are any comments from the audience and please feel free to uh to participate uh me how speaking so uh to recap your I can say elsewhere to be good service service leader we should trust people and say it and see always things from the better side rather than good side uh worse side yeah so so I have a couple of things that I'll add to that I think thank you for summarizing it and playing it back because it's made me think of a couple of things that I want to say so the first is that trust isn't yes or no it's not black or white it's not I trust you or I don't trust you there are different degrees of trust and I don't have to completely trust you to be a servant leader I don't have to fully trust you with everything I don't have to give you all of my passwords all of my keys um sign over sign over legal you know guardianship of my children I don't have to go that far for you to prove that agile can work and we can we can work together so I only need to trust you a bit and then you can prove to me that you're worthy of that trust and then maybe I'll trust you a little bit more and we can get we can and likewise backwards and forwards so we can we can start small and we can we can work this up and part of you know an agile approach is is is to achieve that really it's it's don't put all of your commitment in one big block do something small work out what works and same with trust same with relationships and the second aspect of that is when you said about always thinking positively so I have this view that every dysfunctional behavior that I see is a symptom of an unmet need now what I mean by that is if I see someone being an absolute um not very nice person then that behavior isn't because they are an evil person it's a cry for help all right it's it's because they're lacking something and this dysfunctional behavior is basically acting out because they haven't got something that they need now that could be privacy it could be security it could be achievement it could be recognition it could be anything that they need as a human being that they haven't got and so they're they're they're they're expressing that disappointment in a dysfunctional way in a similar way to you know kid having a 10 temper tantrum because they're not allowed to stay up at night it's that kind of thing right and if you start looking at looking at things that way of it's not that they are deliberately messing up it's not they're a bad person this this is this is a natural response to them lacking something that they really really need then you can start asking yourself so what is it that they need and if I give them that or if I help them get that the behavior will probably change for the better naturally rather than managing the behavior so yes I think to be a great servant leader you have to have a positive view of human nature you have to want other people to succeed all right and you have to learn to interpret things in a positive way because you tend to get what you expect thanks michael thank you the next one may be a little bit tricky but I think it's also maybe a little provocative because the next one and I think a couple of people actually ask about it would be how do you measure if you're a successful servant leader so I think we can summarize those couple of questions to to that one what are the factors and and the metrics of my success as a servant leader yeah and so in my book I give the almost ultimate success metric is not being needed but still being wanted so if you know if I was to walk away from this team they would be upset because they actually like me they're not necessarily as a person but they like the fact that I'm there they like the value that I can bring but actually me being there is an inhibitor than inhibitor to them being even more empowered so I need to I need to give them that space and so in from a incremental metric approach I'm generally looking at if how let me take another way of looking at this basically is how autonomous are the teams and the organization right so I'm looking for self-management capability of the teams and I tend to I tend to think there are three variables at play when it comes to a team's ability to manage itself one is their competence so do they actually have the skills necessary to to to manage themselves are they able to plan are they able to argue are they able to make decisions you know are they able to reflect and adjust inspect and adapt what they're doing do they have those those skills to be able to do that so competence the second thing is confidence so they may be able to do it but if they don't have the confidence to do it either because they're worried about consequences of their decisions or being overruled or getting it wrong then then they won't do that so confidence and competence and then the third is the conditions so the environment that they're in so some or some teams can be really really good at working for themselves as a team but they're only one part of the system and they don't have the ability to to deal with everything else so their definition of done for example or the the recruitment policies or reward policies or contracts with third parties or anything like that all of those things that can affect the team's ability to to influence the overall system so as a scrum master and a servant leader I'd be looking at all of those aspects and thinking well what are they what's their competence level with regards to self-management what's their confidence level with regards to self-management and how how much are they able to affect the overall system with their self-management and those aren't necessarily easy things to measure but you're looking at well how how much decision making can they can they actually take hold of and take control over take responsibility for as opposed to how much are they looking to to it from me I'd be looking at things like asking for permission is one step yeah we think we've done this we think we would like to do this can we do this please and then that's great that's because they weren't identifying things like that before but now later on they're they're not even asking for permission they know it's a right thing they know it's a good thing if they get told that it wasn't the right thing they could explain it and they'd have the confidence to be able to explain their decision-making process their thought process so they don't ask for permission anymore if it goes wrong then they'll just ask they'll say sorry and they will ask for forgiveness and that without wishing to sort of upsell my work if you like that's where the team mastery work came went so I saw scrum masters working with their teams and each team was different okay and they have different needs based on the maturity of that team the confidence the confidence and the conditions and things but they were always looking for ways to get better so they would have regular conversations about well what do you need from me as your servant leader as your scrum master what do you need from me now based on where you are as a team and you know what what commitments are you going to make to each other and how are you going to know you're getting better and they would come up with their own milestones of development as a great agile team and so together the scrum master and the agile team can identify some common goals for that team autonomy that they want to work towards and recognize and mark them off as they are as a team what they need but agile team one and agile team two and agile team three might be at very different points with very different challenges and so saying well these are the the the metrics for every team would be kind of crazy so having that conversation having some kind of common patterns if you like can be helpful but every team needs to work that through with their own scrum master servant leader okay thank you the next aspect of being a servant leader and I again I combine a couple of questions to one Fred uh it's building respect as a servant leader how do you make people respect you I mean the team and then secondly what's the balance and I think we I mentioned it a little bit offline when we discussed how do you find this balance between being leader and servant or maybe it's it's not about finding a balance because it's it's just coherent and then you cannot distinguish these two because what I read from those questions but how do I not get exploited how do how do I not allow people to take an advantage of me as a servant leader how do I not cross this line what we're being taken advantage of look like here uh didn't specify unfortunately in the questions but I can imagine there is this quite often maybe a good example which we just always been taught during you know scrum courses a scrum master is not a secretary of a team for instance or it's not a someone who does things for for the team right it's rather than someone who empowers the team and guides but very often in a bad implemented scrum I think we see this the situation when the scrum master becomes kind of indeed a servant without the without the leader so how do we not allow this to happen how do we build this respect and and the position without you know then again balancing off for the leader perspective and and being in charge okay so I'll take that in reverse order I think so the second part first in terms of not becoming a secretary style servant and I'll sort of play back to my previous answer but emphasize a different part of it so just as the scrum master will often say to their team what do you need from me right now to help you become more self-managing more autonomous and sometimes that might involve a little bit of admin it might involve a little bit of secretarial work for want of a better word and because they've got other things they need to focus on right now and that might be the right thing but just as the scrum team should be saying to the scrum master this is what we want from you the scrum master has needs as well and so that would be a two-way conversation so what do I need from you as a team so that I can be successful in my role and trying to find that common ground of well okay well I'm prepared to commit to this but I'm not prepared to commit to that because I think that would have this kind of impact and having that conversation I think is something that I don't see enough teams having but every time I've seen teams have that conversation it's been incredibly helpful not just between scrum master and development team either development team and product owner scrum master and product owner whole scrum team and wider organization whatever it is just having that open adult conversation about what do we need from each other what do we expect from one another and what are we prepared to commit to one another in order that we can all be successful so that would be the first that would be the first thing there because if we have that conversation and the teams say well what we want you to do with this we want you to update all these things we want to make sure there's enough station we want to make sure that there's fresh cakes in the in the in the team space every day that the scrum master well hold on a minute that's not my role okay we can we can find someone else who can do that if we need to but that's not my job there's a second aspect to this still on this the first part of the question that I'm answering the second part of makes sense to me and that is as well as the scrum team potentially taking advantage of the scrum master there's also a risk that the scrum master i'm not sure takes advantage of is the right phrase but almost sacrifices their own autonomy because they enjoy helping so much and so it's it's it's a nice thing that people want to help others all right and people are naturally drawn to the scrum master role if they do have a desire to help other people be successful but sometimes helping the team in the short term is not good for their long-term development but we have a pull because we get that instant feeling of i've helped and sometimes it's a little bit there's a little bit of well i need these people to hurt a little bit all right i kind of use the analogy of teaching my my kids to ride their bike if i didn't ever let them fall off they would never learn to ride on their own that kind of thing and it's not nice as a parent to see your kid fall off the bike all right it's not nice as a scrum master to see a team you know have a bit of trouble here a bit of stress here a bit of a bit of a problem here but that stress is needed sometimes so that they can build up their resilience and they can prove to themselves they can actually work and work their way through it now scrum masters who aren't comfortable with that will come to the teams rescue too quickly and too often and that team won't grow they will learn a dependency upon that scrum master so that they can sabotage that team growth themselves even though it has good intentions so now the second part which was the first part which is how can you build respect now i would say i i don't have enough knowledge to be able to give a fully comprehensive answer of this because i think culturally respect is earned differently in different cultures and i don't know enough about each individual culture but i i can probably say with some level of certainty that integrity is a common part of respect so and what i mean by that is doing what you say your words match your actions um you have a i was talking to somebody earlier today about um this sort of indefinable quality that some people have where what you see is what you get whereas some people you think i'm not sure that what you're saying to me is something you actually believe i'm not saying i'm not saying you're lying to me but i'm not quite sure that when you say you're going to do that you're actually going to do that and it i haven't really got a good word for that but the positives interpretation of that is integrity what you see is what you get all right and i think that builds respect so one of the first um one of the first tips i give to people is don't make massive promises just just make lots of small promises that you can keep and keep them because then you build up that reputation of okay when when they say something i'm pretty confident it's going to happen be honest and transparent about your faults is another common for me at least in what i have seen pattern in people who command respect they don't pretend to be what they're not when something goes wrong they'll put their hand up when something goes right they don't brag about it but equally they'll say this went well they can own it they won't try and take other people's success as their own they make sure credit is given where it's due these sort of general sort of human um say characteristics or qualities i suppose i think there are others but if you were if you were to think of somebody that you really really respected what characteristics would you pull out i would agree with trustworthy integrity being reliable that's i think being honest so that's indeed all comes around integrity and there's an element of competence as well i think usually or at least knowing what you are good at and knowing what you're not good at and being able to command a certain amount of respect for doing what you do to the best of your ability for me i think most of it comes down to your words match your actions thank you again if there are any comments from the audience more than welcome once again miho speaking if i can okay i understand what's what's say but for example if i'm scum master who is working mostly with services like ccirt some security services uh and more or less this scrum master uh born in this environment he know everything about that or more or less know everything what the team doing and next day he have to take uh take under him some development team which work on some program and he don't know nothing regarding this matter of uh coding and so on and uh how what do you would do on the beginning with this team to not be a secretary for them because okay scrum master don't in my opinion don't have to know exactly about the the matter of the project about the coding on service but i know that is good to know more or less something about the matter of the project this is helpful to for communication with the team and apparently you don't know nothing and you have to be the scrum master this is possible of course this is possible but how to start such project uh cooperation with the team uh to on to not be on the beginning from the beginning be secretary um i hope you understand what i mean yeah i think so so um i it there's there's not consensus about this so i have my opinion um but that opinion is not one that everybody shares so my my opinion is that i would rather be a scrum master for a team where i didn't understand what they did than be a scrum master for a team where i did understand i would prefer not to know but i know a lot of people who would prefer the opposite now the reason i would prefer not to know is because then i'm not tempted to take control i'm not tempted to make decisions for the team i can say with genuine um genuine honesty genuine truth that the team know better than me all right sometimes i say that and i don't necessarily mean it 100 right but it's important that the team believe that they know better than me but if i if i'm in a situation where i don't and that is quite often the case then i believe i can be my most effective as a coach and servant leader of this team so my job then quite explicitly becomes not to hear them all out and make a decision not to make a decision for them but genuinely to help them think through their problems find out where their challenges are find out where i can help them by them identifying where they need help and helping them to see solutions to the problems that perhaps their limiting assumptions are giving them it only really for me becomes a problem if i believe i'm going to either be held accountable for this team or that the team don't feel confident enough in their own ability and understanding to be able to make those decisions themselves and they don't feel they have enough safety to learn themselves so in terms of where where do you start i would start pretty much how i would start anyway which would be getting the opinion of the people in the know to tell themselves in my presence the state of things so they're not telling me they're telling each other but i'm there all right because they're not telling me because i'm not going to do anything with that information apart from play it back to them or perhaps highlight some gaps that i might see because i'm i'm seeing things from a completely childish perspective in fact i once said every scrum team should have a five-year-old on their team because the five-year-olds ask the best questions might go so far as to say three because i've got a three-year-old at the moment and he's asking ridiculously annoying questions but quite quite interesting questions in a way you know why this and why that um and you know just putting words together in a very different way makes you think about things in a different way better you know i'm slightly digressing but being able to ask those really naive questions that if you worked in this environment you just wouldn't ask because well you just never do you kind of accept that wisdom um there's a there's a there's a phenomenon called entrenched expertise which basically means if i if i'm the expert with a hammer i see every problem as a nail and it's so easy to get into that habit but if you've if you've never seen a hammer before then it's a little bit easier to think about how you might deal with something differently so there's one more thing i would say to this and i would say this in lots of different contexts so as well as being a scrum master in the past and as our coach and working with people in these in these guises and i'm also a professional coach so i'll have one-to-one coaching clients leadership leadership coaching clients and part of my setup with these people is to just make sure that we're both clear on what coaching actually is okay and so one of those conversations what part of that conversation will be the difference between a coach and a mental um and the difference between a coach and a therapist and as a coach i'm not either of those things but sometimes i am a mentor to some people and sometimes some of my conversations feel a little bit like therapy with other people all right but i'm specifically engaging with this person in the role of a coach now that's not to say that a coach is better than a mentor or a therapist in fact many people will benefit from having all three okay just not with the same person so i would encourage a team as well as having a servant leader especially if they're new to have some kind of mentoring to look up to experts in their field perhaps within the organization perhaps from outside the organization perhaps it's a youtube channel that they subscribe to whatever it may be having somewhere that they can look to for growth and guidance and expertise and the answers but it just wouldn't come from me i'll stop talking and see if that helps in any way and whether you want to tweak your question or follow up your question yes yes thank you for that and that this is discover almost my second question about the pm who become a scrum master in in my organization this is often a often situation that pm becomes scrum master and very often it's empty like a person who was pm and next day his scrum master to i can say to not be pm in scrum master role you how i understand what i mean but you answer already on this question how to not be pm in skin brilliant and for what it's worth i was a project manager that became a scrum master and so it can work like with me i'm i can say i am still pm but i'm starting work often and often like the scrum master and this is temty sometimes be like scrum master and please do that but i thinking that you should do something like that or that and this is very often temty to be i can say rather ask them what they need tell them what i think to do yeah so but but you understand my point of view yeah definitely definitely and i think part a big part of that and this when i mentioned around confidence competence and conditions earlier on that applies to a servant leader as well yeah and if if for example you you you've effectively still got the job description of a project manager but you've been asked to take on the role of scrum master and the organization still has accountability lines that are saying you know if this project fails then it's on you as a project manager oh i mean scrum master then it's going to be much harder to say okay well this this this is a decision for the team to take because if they make it a bad decision then my job's at stake or my bonus is at stake or my pay rise is at stake so there are conditions that will affect how easy it is to not take control that are outside of that team dynamic and it's it's part of the job to start addressing those impediments those organization impediments that stop the the functional behavior from happening and encourage more dysfunctional game playing behavior thanks for the questions thank you for right thank you a couple of questions that i had on my list from from the audience but already has been has been answered so thank you for that so just to mention that there were indeed those about let's see what not to do as a as a servant leader and i think that has been answered another question and that was also quite quite well answered already that it's about the technical knowledge of a of a scrum master but the the other one would be whenever i'm scrum master as a servant leader should it be only my only role or can i should i participate in some actions or would i lose the the high perspective then and i think that's also something that i personally for instance found very different opinions when it comes to that point should i as a scrum master take also part in in any kind of job being also having a role of analyst or very rarely developer but but quite often analyst i would say that's commonly combined at least in in my environment or should i still keep as a scrum master and do nothing else what's your opinion about it so again you're right there are different very different opinions and quite strong opinions on this um my my personal opinion is i i i like to get really good at what i do um and so rather than well there's more chance i think of becoming a really really good scrum master if i do that role but if i do other roles then i'm going to split my attention so it's not 100 answer but if i was going to not spend all of my time as a scrum master for a team and i had some extra time left then and i've still got the whole organizational change aspect to be going on with then i would rather probably focus more on being a scrum master for another team rather than being an analyst within this team personally i think if i've got more than one role within one team that makes things a lot messier um and a lot harder to to delineate not impossible but a lot harder and generally speaking if i've talked a little bit about this incrementally distancing yourself a little bit giving the team more and more space to fill that gap and become a bigger self-managing unit then it sort of makes sense for me to to have something else to be doing with my time as a scrum master and if i've got that mature team where i'm spending a little bit of time there gives me space to start the growth of another team that might need me a lot more um so that would that would make sense for me but i guess you got to find what works for you in your conditions um there may be many situations where actually you just you just haven't got enough people to do all of those things and focus on one role all right and you can actually get benefit from experiencing different aspects within the team you can build up that empathy quicker people might respect you more if you have more of that technical knowledge the the culture and the the organization differences might might encourage different results but that's that's where i stand on it thank you lord there were a couple of questions about difficulties in your organization so especially i believe whenever you're a kind of a evangelist of scrum or agile in general in a company or you are hired as an agile coach because the company and that's something that especially happens at least from my experience in quite big companies they've heard about agile so they of course want to implement it but when you hit the wall i think quite a couple of questions quite a few questions we're concerning this how do you work with organization that says they want to be agile but you clearly see they they don't really understand what it is about it in fact they perhaps don't even want to be agile yeah well being agile is a means to a particular end so you mentioned organic agility is something that i co-created with Dave Snowden and Andrea Tomassini as a way not of creating an agile organization but of creating a resilient organization one that can actually cope with the unknown unknowns rather than try and plan and protect themselves from the unknown and that's our natural human response is to try and protect against that but organizations in a complex and very fast moving environment need to be more resilient so looking at why an organization has decided to go down this agile route usually in my experience i'd say nine times out of ten but what they really want is resilience not to be agile agile is a way of helping them become resilient so start talking about things in their language start really finding out what their goals are what their organizational goals are and how agile might help them because generally being agile as a company isn't the goal it's what it helps us do or what it helps us be then we've got some commonality then we've got something that we can all work towards because when it's not like that it's a case of i like agile i know agile is a good thing you need to change and you're wrong and it's very adversarial no one wants to admit that they were wrong no one wants to admit that they need to change and so they're always looking for a reason why this isn't the answer rather than looking for a way that this can help us so i i recently recently announced that i'm i'm stopping teaching certain certified scrum master courses and things like that because how a lot of people go to those courses and then try and be a scrum master in the real world in their real organizations and they haven't got the skills from those two days to help them deal with you know senior managers who come in and change the product backlog you know just like that or start moving the teams around or tell teams they have to work late or whatever is going on that stops this team from being really truly agile and they just haven't got the answers to that how do we deal with that so what i've what i've seen success is helping those people once they've got the understanding of what it is and you know some few tools and techniques that they can use to get things going is actually helping them deal with those situations in real time so having some ongoing coaching support you know every month go working through some real examples and usually they're they're people skills their relationship skills their dynamic skills their influencing skills their political skills their their ego management skills flexing your your how you approach people and with in a different way to get a different result so looking at those situations that you you know if you're in a classroom with 15 other people you haven't got time to go through all of those but what ifs but what ifs and in this situation how would you deal with that but the ongoing support then you can so that's something i think it's really really important over time because you know is it is it Einstein that says in theory there's no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is once you're outside of the classroom in the real world it's really quite hard but in theory it's really really simple scrum is very very simple so yeah it's a really long-winded way of saying trying to answer that question but bring me back and tell me if there's a part of that question that i didn't cover and i'll try again all right at least to my understanding i figured what i uh what i expected i mean not what i expected but you answered the question i don't know what about the others any comments i think coming also to to the servant leader because now we we are heading also to the how do you collaborate with organization there were several questions regarding how do i we we kind of answered it at the very beginning but very there were a couple of people that thought about how do i come from other industry and become a good scum master how do i internally in the organization build a skill uh because this is something people i think looking for a guidance where to where to start where to kick off if they are interested in becoming scum master but how should they what should be the first step um i'm not sure what their first step should be but i think an early step would be to talk to people in the role you know and this is why one of the this is one of the reasons why you know i like supporting groups like this because this is not just about coming and listening to someone talk about a book or something but you get chance to know other people you start building up a network of community you can start supporting each other you can have a few conversations especially if it's in person you've got a chance to talk beforehand and afterwards uh you know and you'll find similar problems and you can talk them through maybe it's something you're facing they've gone through already so i would you know a lot of people who are looking in getting into a role like scum master or product and will go along to a meetup group and they'll start talking to people and say so tell me a little about what you do and you know the challenges you face and what it's like working there um and that i think is a really good insight because you can start then imagining how you would deal with some of those situations so i've quite often had people come to one of my workshops one of my training courses and they they're they're changing career so i've had people that have left um marketing i've had people that have left teaching people that have left um nursing and they've they've come to scrum mastering because they've spoken to somebody who's you know told them about this thing oh that sounds quite cool you know i think i might might be able to do that and a lot of the scrum master characteristics that i that i've written about they're not technical they're they're people things right can you do do you have integrity can you can you help people are you are you diplomatic do you know can you can you challenge the status quo can you speak truth to power these kinds of things they're their skills that you can have in lots of other different professions like someone um so i recently did a a train the trainer program so i'm teaching other people to be able to train my courses and one of the people on there used to be in the police uh so they were a crime scene investigator right so a lot of the skills that you have in there looking at things from different perspectives hypothesizing look talking to people and helping them helping interpret you know what their gaps in their memory might be telling you or not um mapping what one person's saying to what another person's saying reading between the lines and playing that back so lots of crossover skills so i would say look at the role from talking to somebody and think is that a role that you would enjoy and is that something that your skills natural skills things that you enjoy doing would play to because if they don't and you're doing it because it's i can't imagine why anybody would want to be a scrum master because they think it's trendy or it's cool or whatever it's a horrible name isn't it but um what would if you don't enjoy it it can be a really challenging i mean i suppose any that's the same with any role isn't it if you don't enjoy it can be quite um quite sad but it is one of those roles that i think you need to be intrinsically motivated to do i think i'm not uh i think at least two more if i may the first one would be a little more general about the environment and the industry as such so there are a couple of questions how do you see agile community and agile evolving next couple of years what threats do you perhaps see to agile there were some mentions also in the in the in the questions that for instance you know big companies again big companies they try to to use agile but in in a sense it's only a buzzword for them right and when people get for instance they get resistant about scrum or agile in general because they saw the very bad implementation of it and then someone trying to to implement it although they never understood it so people got for instance yeah they they're repellent to uh to scrum as such so what threats and then how do you see the future of agile scrum in the future hmm i've never been particularly good at predicting the future but what i would say i'm pretty confident in saying that the threats the threats to not necessarily agile itself because i don't think it's what you say in there is is people's perception of agile and people's appetite for it um is you know the big uh consultancy frameworks things like safe and Deloitte's agile tube map and Accenture's monstrosity whatever it is that they've they've created recently um that that is trying to use agile to help them sell their consultancy services that is that is the threat to me it's it's difficult because there's this phrase that goes around is that nobody ever gets fired for hiring insert name of consultancy here um but they could also be in a almost a perverse way the saviour because i think it will allow the real agile to to more clearly differentiate itself uh because the battle isn't really about agile or waterfall it's agile or crappy agile isn't it um and so in terms of the future what i've what i'm betting on what i've just started to create and nurture is it's called the agile licensing library and the idea behind the agile licensing library basically stems from a problem that i had when i was an employee so when i was a scrum master at my first big organization we we wanted to get some experts in to help us so we wanted to get some scrum training in but at the time there were only like five people in the world that could teach scrum and they were all in america and they all charged ridiculous amounts of money to come over and teach us so that was our any choice and we did it for a little bit but then eventually as a company we said well could you do this job so well i hate training said yeah but we're not going to pay these americans to come over and teach us all the time so you've got to do this so okay i'll do it so we did that um that i was then licensed to teach that stuff that meant we could run classes a lot quicker a lot cheaper um and it allowed for the the knowledge to spread and that was okay because it was i mean it was small it wasn't i mean scrum was still quite young it was still a very unheard of term in many ways but at least it had that element of validity and you know integrity about it had a had a brand but trying to get someone like ester derby in for example to help us with our retrospectives was much harder because she was ester derby she was just ester derby she wasn't the scrum alliance she wasn't scrum and so from a senior management perspective it was very difficult to convince them that we should get someone like her and even though she was even more help she would have been even more helpful than getting um yeah some scrum training in um so we've got all these pockets of people around the world who have created incredibly helpful incredibly good stuff but they are to be in a nice way they're just very small you know they're insignificant against those these big brands these big machines so this agile licensing library is a way of trying to bring those artisan collaborators together if i'd have been able to say to senior management at um at british telecom 20 years ago there's lots of different parts of agile okay there's janet and lisa who do certified agile testing okay we need engineering practices stuff because if we we can run in iterations but if our code's terrible we're just going to build crap quicker so we need to be able and these people do this all right they are part of this umbrella of the same umbrella that has you know ester derby that has roman pickler that has jeff watts that has these and it has that collective um sense of um corroboration i suppose so trying to get a bit more um support for these artisan creators who have stuff that organizations need but don't necessarily see because the first thing they see is the big packaged machine if that makes sense so from the consulting grade the big package yeah fancy advertising i see apologies to any big fancy consultants on the call tonight a little bit of a personal and a tricky one that that's up from the from the audience is what do you consider if you if you would like to share your biggest failure as a scrum master servant either i'm not sure i could say the biggest but i know the biggest uh theme and it's it's something that it's um it's something that i still work on i'm still aware of i still fall into the trap of um and i'm aware of it but i'm a lot better at it than i used to which is that rescuing thing that i that i mentioned earlier on so i i love i love the feeling i get from solving people solving problems for people i love it and seeing someone seeing a team that have got this problem and thinking i i can i can take that away i can solve it for them um and then i do that but then they think oh jeff's good at solving these problems next time jeff can you solve this and it's the same for my my my wife's parents you know they they they have problems with technology i'm i'm not particularly good at technology right but they come to me if they can't log into zoom or whatever or their their wi-fi is down or something i come around and it's just just much quicker for me to do it so i do it all right but now they're dependent upon me and every time oh jeff can you come around and do this which on the one hand is nice because i get that feeling but equally they're they're less and less capable of doing this on their own so when i'm away for a couple of weeks they won't even try to fix their wi-fi that's oh wait we'll wait for jeff to come back and that sense of stagnation i'm undermining their ability to to be self-sufficient so that my biggest failure is is liking to solve other people's problems liking to rescue and i work on it still always probably always well right because it's part of those things that that i enjoy thank you uh rafal commented maybe biggest fail first attempt in learning yes yeah it's not the first attempt though i've been i've been i've been trying to learn this for a while but thank you for the reframe uh you mentioned something about the predicting and there are a couple of very technical very down to earth questions about writing a good user story or so uh i'm very curious about your opinion on uh estimates because that's not really about you know being a leader but if i may one technical question there is a lot of you know discussion right now about do we estimate or we don't estimate the workload uh as as do you encourage as a scrum master do you rather go let's drift away to to this uh very fashionable lately uh let's not estimate let's use metrics let's use historical data or do you still like for instance story points you know t-shirt science i actually like estimates i actually like the process of estimation i like a team to go through that process of estimation not because the answer is going to be right but because they're asking themselves the kind of questions so what do we actually need to do to make this happen and it's not so much how long do we think it's going to take that's not the important bit it's you know we yeah we need to do this and we need to do this and we need to do this and maybe that's it but sometimes when you say we need to do this and we need to do that and we need to do this somebody will say oh yes but we also need to do this and actually that's not right because if we do that then we'll have to do this that's what that's the important thing for me which you get from the estimation process the other thing that you get from the estimation process which is a bit meta and i could talk about this for ages is it will help highlight our dependencies so what i mean by that is if we say how long is this going to take and the team say well if yarrick does it it's going to take a day but if jeff does it it takes a week all right because yarrick's the only person that can do this right so well we've got to give it to yarrick then because we haven't got time for it to take a week we've only got to cram this in that helps us highlight where our big bottlenecks are where our big risks are and actually we might need to stop you from doing this stuff right because ultimately if you go we're screwed so that estimation process helps me i think helps teams in in lots of different ways but if it becomes about the accuracy of the estimates then absolutely it causes all sorts of problems so as a skirmann saying i want them to have this conversation that estimation gives them but i don't want them to be playing a game about accuracy of estimates so how can i how can i manufacture that within the organization so we estimated this was going to be an hour right didn't we i believe so yeah we've run out already of time maybe sorry but this is yeah there were so many questions i still try to group them i think we kind of covered most of the topic so perhaps there is someone else if i may just one small question from from the audience maybe me hi everyone but maybe it will be not a small one uh first of all i must say it's a great meeting and thanks yarrick for inviting such a great guest and thanks jeff to be here with us it's highly appreciated and coming to the question maybe expanding expanding a little bit the question about the future of scram or and agile they have experience with the empowered product teams because it's a proper trend nowadays and companies are trying this approach and scram master role it's like it's not specified there so do you have any experience with empowered product teams and how can scram master find the place for for him here there all right so yes and well i wrote product mastery there's a lot of stuff in there that overlaps with um scrum mastery in a way because the product mastery book isn't about how to be an amazing product manager from a technical perspective it's about how to be a great product owner from a personal perspective and my view and i've seen this in practice is that great product owners actually are almost half scrum masters in a way because they are servant leaders of product management they they they value an autonomous engaged team they're not there to tell the team exactly what to do they give teams problems to solve it rather than requirements to deliver they're creating psychological safety so they're not lying about the estimation process so yeah the empowered product team is what scrum was intended to do and part of the scrum master role was to bring that product person and the people who are building it together so closely so tightly and then work on the outside of that environment so that the the environment is more supportive that this scrum master can walk away and they've got they've got that unit now whether that stays together long enough it determines whether that scrum master can walk away or not you know because sometimes product owners will move on and team members will move on and then you have to work through work it through again but in theory then a product an empowered product team shouldn't in the long term need a scrum master so thank you thank you a lot Jeff thank you a lot once again sincerely thanks for for participating it was really a very nice meeting and we i think we've learned a lot from from an expert so once again thank everyone for participating i think there is there's still going to be a small questioner from coming from Beata in a second as usually about how we can improve so please guys if you can participate we would really really appreciate it and Jeff again thank you for your time i hope it's not the last time and last opportunity for us to speak and perhaps in the future we can we can repeat such sessions yeah thank you and far be it from me to in any way influence how you structure your your sessions but please like i said do use these to don't just come and listen to somebody else but come to connect build that community support each other share your experiences and you've got so much to share to each other don't think that someone on the other side of the world has written a book has got all the answers you've got a lot more answers amongst yourselves than i've got right so share that amongst yourselves thank you nice nice summary actually just just for fyi it's how we do or how we did before the covid so it's been a which was usually about you know gathering in uh physically in one place and discussing or discussing a specific problem or a or a theme but indeed a covid changed a little bit and now it's kind of a hybrid uh then we decided to also have cool thank you all right thank you very much thank you all once again thank you bye bye thank you thank you thanks bye bye bye thank you bye thank you goodbye