 Welcome all of you to the session, one supported time managerial by John and he'll take us through this insights, what it means. Thank you very much for coming along. My name is John Ladru. I've worked in the software industry for over 20 years now. This is a talk about stories, the stories we tell others about who we are, the stories we tell about where we've been, the stories we tell about where we want to go. And perhaps who we wish we were. So the time is about September 2000, and Harry and Sally meet for the first time when they started graduates at the National Institute for Romantic Commedies. They were both excited to start their new job and their new team seemed really friendly. They were both feeling optimistic, energized and positive. After their first meeting, Alf, one of the older team members commented on how cheery the new starters were. He laughed. They haven't seen what it's really like yet. Now the time is March 2017, and the place Manchester, my house, my partner of nearly 13 years has just told me she wants to leave me. I knew the relationship had been struggling but I was blind to the reality. It completely threw me. I was still very much in love. I had two children. I swung between the feeling of loss for the relationship and the sheer panic of what the hell happens now. We've been together since I was 19 and over the years as we grew up together, we also grew apart. It seemed like everything was collapsing, not just the relationship, but my entire identity. I realized that I had become a we before I knew who me was, and without that we, who the hell was I? So trapped in a crisis of identity, I set out to try to recreate myself. I wanted to transform myself to be someone else, anyone else, just not the broken person I felt I was. So I'd like to invite everyone here to close your eyes for a moment and then just take a deep breath and hold it for a second and breathe it out as slowly as you can. And now just let that breathing return to normal and bring your attention to your breath, the sensation of breathing and take a few breaths in your own time. Now, I'd like you to really think about this question. Who are you? Who are you really? Now, I don't mean who you want to be tomorrow or in 10 years. I want you to think about who you are here today in this room, this minute, this second right now. Who are you? About who else knows this person, maybe everyone, maybe not so many people, maybe just you. Just take a few breaths in your own time and open your eyes. So a few months go by and now they are told by leadership with some fanfare that the organization is going agile and so are they. The other team on Harry and Sally's floor has already gone agile, whatever that means, and apparently they're doing really well. Someone called an agile coach came in and said they're all supposed to start using these things called stories. And now no one is allowed to say how long something will take, just how many points it is or something like that. Some of the teams seem really resistant to the new ideas. Harry and Sally heard about this agile thing in university and they're happy to go along with it. That lunchtime, Sally created a Jira ticket and assigned it to Harry. It read, as Sally, I would like Harry to accompany me to lunch so that I can get to know him. She estimated it at eight points. So after six months, the coach left. Things seemed okay at first, but the team started to struggle. The same things kept coming up again and again in the retrospectives and those same things made the team fail again and again. Harry and Sally would have lunch together most days. They could have a good moan about everything despite their frustration. It was nice to have each other around. Harry liked Sally. She had made the last few months tolerable. He was smart, confident, funny, and everything else he felt he wasn't. Out of his league, obviously, but he was glad they could be friends all the same. Especially with the way things had been going. They just didn't get it. It all seemed to be going so well. They even launched on time. It just started falling apart. There wasn't enough time for anything and the pressure just kept increasing and increasing. The team couldn't work out what they were doing wrong. I think many of us have seen a situation like this. A wonderful, talented agile coach arrives at an organization and tells them about all the brilliant agile they're going to be doing. At first, maybe they're a little skeptical, but soon they get in the swing of things and by the time the coach leaves, they are scrummed up to their canvans and really dig in the vibe. Perhaps initially things go brilliantly, but things that worked just don't seem to work anymore. People start to feel stuck and cues start to build up in all the wrong places. But it's okay. The agile coach left them a manual guide, so they check it to see what they are inevitably doing wrong. When we're working with teams and individuals who are brand new to a concept, the assumption when things go wrong will be that they are wrong. They're very unlikely to assume that the process that seems to be doing so well for everyone else is perhaps just not right for their context. But just before we separated, I'd taken a decision. I'd been in largely technical positions for nearly 17 years at that point and I wanted to reorient my work so that I was working with people first. So I left my technically focused contract and started to try and rebrand. And then my partner left me, so I was unemployed, broke, annually single, abandoned, alone, and I had no idea who I was. Feeling like a protagonist in my own sci-fi cliché, I did what anyone would do. I accepted a speaking gig in Detroit. I was going to be running a workshop as well, but because I wasn't known at all, I sold a total of no places. So I ended up with two days to myself and headed out and explored the city with my camera. I'd never visited Detroit before, but as I walked the streets, I got the feeling of a city rising from the ashes. It's a city with problems, huge problems that have been with them for over half a century, but it is full of hope. The people are so full of hope. Now, I was having a wonderful time, but my friends and family were worried about me. I was reminded of the dangers of looking like a stupid white tourist wandering around the wrong parts of town. I had a call from my mother, which just started. Darling, you know they have guns in America, don't you? On the last day, I'd been exploring downtown Detroit and I realized that in my excitement to leave in the morning, I'd managed to leave my bag. My camera's battery had died and I had no wallet for money for a taxi. So I started the 30-minute, more so walk back to the little midtown apartment that I'd been renting for a couple of days. As I turn a corner, there is a man stood in front of me. He's filthy, has a cut on his head, plastic bags wrapped around his feet. He looks right at me, sees the camera and says, Hey man, take a picture of me. I'm the real Detroit. So, change. How do we respond to changes? Especially, you know, either personal or professional, but especially those really big or sudden changes. Do you want to just type, throw your words into the chat there? How do we respond to change? Any ideas, people? We resist. We might resist. What might be the emotion that we feel before we start going into a resistance? Then analyze, respond. That's a wonderfully logical response. Curiosity. I know we're at an agile conference, okay? I get it. Embrace, change. Fear, uncomfortable. These are things. Panic is one I hear a lot of. So, I think that the thing that is, is frequently fear. Fear is what the vast majority of people feel. Now, a lot of us here have worked in IT, and interestingly, there's less fear experience. I'll explain why in a second. But yeah, it's most of the time, we feel deeply uncomfortable. It's scary. So, there was a thing called the diffusion of innovations theory that came about in 1962 from a guy called Professor Everett Rogers. And what this, he was seeking to explain with this is essentially how an idea or a technology or a concept or a behavior might spread through any given population. So, how quickly those things might be adopted. And I think many people will have heard of this before. So, in any group, you start off with your innovators. The 2.5% of a group are the innovators. The people that are like, whoa, I want all of the new shiny, okay? And then you've got the early adopters who maybe eventually after the innovators have tried it out and proved that it doesn't kill them, they might take it on. Then you have the next 34%, the early majority. Then the late majority, the next 34%, and then finally the laggards who that way may very well not even, they may not even touch the whatever the new idea is. So, the thing that got me thinking about this is interestingly, it was actually the conversation I had with Linda Rising, I believe at the last Agile Indy that I attended, which I think was 2019. And the interesting thing is that I wonder how long people have actually been behaving like this. So, what I mean by that is, was it like, how long have human beings kind of fallen into these groups? So, for this, Linda gave me this nice explanation. Imagine the early human, okay? So imagine a bunch of cavemen wondering about. Now 2.5% of them, let's say, noticed this new berry bush. Hey, there's this new berry bush here. And they start wolfing down those berries. And the next 13.5% of the group, they're like, those berries, they do look pretty good. We'll give them 24 hours, we'll see how they look in the morning. And then the next 34% are like, oh, those berries, they look pretty tasty. Quite a few people seem to be eating those berries. Have you seen the berries? Oh, we'll give them another week. Make sure they don't grow a third arm or something. And now everyone seems to be eating them. And that last late majority, they're kind of like, oh, I guess I'll eat them. My wife snuck some of the berries into my dinner. Maybe I didn't really want to try them. Oh, maybe I do. You know, I'm going to give it another month. That last 16%, those laggards, they might never touch the berries. Here's a question. Do you think that behavior was useful for humans? Do you think that's been beneficial to us? Do you think that helped us? That's interesting. If you think about it, what would happen if 100% of us dived into that change, into those berries and started eating them? In the story I gave, the berries were fine, but there could be bad berries out there. The basic reality is, is the fact that we all experience a bit of anxiety towards change is actually the entire reason we're all here. And interestingly, that also means that just being aware of that, that if you are, and it does seem like a lot of you are really passionate about change, like you love it, you're curious, you're diving right in there. So you could well be part of the innovators group here. So you're the 2.5% of the population that are, you know, you're like the poison testers, just keeping everyone else, everyone else safe. Just bear that in mind, you know. So what emotion stops us from eating the berries? What stopped us from doing that? Anyone want to shout out an answer? I say shout, virtually shout. Type as loud as you can. What emotion stops us from eating the berries? Or stops 97.5% of us from eating the berries? Yeah. Yeah. There we go. Absolutely. Fear is the driver. And what's interesting here is that what this taught me was that I need to be aware of the fact that if I go to a team as a coach and I try to present some new crazy thing for them to do, 97.5% of the team are probably going to experience some level of anxiety towards that change. And that's something to be aware of. Now, there is a bias as it happens within IT teams and generally creative problem and knowledge worker teams in general towards innovators. You don't necessarily want a whole team of innovators. That would probably be a crazy mess. You would be going off in all directions all the time with very little checks and sanity checks. But there is a bias towards innovators, but certainly not the majority. It's not wildly out of proportion with the global population. So that does still mean that the majority of any given team is going to have some resistance. So if there's always fear and if there's always fear and if there there will always be this inherent resistance to any change from the majority of any given group, how do we guide teams towards positive change? I was born in North London. Stones throw from Arsenal's old hybrid stadium. And after three different primary schools came and went, I started to develop this theory that maybe this school thing wasn't for me. I love learning, still love learning, but all of this teaching was frankly getting on my tits. Then just after my 10th birthday, we moved from multicultural North London to a small village in North Yorkshire. When I was 10, this was pretty wonderful. By the time I was 13 in the realisation that I was at least an hour away from anything resembling civilisation, it all seemed a lot less wonderful. I was still really struggling at school. My handwriting was awful. And one day when I was about 14, a teacher sat me down and said, JP, I was called JP back then. You're an A-star student, but with handwriting like this, you're going to fail. I thought, well, I've been failing to write properly for, I mean, I could count 10 years now. I guess it's not going to get any better in the next two years in time for my GCSEs. So I decided to leave school. I remember very calmly sitting on my bed explaining to my parents that I had no plans on going to school anymore and that I was now going to homeschool myself until I was old enough to get a job. My parents seemed pretty supportive, but you see my parents are puppeteers. So when I said I want to go into IT, it was like the child of accountant saying they want to run away and join the circus. I think they were just relieved that I was at least using a less traditional path. So at almost 16, I did get a job working for a small software company. I moved back to London as a lodger in my old childhood home, which was now being rented out. My old childhood bedroom seems like a somewhat ironic place to start my new adult life. As you know, at 16, you're unbreakable, but as you know, at 16, you're not unbreakable. I was playing at adulthood. I was running faster than I ever could to keep up with the adults I was working with, and it was hard work. Fast forward to just before my 19th birthday in courtesy of the pre-financial crash world, I was now over £25,000 in debt, still trying to keep up with my peer group, still playing at adulthood. The credit cards finally dried up, but after finding a new job, I managed to come to an arrangement with my creditors. I moved to Windsor and got a nice new flat. The flat was more expensive than I could afford, but I couldn't admit that. I even decorated and had a house party to show all my adult friends just how grown up I was. I couldn't really afford that either, still playing at adulthood. Fast forward eight months and I lost my job suddenly and unexpectedly. And now I've defaulted on the arrangement I came to with my creditors and have no money for rent. I'm on the phone with my bank and they've just told me that due to my new credit status, they'd have to close my account. I broke down in tears on the phone to the agent. I'd completely failed. No job, no money. I couldn't play at adulthood anymore. It was finally impossible for me to pretend I was smack bang in the middle of an adult situation. It was really shit. Bend your entire childhood wanting to grow up until you grow up and wish more than anything to go up back to when life was simpler. So unemployed and broke, I moved back in with my dad in London, back in my old childhood bedroom. Shortly after that, I got into that relationship. This lasted 13 years. It wasn't great for me and wasn't great for my partner. And there I was, sat on that sofa thinking, if only I could transform myself and maybe everything would be better. So I believe that when we look at teams or individuals or organizations for that matter, we can break them down into two parts. Their context and their structure. So starting with the context, that is the work the team does. So the stuff the team does and the people who do it. This context changes all the time because both the drivers that create work for the team, username, business strategy, government policy or whatever, and the people working for the team are highly changeable. And then you have structure. That is the process, the way the team is working and again, the people. This structure is the team's response to their changing context. A team notices its context has changed and realigns to it, continually building and modifying their structure to support their changing context. So this little graph probably pop above my head is the structure and context of a team over time. So in this one, this is the one where that orange line there is the structure and then we have the ever changing context. Now, what's interesting is, is many people look at this and they go, oh, this, this is my company. We never change. We're not agile at all. And what is interesting is, is I look at that. I, you know, I spent a fair amount of time in the industry. I've never worked for a company like this. So in fact, the companies that I work with often seem to look a little more, more like this. Boom, sudden big changes to structure. It's like here, they're like, whoa, guys, we're going to go, we're going to, we're going to implement safe. Now actually safe didn't work. We're going to less actually scrap that. We're going to some bespoke custom agile craziness that we put in. Oh, maybe we're going to try and use the scrum guide for a little bit. Oh, someone found a Kanban book. Let's change that. All right, guys, we paid a consultancy billions of pounds and now we're going to, we're going to use whatever they told us to do. And that's what it's like. And the funny thing is, is that many people I know are in organizations that feel like this. And it is exhausting. It's almost like that we use steel, okay, as a building material. And the reason we use steel as a building material is that it is both strong and flexible. And it's kind of the superpower that people have to, why do we like using people in our projects? Well, we use, well, because people, we're pretty strong. We're pretty resilient. And we're also very flexible. We're far more flexible than robots or other things we might use to do equivalent work. But if you take that building material, steel, the building material they use in skyscrapers and they build and use it in skyscrapers because as the heat of the weather changes, as the wind blows, that steel needs to move and change shape and expand and contract and sway with the wind. The same thing is true for people. We need to do all of those things. We need to vary. But if we are constantly change, if you take a piece of steel and you bend it, you bend it back again, you bend it back again. That steel suffers from a thing called metal fatigue. And eventually it breaks down, it heats up, and it will snap. And that happens to people too. And then for comparison, you have this team or organization. As you can see, their context and their structure are almost always aligned. So it's all changed for Harry and Sally. They, the company brought in a large consultancy firm who restructured everything. They assessed everyone and assigned them to teams based on their skills profile. This meant that Harry and Sally were now working on different teams in different buildings. The crazy thing is that they were still working on the same product. So they spent all their time with integration issues. But at least that was an excuse for Harry and Sally to work together. Sally liked Harry. He was pretty much the only reason she was still there. He was kind, supportive, intelligent, and everyone said he obviously fancied her. Just too shy to do anything about it. Sally submits a pull request and assigns it to Harry. It was full of merge conflicts. The description reads, looks like there'll be a lot of conflicts to resolve here. How about we tackle them over dinner? They meet that evening and decide to follow up again the following week. Eight months later, the leadership announced that half the team members are being made redundant due to current economic challenges. All of the consultants seem to have disappeared as well. Harry and Sally's jobs are safe, but it's a huge shock. But at least they're back on the same team again. Harry moved into Sally's apartment. She said he would have to decide between his vintage comic collection and his collection of historic computer hardware dating from 1986 to 2001. It was a tough choice, but he decided on the comics. The computers now live in his parents attic. So when we're born that way, we are as authentic as we will ever be. We have no shame, no expectations. We're just us. As we grow, we develop self-awareness. That isn't itself pretty useful, but self-awareness comes with a sudden recognition of all the things we don't like about ourselves and all the expectations of family, friends and society have of us and the gap between the reality. When we start to create the image of the person we wish we were, the if only I had that, could do that, could sing that, could be that person. And as much as possible, our outward self projects that person. But the gap between who we are and how we are gets larger and larger. When we can't be ourselves, this creates a state known as cognitive dissonance. This is whenever we are expressing outwardly something that we're not on the inside. We're being inauthentic. I like to dig into the definition of words. And I find that we can learn a lot from looking at how words are used in different contexts. In music, dissonance has a different meaning. That is when we hear dissonant tones that clash. We know this feeling. It's like an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of our stomach. Like when somebody scratches their nails down a chalkboard. Interestingly, we feel this with people as well. That icky feeling we get when someone isn't really comfortable in their own skin, we sense their discomfort. The opposite of this is consonance. That is when things feel harmonious. And again, we feel this in people as well. We sense when people are comfortable in their own skin. We feel comfortable around people who are comfortable with themselves. So this is a quote from a website called Sibelius Academy. I really love the personification in this description, how the dissonant intervals have the desire to return. To me, this is like the ever increasing tension as the distance between who we are and how we are increases. It's like this piece of elastic. The further away you get, the further it is to just stay where you are. This is wasted energy. Energy that could be invested on being the best version of you. That is wasted on trying to be something that isn't you at all. The best version of you is still you. So as I said, I struggled at school. So it turns out that I am a dyspraxic and dysgraphic. The dysgraph here is what affects my handwriting. The dyspraxia affects a range of things for me. I have to really think about which way is left or right. Left, right, right, left. I lose things all the time. I can be a bit clumsy sometimes. But one thing I really struggle with is tying my shoelaces. And any situation where I had to take my shoes off for some reason would cause me huge anxiety. Changing at the gym. Taking my shoes off to go through security at the airport. How humiliating. People would find out I can't tie my shoelaces. Then I discovered these silicon laces. I could just pop them in and voila. No need to tie them and even better, the white ones look just like normal laces. No one would ever have to know. I could pretend to be someone who could tie their shoelaces. And not just that. They were tied perfectly. Only... So one of the shoelaces snapped off going through Heathrow Airport security. And in my mind, everyone in Heathrow Terminal 5 stopped. And the girls pointed in horror at me. I mean, only they weren't, obviously, and they didn't. There's a nice paradox here. We spend a lot of time thinking that everyone is looking and thinking at us, but they're not. Because they think that everyone is looking and thinking about them. So my white silicon laces snapped. And I was looking online for some replacements. And I needed them urgently. The first set of silicon laces that could be delivered to my hotel that afternoon or that evening. It turned out that they were rainbow silicon laces. I put them on and the next day, and didn't really think much of them, I was just glad to have something in. The next morning I was in the office and somebody commented on them while I was making a coffee in the work kitchen. And they just said, oh, they look pretty cool. And I was like, oh, they're silicon. It's because I can't tie my shoelaces. I remember I shot myself. I just said it. I outed myself. It was this realization that it was OK. The sky didn't fall. The world didn't stop spinning. It was OK. This was just the start of a journey for me. But the feeling that just in a small way, I was that more aligned to myself was powerful. So often a team will have their ways of working dictated to them. They often find themselves working against the process. This is the same thing as with individuals. The team is being inauthentic, like someone trying to be authentic by copying someone who seems authentic. A team trying to be agile by copying another team's process may well be doing really well for them. We'll end up following the process, but not their process. This is what I call contextual misalignment. It's important as leaders and coaches to be guiding teams toward contextual alignment. This doesn't mean telling them how to do the process. It means guiding them to discovering their own and supporting them as they discover and rediscover what this is. A few months after the redundancies, the team get a brand new coach. Initially everyone is pretty resistant. They're still in shock from everything that's happened over the last year. The coach gives them a whiteboard. They call it a workboard. Anything they're working on goes on cards on the workboard. It has three columns to do, doing, done. All they have to do is get what they're working on up on the board. They all get magnets to indicate who's working on what, and they're told to pick an avatar for their magnets. Sally chooses the Incredible Hulk. Harry chooses Day Medna Reverage. One day they stand around the board. Once a day they stand around the board and chat about the work that's on there. But after a couple of weeks it just seems natural to stand around the board whenever anything came up. It's where the work was. They still have their retrospectives every couple of weeks, but everyone seems a bit more invested in it. So they decided to go to the board to make little changes as experiments after each retro. For example, they realized they wanted to get better at demoing their work. So they decided just to try splitting their done column from not demoed to demoed. It was only a small change, but it was good to have some ownership over the way they were working. And they were making lots of small changes. But after a couple of weeks, they finally get to go on the holiday they'd been planning for ages. Harry tries to propose to Sally on top of the Eiffel Tower. She tells him that's way too cheesy and he should try again. The next morning he wakes up to find a gift card for a driving experience day from Sally. It reads, enjoy yourself and see you later. He spends the next two hours tearing around the track with the Stig. At the end, to Harry's surprise, he removes his helmet and Sally is revealed. If you want a job doing properly, she says. So after all that, I ended up face to face with a homeless drug addict in Detroit. Hey man, take a picture of me. I'm no real Detroit. Well, I thought my mum's words ringing in my head. I guess I had it coming. I stopped and smiled and said, I'm so sorry for letting the fear of death in the way of good British politeness. My camera's battery's dead. I would love to take your photo, but I can't. And then I paused for a moment and said, and I left my wallet at home today. I have nothing else I can give you. I'm sorry. He looked back at me and I looked back at him. We just stood there for what felt like hours. And then breaking the silence, he said, can I rap for you? Rap for me? Well, that was unexpected, but strangely, I knew instinctively that the correct answer is yes. So in the strangely intimate setting on the corner of a street at the edge of downtown Detroit, this man rapped for me. He told me his story. He told me how when you live with a heroin addiction and you have no money, you are living with withdrawal all the time. You live hit to hit, desperate for relief. He told me how two nights before someone had kicked the shit out of him while he slept, he doesn't know who it was. He just woke up with a boot in his face. He told me about his wife. He told me about his daughter. How much she missed her. How much he loved her. How he left them to protect her from the him he was becoming. When he finished, I hugged him and thanked him. We said goodbye and I continued my walk up Cass Avenue. A moment later behind me, I heard him talking to someone. Did you get anything? The voice said. Nah, nah, my friend replied. I told you, man, we're not going to get shit from people around here. The voice said. Nah, nah, man, my friend replied. He listened to me. It's been a long time since anyone listened to me. After my relationship break down, I had to work out who the hell me was. But the thing I forgot is the best version of you is still you with all your broken bits. But those things like the sculptor's chisel shape your life. They define who you are. You will never be without them. You do your broken bits better than anyone else. They are your superpowers and you own them. They don't own you. Life is not about redefining yourself. It's about finding out where your boundaries already are and accepting them. In a sculpture, its boundaries are what make it beautiful. And they can be what make you beautiful as well. Life is not about redefining yourself, pardon me. You see, when I asked you to close your eyes and think about where you are right now, that's because unlike a sculpture, many of your boundaries do change. Who you are does change over time. The trick is noticing it, aligning with yourself and not fighting it. When you fight who you are, you waste your energy on being that other person. And it's harder and harder to be the wonderful person you already are. So in 2019, I returned to Detroit. As I walked up Woodwood Avenue with a friend, Facebook reminded me that I had actually been there. On that day, two years before, only this time I had delivered that very same workshop and it had sold out. Over the last, over those two years, over the last nearly five years now, as I have reconnected with myself and discovered my superpowers, I've had more success and more importantly made more close friends than I ever had before. As we walked up the street, we found the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art. When I walked past this two years before, it was covered in amazing murals striped with pink and yellow. But this time, it was all black. I thought that perhaps they were between murals that it was an undercoat. But as we got closer, we realized there was a mural there. It was a simple message in white neon lights at the front of the building. It just read, everything's going to be all right. The famous lyrics from Bob Marley. When I went to Detroit the first time, I was broken and in pain. But this city with all of the suffering it has had for over 50 years was a city of community, a city of pride and a city of hope. A city that despite everything is holding onto its authenticity. Holding onto the real Detroit. Thank you very much, everyone. Sorry that I'm a couple of minutes over. Please feel free to connect. Thank you, John. Thank you, John, for such a nice session.