Agile Coaching and Organisational Problems with Tom Siebeneicher

Hi everyone. My name is Patrick Akio, and this conversation made me realize that organizational change is incredibly difficult. Optimizing and making more effective how people work together. Having those conversations, persuading people. How do you do that? Explaining that and joining me today is Tom Zebenaja, my friend and colleague over here at Xebia. Enjoy the episode. Beyond coding, fine. How many marathons have you run?

That was actually my first one, first full one. The first full one I did 1/2. And the reason why I did it this year was actually quite interesting because a good friend of mine called me in February, maybe March and said I want to run a marathon this year. I said, well yeah, probably the Amsterdam marathon should be nice because not that much hills in Epsilon and also the city, the sky, the skyline on the city itself was nice. And he said yeah, that's a great idea.

I probably saw the advertisement a week ago, I don't know. And two hours later I got an e-mail. Yeah, you signed up for the MSA marathon. Oh, OK And I said wait a minute. And then I called him and he said, yeah, well, I thought we'd do it together. I didn't thought so. I think so bad. Anyway, so we signed up. We did the preparation together, even never physically trained together. We just use lava and then we can back and forth.

And it was always these. Shit, if you wake up and he already did his 20K at 8:00 in the morning, he said. OK, now I need to do mine. It was a great help. And then we also managed to really run the full marathon. Yeah, really Side by side together, that's also. Really nice. Still, you probably know the Vibo start office. If you go down the street where the university is, University of Amsterdam, there's this crossing where the street goes down and up again.

For whatever reason, the the marathon route goes down and then you need to do up again. But it's after 35 kilometer, so not a good place to go downhill because that somehow works but uphill. You're done. You're done. So we did and we managed somehow. But when we came on the bridge, he looked at me and said, do we walk? Let's walk. And then we walked. I didn't know for three hundred 400 meter. And then it was just finishing through Wendell Park and so

forth. So the feeling at the end was really nice. But I would also say the last last five were the hardest part. The rest went somehow smooth but. The last five was really tough and did you do this from like scratch? Are you a runner? Did you run before or was it just he signed you up and it's going to? No. So normally it's. I think I managed to run once or twice a week, maybe an hour, hour and a half an hour. You're a runner. Yeah, I'm you can quantify myself as a runner, but I never

did long distance because for example. I like podcast. I like listening to podcast. But you know it is. You never record a podcast for two hours. Normally it's one episode or two episodes you can listen to during one run. But if you prepare for a marathon, you need to do 2 hours, 3 hours preparation and it's just it's too long. That's my reason. Bowing in my head, I had to do 3 * 3 hours and and it was really I was running and OK, two hours

and then another and then. But I also kind of used to audiobooks because I concentrate too much to it and then I stop, I stumble. So Nah, it doesn't work. So yeah, music it is, but even music for three hours, you don't think, OK. But nevertheless the mouth on itself was really easy because along the whole course where people and they would make noise, they would cheer you up. So that was quite nice. But the preparation, yeah, it's

hard. Yeah. Yeah. A friend of mine started getting into this, I think half a year ago, and he signed up for like a a, a run in Romania. That's where he's from originally. Yeah. He did it with this guy that was like a mini triathlon. So I had to swim, he had to bike, had to run the whole thing. Then he did the last round, and I'm saying he did the half marathon and he's like, next year I'm going to do the full one. He's like, you should join as well.

Yeah. And I'm like, I mean, maybe I should, but for me, it's just it's too long. It's too long and I'm not that person that then tries to one up himself and then go further and then eventually become one of those ultra marathon runners that like runs for 24 hours. I don't want to be that person. Yeah, I I can imagine. And one of the guys, actually, after we finished in the stadium and said, Oh, well, a marathon that's not just two half

marathons. Yeah, which, well, it's actually right, because I have the feeling 1/2 marathon you can. Well not without any practice but it's not that much practice you need because it somehow works But the full one that's it's harder it's harder. There's definitely harder and different also doing the preparation there.

Are you then gonna stick to marathons or are you gonna one up yourself and? No, I think that the nice thing about it is. That the friend of mine, he lives close to Frankfurt. We don't see each other that often and this is a good reason to connect once a year. So I think we will try to do 1 sport event. I don't know, it's always a marathon a year just to keep in touch, train together even remotely and then have this event together because he came by with his family.

I didn't saw his daughter. I think she's now 1 1/2 years old, so already quite old in that regard. And we already said, well, if we do myocca next year, so why not doing a week of vacation afterwards together. So that that's the whole idea. I love that. Like, I'm really bad at keeping up with my network, with my connections, with the people that I used to work with or used to be friends with or still friends with.

And I think this is a great kind of hook to keep in touch, to touch base through Strava or whatever app you have. And then once a year or maybe when you have a marathon, come together and then, like, spend time together.

Yeah, yeah, let's see. So next year's already signed off. And then he also said he's really pushing for triathlon. But I hate swimming. Me too. And yeah, well, we're in Holland, right? So biking, that's fine. I think we can do that. But swimming? No chance. So I've probably drowned along the way, but he's got to take lessons. Yeah, yeah, he said. Now, now we need to do it.

He said. Well, let's do another marathon and then we see so. We are maybe up for more, but I'm not sure yet that this will work out. This guy's a good driver though. He's like, let's do this. He's really ambitioned and my girlfriend is 100% behind it because if you train for a marathon you also lose a lot of weight naturally. And she said, well, that's actually really nice side effect, as I've noted. Yeah. Do you feel any different from having run for those long periods?

Yes. So I think that my technique got better. So it's better technique and. If you've run that long or so, what kind of shoes are you wearing and what kind of socks are you wearing? More and more things come to play. I mean, I'm not a professional athlete. If you, if you think about it, I run the marathon in four hours, 11 minutes. The fast fastest guy I think on that day in two hours, 8 minutes. Wow. So when I was at the half marathon, he was done. So totally different world.

But yeah, you start to feel these these things, but it's also. I'm more energetic and also, I don't know how it is for you, but the work we do is so much thinking and focusing on things that having this distraction of being out and just really simple run in One Direction for half an hour helps a lot. Yeah, yeah. Mental, mental clarity is what I would kind of assign it to. Yeah, I do my workouts in the morning and now I'm a little bit less on schedule than I that I would like to be.

But when I did it, for example, adamantly every day I would go into my meetings, I would go into work, I would already have done my work, I would be awake basically. I would sometimes be exhausted because you do a good workout, you are exhausted. But when I went into meetings, I would catch myself being very sharp and I think I would have the mental clarity for that because I did all my exercise, I I basically didn't think about anything, just working out,

giving it my all. And then throughout the day, I I would be able to give it my all on a professional level as well, what I do on a day-to-day. And I found that if I didn't do that, I would maybe be slower, I would maybe be sluggish and I wouldn't like that because I know what it feels like to be like on top of your game. Yeah, to have mental clarity as well and no distractions and just being very focused in that way. Yeah, yeah.

And also having this and this is what I like in my work in my day-to-day is that having this freedom also to? Can quote scheduled in or plan it in a bit. So for example, yes for sure you sometimes have important meetings which are reoccurring, but if you also get by the management, it's freedom to say for example potentially Wednesday, there's a good win. So I would go kite surfing. So I if I manage I will carve out half a day to go kite surfing which I then I can make up for later.

If there's no team or not directly. A relation I need to take care of and this is also what I like because. Let's say mental clarity. Squeeze it in where it fits with family, friends and work. This is also I really appreciate, yeah, absolutely.

I think if if you can combine that flexibility of your personal life and your work life like that's the that's the best balance to be in. But the problem is if you let go of that and if you don't do it, and if work kind of becomes the main driver, which it has been, and then even maybe you have side projects like, it's very hard to spiral then out of that and back into kind of getting control of your life, exercising, eating, healthy stuff like that.

Yeah, it's a it's a good thing when it's a good spiral, let's say, but it's hard to get out of a bad spiral in that way too. Yeah, definitely. And it also quite often gets gets, well, not fostered, but you have these bad examples. So I had a client a while ago where I mean do you will get a bad side eye if you will if you're not at your desk at 8:00 and if you are leaving before 4 because the management was

always. As long as I have the people around, they will work because if they sit at the desk they will do productive work, was the assumption. I think we can all agree with it. It will not be productive the whole time. But this was just the way they would manage it and which creates a lot of frustration, anger because you need to squeeze in your family life, your friends. Sometimes having a little, little bit of flexibility helps a lot, yeah, yeah, I agree. How do you like?

Do you have any pillars in place to help you not overwork? Because I feel like if you have the flexibility and if you love your work, you might overwork yourself as well and kind of hit into a wall when it comes to burning out or even getting close to that. Yeah, I I even had a situation where I nearly burned out. I would say it was 2008, right before I went on sabbatical, where work was everything.

So if I couldn't check my phone for emails, messages whatsoever, even in the evening, I got nervous and while. Let's say being on this journey, I also recognize that there are little signs where I see OK, I'm, I'm under pressure, I'm stressed out, and so forth. For example, my my sport routine, if I come to the point there, I say, well, I have a regular scheduled, let's say slot for for running or for

going to the gym. And if I need to skip it two or three times, I start to think about OK, what's happening. So what's the reason I do I have a stressful week? Do I have two stressful weeks? What? What's what? And the other thing is that. Like a Monday, like today when I start working on the Monday and I already feel tense when I just start working, then I normally

know something is off. There's too much work, There's things which don't work because what I try to do is I have a 0 e-mail policy nowadays, also applies to Slack teams and you have all these messages. But if I plan my day or my work life right, I'd I'm always done with that stuff in a reasonable time frame, OK? But if I if I recognize that emails sit in the inbox, or Slack messages sit in the inbox that I can't answer for a day or two, then I normally have too

much work. So then my planning shifts a bit and then I try to quote work against it or change it again. But what I need for that is. But I also see at clients quite often instead freedom in the frame. So I know OK, I need to do my 40 hours. You all know that. But. When are you do that, doing that and what are you doing when? That's up to you to decide. So if I now talk with my unit managers here at Tabia, they also say, well, Tom, this is what I need. This is when I need it.

Does it work? Does it not work? And as long as this open dialogue is happening, that's quite helpful for me. Yeah, in, in organizations where

they have that flexibility or kind of are afraid to give that flexibility. I'm assuming it has to do a lot with trust, right? Discipline from the people that work and trust from the people that give that freedom. Definitely. And also quite often the the goal setting system you have in these kind of organizations then doesn't work. So for example and I had a coaching a while ago with a guy he said well Tom, I need to, I need to reduce the back rate by 50% in the next two months.

So that's my goal. I said well that's not a bad goal but share it with your team. No, I don't want to share it. I don't want to pressure them. But now you keep the pressure in quotes for yourself, and you also take the solution izing away from from the people, because. When they know this is your main

driver, this is your main goal. They might come up with other things they they want to do, but this is denositis behavior of losing control because all they know what I need to do and now they come up with a solution which I need to argue about which might be better, which can be, but the people could unsecure about it. So also on the management level. This is where I quite often do my coachings around. It's good to be, let's say, confident enough to let go of

things. So there's also sometimes this decision metrics, when do you do a centralized and when do you do decentralized decision? And quite often people say, yeah, this is a decision I need to take for whatever reason and then take a look on the decision and said, well, you don't have a knowledge, you need to gather all the information. It's not really affecting you. So why do you need to take the decision? Because I'm here for decision making. OK, great.

I mean it's probably the same for you with if you act on a team or if you have a broader team setting, someone will make a decision and then the team can argue about it. But yeah, I I like not making all the decisions. I think some decisions I have to make, but I'm I'm not sure which ones they are yet and I'm not sure if I go too much into kind of democracy and letting things be decided by the team.

It's something I'm I'm experimenting with and seeing what is a good fit, but I'm not sure if I'm not acting when I'm supposed to act and I feel like in your case people are acting or they should delegate or they they become the bottleneck themselves in that way. Yeah, that that's quite often

the situation, but. On the flip side, it also can happen that people which are sitting in the team or on the management level say, especially middle management, quite often they say, well, I will do what my boss is telling me to do and then I will cascade it down to my teams. Because this is somehow an easy life, right? Because the boss says we go left, we go left for two hours

and please let your team know. So they take it, give it to the team and then the team said, but it doesn't make sense, they still can safeguard their position with yeah, but our boss said so. Because they don't want to make own decisions. But also in the team level you have the same. I had a team which I started with Scrum and then two or three of the teammates said, well we don't want to make a decision. You need to tell me what I need to do tomorrow. I will do it.

I will do it great, but that's it. And then this we do a Sprint planning. Why should I plan? I just want to do my work and tell me what to do, yeah. And handling these emotions and these perspective is also quite important. So what we did for this particular team is 1 specific case was they didn't want it to take care of any kind of refinement work. They want to say give me a ticket which is ready to go and do it.

So instead of having the full team and the refinement, only two of the people showed up and the rest of the team certainly don't want to and everyone was happy and everyone was was living with that. But what we did, half a year later, I said, well, did you ever ask if now someone else wants to join the refinement? No, Why? They said no. I said, well, they said no once, which doesn't mean they said no forever.

Yeah. So we asked and two people actually said, well, I think now I want to join as well, which was great for the really good, having this repetition and also challenge again what's already set in stone, quotes in stone. That's quite often awesome. Important.

Yeah, it's it's very hard for me to put myself in in those shoes because one of my main drivers is like understanding why we're doing something. And especially I've also been put in kind of that middle management position where I was like, no, no, I want you to kind of distribute information. I was like, no, I don't want to do that.

If I'm in that position. I don't want to be there basically because I I cannot be kind of a bridge between people that need to know and someone that's going to tell me something because then what is my role, right. I'm just noise there. And you know how you have like and you do this when you're in school, like elementary school, you have this huge circle of people and one starts and like says something to the other people. Like all those communication bridges, it's all going to be

noise. And at the end you're going to have not the essence, you're going to have some random sentence that someone said along the way. That's really what I feel like. And then to put myself in the shoes of people that say I'm fine with that, I'll coast in that position and I don't have really have accountability, but

I can. I can be like, no, that's that person's fault or we need to execute based on this information is very hard for me to do, to imagine myself be there and then kind of from that point on help change it in that way as well. Yeah.

And I think one of the things I also discovered in addition to that is that I mean I'm I'm 34 years, so my whole professional life is roughly 10 years. So, but I work with people which are already 20 years, 25 years in the job, but they but they also have another 1020 years to go because we all can retire I think in Holland around. 68 Yeah. Might as well be never. Yeah, yeah. Never, Maybe yes. But to acknowledge that they grew up in a different setting in a different world is also

quite an important. Because quite often I see these agile coaches or professional consultants going in and said this is the new world, this is what we need to do. And they totally deny the fact that there was a different world, which also were quite fine for quite a while. So why should they just switch 100% or make a tall turn and

then having these discussions? Can be really beneficial because quite often I think we forget that there are people in the room which have a lot of experience, different kind of experience, though, yes, I acknowledge that. But they also have a lot of time ahead of them. They need to work, yeah. So they also want to have a work environment which is healthy for them, which might be different to what we expect. Yeah. Then from your point of view, like when you come into an

assignment or you're there for like change management, you have an idea, have a better future, right? A better way of working for them, and you might get pushed back. No, I don't want to do the refinement, just tell me what to do. How do you balance between what is acceptable behavior and how much do you push, kind of, for your vision of how we should work together? Yeah, I think it what I always try to determine first, what is the sense of urgency.

So why do we want to change? So if sometimes you have organizations, they say, well we want to introduce Scrum or Agile because everyone is doing it. Is that usually the reason? Yeah, quite often it is actually. And then you talk to the management and say, OK, have you ever worked in a Scrum team? Now why should I? My team does. I said OK, good, And you already have two two red flags in the room.

But what also happened and with the team is so if you say, well, you now need to work in Scrum. So we determine Scrum is the way we want to go. And then addressing the concerns of the team members to say, OK, what does Scrum actually mean? What does it, what does it do to me, What what is changing? And then also taking into account that you sometimes have people which already worked in that environment and really love it. To say yes.

But you now have people that are not used to having this time boxes and also not used to let's say this freedom. So it's like like take a child, If you put a child in the sandbox and you tell this is your sandbox, stay in the sandbox and you give it a shovel, it will probably shuffle or it will throw the shovel away and try to leave the sandbox. So. But if you say five times no, at a certain point in time the child will stay in the sandbox.

So and what I see then is that we expect from people which got 5 * a no. I like to jump out of the sandbox because new world, freedom to grow, yadda yadda yadda and that doesn't work. So taking these people along and also quite often explain what does certain things mean for them and what are the benefits, That's what I normally do at the beginning. And the other thing is then also validating, do they actually want that?

And this is also where I see let's say my biggest benefit, because we all can read the Scrum Guide, it's not that much pages, it's easy to read, but doing it this translation work between where do we want to go and where are the individuals in the system to pathway a route for them which also works for them. So I have sometimes teams which I have let's say 2-3 subgroups and every subgroup needs a different support system to really do the steps in one or

another direction. And quite often I also get the question, so when are we done with this agile transformation thingy? So when, when, when can we finally work which is office? Great, I said, well actually we are never done. Point #1 and point #2 is the ideal system if you really follow it. As always, what is the most beneficial for the group of people you have? So as soon as you change the group of people, you need to rethink your operate operating

model to a certain degree. Yeah, I I'm just trying to put

myself in your shoes. And even when you talk about multiple teams, let's say there's five people in those teams to build up a relationship with those people and with their managers and kind of the organization is going to be a lot of communicating. It's going to take a lot of time, right? You don't just. Start with a great relationship that has to take time for them to be able to trust you in leading them to a better way of working and a way of working that also works for their

circumstance. Because it's not really a cookie cutter mold. Like it's customizable. It needs to work for the people in that team and the people, especially when they are diverse. They require like flexible communication, a flexible way of working in that way as well. How? How do you manage? All those communication lines building up those relationships from the position that you have. Yeah. And it's always several things which come to play. So one, one thing is how can we

make the change tangible? So how can we create this the sandbox? How can we create the sandbox that everyone from a start knows? OK, this is where I can be. This is where I can run around and maybe not directly dip the toe out of the sandbox, but this is my play field and this can be done via standardization. You can just share and communicate about it. But then you have, yeah, well you always have someone in the mix who says no, I don't want to do that, I can't do that.

And what helps quite often is if you tried to catch the early adopters through, which are really open for it and start with them because one of the biggest push backs you will nearly always get is this doesn't work for us. We are different. Yeah. Well, and she said, OK, how can we create this fear of missing out? So how can we create this movement at the beginning that people understand it's working

for one subset. So for one team for example, and especially people which are then concerned, anxious or not sure how to do it, they start to speak up normally because they see they are happy. I also want to be happy. How can I be happy too? And I honestly had cases where people then said I think the way they do it, I can't be happy, which is fair, which is a fair assumption.

Which then brings you to the situation where you either say, as harsh as it sounds, do I need to leave the organization because this is the movement the organization has created or do I find a different spot in the organization where I can flourish? I had once the situation from a

really experienced architect, he said Tom, I don't want to work in the Scrum team. I'm not good in that I don't like it, but I'm great in talking and I'd like to be asked. So what helped him was that we created a model around him and another colleague to architect where they had this Ask me Anything sessions always on a Tuesday the 1st day. So the whole day would would be asked them anything and in between they would design the concept do the architectural things and so forth.

So the all teams I think it was 25 teams they knew on a Tuesday or first day I can just go into that room or that's lecternal or that team's room you never never know and ask them anything I need to know And this worked perfectly for them. They never worked in a scrum setting. These two architects, they never had to, but they knew OK Tuesdays and Thursdays people will hover us in quotes and the rest of the time we can work on designs we like to so everyone

was happy. But the issue is that especially

around Agile coaching and this is also a movement we see in the community nowadays, everyone thinks it's a skill set. Now everyone already has. So everyone can work agile, everyone is used to that. And I strongly believe there's still pockets around the world or in in different cultures, different organizations, wherever where it's not the case. But the people are no longer willing to invest in that journey because as you said, it

takes a lot of time. And I mean you are quite often working in the system or in a team. They also would say, yeah, work Scrum, you know how to just run. Yeah, it's. I don't know, like I I grew up with it. I I don't see what was before that. I don't even know what the way of working was because I joined an organization. I came from operations. I was like, OK, this is software development. This is our way of working and we follow this framework and these are the rituals and.

That's it. This is how we deliver value and we do that over and over and over again, Sprint after Sprint. And I was like fine, if this is our way of working, I can. I can see the benefit of it. I can see kind of the the conveying of information, the growing together as a team, the information distribution that happens, the opportunity to understand why we do the things we do like I could see all the

benefits. Which makes it really hard to, like, think back and think back from a place where that wouldn't be there and people would just work. Like, how would they work? Yeah, there would be no framework. There would be no processes. Yet they would still deliver, like, and they always delivered. Maybe not on a timely manner, maybe like, maybe they did meet deadlines. I have no clue. Yeah, that makes it hard. Yeah. And this is for me also where I got a glimpse at the very, very,

very beginning of my career. Because when I started, I joined an organization which was focusing on classical waterfall project management consulting. Yeah, really long and Ruddy description. But anyway, so I would go to an organization, they had a waterfall project, they made a plan, they made a design and would execute it for five years

and hope it works. So I got a glimpse of it and I think, and this is also what I see when I go to conferences, I still strongly believe do agile where agile is due and so it

will not work everywhere, but especially like you said, there's now a generation of developers people not even in just in software development. I think in a broader sense or some other areas which never saw the classical waterfall way and it worked and there's still companies which are extremely successful with it, but we never learned that. And I think we are now transitioning sometimes into the situation that it's not about teaching agility that much

anymore. It's more about how can we translate between the world we have been for years and now the world we want to live in in the future. And not a lot of people can do that because like you and me, we are somehow, yeah, natives in agility. We never work otherwise. And now there are people for a reason which still have a lot of knowledge and stuff to bring to the table and given the timeline also a lot of years of work

ahead of time. They also want to integrate in a way and I'm curious how this would play out. Yeah, same. But like from my perspective, I didn't wanna be bothered with and I trusted other people to optimize our way of working. Yeah, right. And I could see later down the line what people, what decisions were made and maybe if I agreed or disagreed with that, but I

still didn't care. I trusted the other people to make those decisions, to have those experiments that you said, to test the assumptions if this works for us. And I wanted to focus on getting really good at my part of like this puzzle within the organization, which was software development especially because I didn't have any like professional experience made it very easy for me to focus on

that. But then later on when I saw that the team aspect, for example, when I was confident and comfortable within my software development skills that I could deliver, I started looking outside at what could be optimized. And I did kind of gravitate towards optimizing us, working together as a team.

And I feel like if you really get a lot of energy out of that within that team, you might then step out of that team and look at other teams and try and like optimize their processes and make sure they're more effective. Because I like a well oiled machine. I like functioning within a well oiled machine. And if that well oiled machine is not as well oiled, then I might just step out of it and try and tweak it, Yeah.

And I think that that's something where there still will be and always is work to do and things you can do around it. It's just that let's say with my speciality, leadership or

executive coaching quite often. It's also this, I still have this old guard people which learned for 2025 years. This is how it should be and it came. They came into that position for a reason, which is fine. But also then teaching them how the world change. And one of the different things is sometimes hard for them to understand, to digest, because let's, let's see, for example, value stream funding. So you give the value stream 4

million a year. Yeah. So you don't know what you get out of it. You only know that they will do their very best to create value, which is hard if you in the past had. OK, I have a fourth cast. I have a business case. I calculate the business case and this is what I get. Yeah. So I know what I get already sometimes as you said, I didn't get it because it took longer or it got more expensive whatsoever.

But flipping it around to say, OK, now you spend 4 million and you need to trust your organization that there will be a well oiled machine which is creating as much value as they can out of that. That's a total mind shift for them. And I went to the Scan Agile conference in March this year and we had a presentation for around 102 hundred people around that. And I asked the group, which was primarily executive level, who have you ever worked in Agile slash Scrum to make a little

more concrete Scrum setting? And I think maybe 1/4 or less of the people said I I even know what it is, roughly. The rest of the world has never worked in it, but I expect my teams to. That's a long Rd. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's I think it's hard if it's not carried throughout the organization, right? Because then you're really lacking a vision of. How? How do we do this within our organization right and all the way through from a vertical

slice? Your manager should understand and their manager should at least have an understanding of how we do this, and it's best if they also kind of work with it because then they learn. I think it's it's hard to just go from the theoretics theoretical side because you need the practicality of how does this work within our environment and within this team. Yeah, but it's also if you didn't turn it around like you said, you're native in that field and you just wanted to

code. You want to be a good developer. This is what you wanted to do. Sometimes people have the tendency, tendency to say, well, for me it's logical what we do. So why do they not get it? But then appreciating or accepting or acknowledging whatever you will to say, well, they never learned that they they grew up in a totally different world. And I never did. That's why for me it's logical because I never saw something else. Yeah, for them it's what are

they doing? So it's like translation template is sometimes missing. Yeah, I get that, does that

because I I think about let's say 30 years down the line, wave workings are going to evolve and going to be adaptable. But even the way you're communicating kind of your position in this, it's a lot of assumption testing. It's a lot of experimenting. Which means you're flexible enough to accept when things work and when things don't work.

And I feel like that kind of understanding that that mindset is sometimes missing because when you have that and the way of working will change down the line, 20 years from now, you're not going to be like, no, this is what we did in the past. This is what always has worked. You're going to be like, interesting, why does that work and what has changed? And maybe I need to kind of reframe my way of working and

adopt that right? Because if there's a better solution, I don't care which solution is the best. Yeah. But I would like to know which one is the best and why? Because then I understand.

Yeah. And I think time will also tell because I I think it was. It was last year. Yeah. Last year I had a client who said, well, Tom, I'm 55, so I have another five years and then I retire early. I don't want to change anymore. Yeah, I changed my whole life. That's hard. And I saw. I saw a good reason in that because he said Tom I don't want to change again and I'm tired.

I'm I'm man I worked for 30 years I'm done with that And I said you are right and still the organization the the world is expecting you to change. And I think for you and me right now for us, it's still easy to say yeah well then we change, circumstances change. So we change. But I, I give it, give the point to him to say, well, I really want to change 2030 years from from now again to something maybe radically different to what we know today.

I honestly don't know. Yeah, maybe you don't have energy anymore. It could happen. I think that acknowledging that that it's also hard for them. This is also what's sometimes missing. And this is where it quotes. My sweet spot is to say, OK, I have a team, a group or set of people which is loving, living the new world. And I have a group and set of people which is saying, well, yeah, we want to change somehow, but it's a long way. It's harsh.

And the easiest is to start from top of the leadership. But there are a lot of layers in between where we then need to talk to different kind of people to organize it. And as you said, if you code something that's tangible, that's a function, something is visible. Sometimes I spend weeks with talking to people and they all do better. But if then the old management is asking me what have you done, by the way? Well, I think it was 40 hours of talking.

So I now pay you for 40 hours of talking that doesn't end up and balance that out, make this transparent that that's the key as well. Yeah.

Do you have any like artifacts that you measure with regards to progress that your communication has done for teams and their output? Or what do you usually measure as kind of the effect of change? Different things than what the management sometimes likes to measure. But there nowadays a lot of good KPIs you can rely on or you can take into account if you want to make it more tangible. For example, one of the good things if you for example work

in Scrum is commitment rate. So what has the team planned and what has the team actually executed? So quite often the commitment rate is off, so they plan, I don't know 40 story points and deliver sometimes 60. So why could they over deliver question mark or they deliver 20 and figuring that out makes it more makes it more reliable. And the other thing is then also if you think about commitment rate, there's one thing, the other thing is MPs scores. You can just ask the teams to do that.

Or the other thing is at some times we use so-called coaching cards where you can say OK with this respective person we touch based on the 25 topics we agreed on. It's like a like a playbook. So it didn't say OK for our organization, this is the playbook everyone should know and then you go through that. It's not directly beneficial for the person itself, but you can at least measure that certain points are transparent and aware. So what we then do is Definition of Done is a good example.

We had one setting with I think A-Team up to 3030 teams and we would just measure, is every team aware of the definition of Done? You would now say, yeah, well everyone should know the Definition of done. But in this regards, no one knew that there's a definition of Done. We cannot question was it a good definition of Done. But in the 1st place, it's just a quantitative measure. Is everyone aware of it? Yeah. Are you the person that comes

with the initiatives of? This is what we should measure or we need a definition of done or we need to understand what that means? Or do you let the team decide after educating them, like what is what is your role in that? Are you the driver or do you try and kind of create bottom up change as well? It's both, yeah. So I see my, let's say, professional focus also on providing ideas of recommendation. What could work in combination to what does the team actually

asking for? So sometimes the team's already asking for certain things and say we need this or we have a huge dependency which is always biting our ass. We need to work on that one which needs to be acknowledged and done right away and then in combination, OK, but what else is missing? So where are we struggling and then also playing the whole field from? Is it a scaling topic? Is it a additional topic?

Is it whatever kind of topic that that's the key for me, but it sometimes takes time to figure it out because it also can be a cultural thing. So I've worked with, for example, with Tiktok a while ago. And yeah, Tiktok was all about growing, being being humongous and a lot of the teams in one area struggled about dependencies and well then we focused on dependencies. While the actual request from the management was I think they wanted to have Scrum at scale setting.

I said well that's not the pain. They already talk quite well with each other, that's not the issue. But you add so much complexity by just growing so fast that they did not keep up with it. And the issue they had was the so-called feature factory. They would just bump out features I think every week and no one would use it. Which is then also not fulfilling for you as a as a coder to say, yeah, I think we have developed these features half a year ago, No one is using it.

That's good to know, yeah. Throw it away is what I would say instantly, Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you get measured on that, then yeah, that will be your output. It's like if there's a misalignment between what the actual problem is and what the management thinks that the problem is, or even what teams think that the problem is, your output will change based on that. And I feel like you need people that have kind of this objective

overview and it helps if they're outside of the organization because so they have no skin in the game to give you guidance on that. And the guidance can also be wrong in some certain cases, right? Have you found yourself in that position as well where you came in, you're like, OK, I think it's, it's this or. I mean we've grown too fast. We need to focus on this and it turned out to be wrong or it turned out to be unnecessary.

The changes you've made Yeah. And I think the the amount of I can quote wrong decision gets smaller and smaller the more I I engage in the in the agile world. So that's the learning curve that that's good to say. But yeah for example at the very beginning I I became I think a Scrum Master for the wrong reasons because the reason I did it was OK, there's a good new certification in market. There's a cool project where I can travel to the states but I

need to be a Scrum master. So let's let's become a Scrum master. Worked perfectly. But I think two or three years later I also said once that we need a common retrospective. So we had six teams and I said now I have the feeling we need to have one retrospective altogether because there's certain things which I see as a pattern across all teams. We need to be in one room. So we created a big, really, really huge retrospective day

with everyone in the office. It was before COVID and we started to talk about things, but no one would speak up because the group was just too big. This, it's a psychological safety where you feel I can speak out there, My teammates, I can share things with them, didn't work any longer. So we pushed this whole endeavour on the organization just to learn, and that one day it it sucked. Yeah, I can imagine and part of me wishes like the theory would be easier, but then I think like

organizations are unique. There are a group of people that come together with a common goal and people hop on board and people hop off board and things change and adopt, right? Even if we talk about culture, it's it's such a like flexible thing and culture can change and it can be better, it can be worse. But that's a person's opinion. That's subjective. For the people that hop on.

It's the best thing ever, which makes it really hard to then just look at theory, which means that if you want to start this

thing, I think you need a lot of practical experience. But then throughout that journey you will make mistakes and you will learn just by doing what works and what doesn't work for different amounts of people within diverse settings feel like it's a whole lot to get into. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think the one thing which shows, let's say, mature organizations or organizations which are ready for the for the world, if you will, is how fast

can you recover from a mistake. So how, how fast or how quick can you recognize, OK, didn't work, let's drop it, do something else. And I think some organizations then hold onto it for too long because they say no, we invested money in it that needs to work. Yeah and then you recognize to be honest, no it doesn't. We learn a lot let's go. And I think it applies to the actual software development also

in other organizations. I was my girlfriend worked for a big company in the in in in Sweden and they would build a plant to recycle stuff and they learned OK the factory haul is too big well let's live. It is like it is mistake we we spent too much money on on on not enough money actually to

figure that out. Mistake made, but just make the best out of it. So instead of saying yeah, well we need to change the whole layout again, they said, well let's just rent out half of the the factory hall. Done, done, problem solved. And just this simple mindset that's all this, let's say pragmatism to say ah come, let's fix it in a different way. That's what's needed. But I don't see it that often to be honest.

Yeah, it it's also hard right? Because from me, from like, AII think it's solutions quite often. And if I think I have the solution, it's very hard to be like what? What are other options there? So if you were like, OK, let's reorganize the factory like it, it makes sense if you think that's the option, right?

Like sometimes you can't even see a different option and someone throws you a curveball and says, well, you just rent out the space and we're good and you're like, man, I didn't think of that. To acknowledge that and to allow A-Team, whatever that might be, to bring in those ideas, right, To just put a problem in the middle and be like we should solve this as a team. I think it's such a good skill to have, but it's hard to acquire, I feel like.

It's really hard and it's also this for example if you then talk about a team what is the frame you have created as an

organization that can act in. And I mean I had once a team which was really really cool team and I worked together for a year or two already and they knew directly what is their code of coding, what is their architectural guidance. They had everything in place and they then it was an app, app development team and once the. In the Sprint review, one of the the stakeholders then said how did you do that? I didn't know that our platform is capable of doing that.

And they said, well, we actually connected to an an open source API and did yadi, yadi, yadi. And then the guy got totally haywire and said you cannot just connect our app to open AIS, blah blah blah. And then the team said, well, actually you didn't wrote down anywhere that it's not allowed. And the API is totally in line with our security and compliance regulations. Everything's fine. We checked that and then the guy said, so we have a new functionality which is working. Wonderful.

We connected to an open API. We can now argue if this is good or bad, but it works, yes. Yeah, Well, you're right. I allowed you to. So why not doing that? But. Having a team which is then, as you said, thinking so much out-of-the-box, what can we do to fix it? And also having this freedom to fix it in the way they think is the most beneficial, That is quite hard to achieve. Yeah, yeah, I agree.

I feel like and I'm I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that, like you have different organizational problems, right? When you start from a small organization and you move to hiring more people and scaling rapidly, let's say in the example of Tiktok that you gave, those will have very specific problems with people and growing fast. And OK, what what do these people do now and how do we

still deliver value? And you have organizations which already have established that scale over that level of scale in the past, very much in the past. And they need to adopt kind of in this new way of working because competitors that rapidly scale like that are catching up and they're afraid. So they look at what they do and they try and implement that. Are those kind of the two levels of of organizations that you usually see or is there kind of an unidentified one in there as well?

Now I think that there are two big chunks, you can quantify them. There's then sometimes this behavior nowadays that let's say you have a traditional organizations like Lufthansa, Lufthansa, I mean they are around forever, It's the airline in Germany and. They recognize that it's so hard to change their traditional ways of working They have so they started to have an incubator and they always say it's a startup incubator.

But nowadays they also have an incubator it Lufthansa Digital Hunger I think it's name where they say they are focusing on our complete IT landscape because we can't change. We recognize we are not flexible enough to change the whole organization. So we just found something new and do it from there. So instead of changing, some organizations tend to. Let's do what everyone is doing, starting small and then grow it. That's one option.

And the other option is to then have organizations which say no, the sense of urgency is so high, we need to tear it down and start it new. So for example, Air New Zealand was one of the airlines who recognized that COVID sucks. OK, we can all agree to that, but it's an opportunity. So what they did during COVID this day took the whole organization apart. So in antigen, I think one of the few airlines around the world would say we have a 100%

agile mindset. They used the Helix model, so they restructured everything and apparently time will tell are now outperforming the competition in their respective area. So by also let's taking everything apart and starting starting new but still I think you can you can categorize the organizations into. Let's say traditional, a lot of legacy, a lot of bureaucracy if you will and these new fast growing organizations. And yeah, I think you can say about Tesla what you will.

Tesla was one of the first organizations which managed to combine these, let's say heavy complex hardware development with fast moving, fast decision pace and also software. Will it be successful down the road further? Don't know, because I think now the the rest of the world recognized shit. They did it. So let's pivot. But pivot the tanker like Volkswagen for example. That takes forever, yeah. Yeah, I can imagine. And the I think it has a lot to

do with your risk appetite as well. If you say tear it all down, we're gonna start from scratch. If you are in an organization which has acquired a certain level of skill, that is like an like an all or nothing decision, right? If that doesn't work, then what is left? Or have you destroyed what you had before? That's a risky one. Yeah. And I think I I am more fond of maybe that's my risk appetite of creating those incubators.

Right. Yeah. Organizing teams or setting up a a startup environment where they are disrupting your own market share. Something in a phrase that a friend of mine told me forget his name, but he was on previous episode. I'll probably put it in the in the description, but I think it's very interesting that more organizations I think should do that. But don't do that right.

If you are able to disrupt your own market share, it's like you're creating your own competitor, but you are the competitor, which means you have those learnings and you can then either incorporate it or still add on top of that and outgrow yourself in that way. Yeah. And especially from organizations which have a certain level of scale, they have the funds to do that. They have sometimes even the time to do that.

Yeah. So why they don't do that and just build on top of what they already have is kind of unknown for me. Yeah. I think one of the reasons to me there's not a final answer and also not fixing the situation is that there's again not enough sense of urgency that doesn't hurt enough. So they still make good revenue share, the shareholders are happy. So why spending money or funding on something where we don't know what comes out of it.

I think that that's the one thing back to risk appetite and how much are you willing to pay? And the other issue is they don't know how. So let's take Deutscheban. I think they all have the Deutscheban digital, which is. Somehow an incubator, but at least something which which is more flexible. But one of the first feedbacks, I think it was an article I read. I would need to dig it out. It was years ago, showed that the ban dodge ban always wanted to do that, but they're always

recognized shit. We don't know how because we don't have entrepreneurs who want to start up. So we actually need to find someone who wants to do a startup in a corporate world and that's hard to do. And I do see organizations doing that more and more.

So I do wonder if down the line, because again, time is like the the most crucial factor here, if it's going to be valuable or if it's going to be like a a lost investment in that way or I hope there's learnings and I think there will always be learnings. It's just, yeah, how valuable do you estimate those learnings to be? Yeah. And the question is then also do I fund my own incubator or do I

just in quotes laid back? And see what start-ups are popping up. Acquire those. And acquire those because you can then see as soon as it's proven as a business model you can say well just buy them because you as you said you have the funds. You can either decide bet on yourself that you can build it and come up with ideas which are so disruptive that that that will help. Or you just in quotes spend a little bit of seed money into start-ups where you think they

can work and just acquire them. But then and that's the next thing where I think. It was in Germany. There were a lot of these startups which had for example different spices or these fancy brands which started to be around in the in the supermarket as well where then gave a little on to fossils. Let's just acquire the brand and add it to our portfolio and the moment I did that the the brand went down. So it didn't work anymore.

So what is the reason to that? And I dived a little bit into it and I think the issue is that. They now have a startup character, ish situation culture which they want to integrate into their given system, which is again a tough thing to do because it's not just taking it, integrating it with work. It's OK. Two cultures are clashing against each other and yeah that's the that's the challenge I see with with the acquiring as well.

There was this company, it was called Dollar Dollar Shave Club and it was exactly what they advertised. They had a huge marketing campaign a few years back, Genius Genius CEO, which made a video that went completely viral and their whole thing was OK for dollar, you get a razor and that. We have extendable models for that, so you can get a little bit more for a little bit more.

And Gilana actually acquired them for quite a sum of money, but then started messing with the whole model, right, and adding more expensive razors. And all of a sudden your Dollar Shave Club was like a few $10. And then, yeah, the whole model

lost its purpose. And that part of the organization was completely lost, like a lost investment, either because of a mismatch of understanding how the business model works or should work or what people want, or just by virtue of not having done enough research, Like, I feel like acquiring has such a risk and it is a even bigger amount of investment than investing in starting up your own. But yeah, you do need the expertise and the skills to do that. That's a that's a challenge

there. It's a hard one, I feel like. And this again brings then all this different kind of leadership or people who lead or want to be responsible for certain things to to the play because you need people, OK, I need people which are capable of for example doing merchant acquisition. How do we integrate then we need to need to have people which are capable of hyper growth or

growing fast and that. But then we also need to have people who can stabilize an organization and then we want to have people which can do a start up so in that. At the end some organizations try to bring all these people into one room and say Kumbaya, we are happy world. There's there's some conflicting even that doesn't work, no.

From from looking at it from your angle, do you ever think about starting your own organization and experiencing those challenges from from inside out and not necessarily from that objective kind of outside in point of view? Do you have those thoughts? Yeah, I do. I think I'm always. I have a good friend who has a start up and he's now. Been doing that for five years. The interesting thing is that I think I'm lacking the right idea. I think that's the one thing.

The other thing, I think it would be too heavy on the process side at the beginning. So it makes sense. Everything would be perfectly structured, but nothing would be done. And I don't know, I cannot tie into this whole idea that a lot of people who are. Let's say founding a company, they do it for an exit. So nowadays there's a complete culture around. OK, I have my idea. I push my idea for 2-3 years because I want to make a big exit. What's the point? Yeah, so why?

Why should I? I mean, yes, I can probably make a lot of money about it. I will probably not have a life for two 3-4 years. Well, this is rough. Retiring with 40. It's a fair fault, but. I think the risk, I'm not the risk taker, I'm too risk adverse for that. Yeah that makes sense. And then what? What fulfills you with your current job that like experiencing that start up wouldn't do in that way? Yeah, I think that sometimes I think, oh shit, I could do it better.

But on the other hand, nowadays I see so many different organizations, also in a larger scale, where I not sometimes, I quite often can make people happy by changing things. And this is fulfilling. So to see that they flourish, they also understand that this wonderful new world, the two of us grew up and actually works. And that's just what I what I like. I think that that's that's good. And knowing that I get a paycheck every month helps, too.

That's so good stuff. Yeah, I agree with that. I was for you because you, I mean you you have which I don't have. You have the technical knowledge. So even if you think about an idea, something you would need to develop, why not? Giving it a try, it's it all has to do with fear. Like I I've said on this podcast and I'm still going to say it like I I do think I want to do that from moving into high school. I wrote that on my like, end of yearbook. I I always thought about it in

university. I followed a minor entrepreneurship and we we built kind of this thing which is basically Uber Eats. We partnered with restaurants and we did the delivery. So I jumped on my bike and we had a few orders there. We built the website ourselves. So I've always had that idea of doing that. It just has to do with how comfortable and when am I going to take the plunge. And more and more conversations that I have, people are going to be like you're never going to be

comfortable. At some point you will take the plunge and I think I will take the plunge at some point. I don't think necessarily I'm lacking any ideas. I think I could try and experiment in my way through it and be like this is what works. Hopefully find something where my passion lies in as well, which is exercise, anything having to do with Japan or more of the technical stuff.

And I I like having those conversations of people that have taken that plunge and learning from them because I feel like it's going to prepare me more and more. But yeah, all has to do with fear at the end. It has and I mean a friend of mine now started on a on a one year scholarship with doing a start up. But yeah, he's this. He has thousands of ideas. He's a vision here, but he now has a hard time to find someone

who's more structurally. Orientated and say OK, by the way, if he this is your great idea, when, when, when is it done and he again? He asked me as you. But not willing to to to to jump. But yeah, I think it needs, it needs to fit. But it's also great to see that there are so many different styles and leadership and the way you can combine it that. I mean, I'm also not done with my journey diving into that. Yeah, yeah, I The only thing that scares me is that time I

feel like sometimes catches up and I find myself being like, man, I've done this for a long time, and long is very short in some people's eyes. But for me, it's very long. Yeah, like when I joined this, I was like within X years I want to do XXY and Z and obviously plans change, but I always want to be in an environment where I can grow the fastest. Yeah, and where I have the flexibility and freedom to do whatever my mind like, my curiosity drives me.

I think when I lose that, I'll either switch organizations or I'll try and find something else or try and create something myself. But as long as I have that, I'm happy. And then I yes, I might have thoughts, but those are still going to be thoughts until something changes, I feel like. Because again, happiness is like priority. Yeah, that's for sure. And comfort is a big thing as well. Like a creature of habit, yeah. Yeah, I can totally agree to that. Yeah, good stuff.

This was a lot of fun, man. I I really enjoyed this conversation. I've heard you've done a lot of podcasts. Is this kind of similar to what you experienced in the past? It's totally different on that one. I really enjoyed it. So also from my side, thank you for that because it was a really nice conversation. I think we pivoted in a lot of different connect directions and the podcast I did so far were always which is fine. It's also I mean the listeners

have a certain expectation. Well, it was a predefined topic and sometimes you have this tendency to now we can derail into one another direction and. And quotes don't allow it because they want to stick to the primary topic, which I which I get. But this was more, let's say, open and let's see where we end. Yeah. Was there anything you still wanted to add on that we kind of left unspoken that you feel like? I think we we for example touch base the whole where I'm also

going on conferences with that there's always the next Sprint because you had this one one line in between where you said well I just want to work on for another one, next one, next one, next one. And there are so many let's say traps you can do by doing that. I had a tendency to jump on that one, but then for now and then, not today. Because, and there's always what I say at conferences. Have you ever seen a sprinter, an athlete who's sprinting and

then sprinting again? No, no, It's only what we do. Yeah, yeah, you told me, you told me that. I think in the in the intercalls line is so stuck with me. I think I said it to a person in previous episode as well. Like it's such a good point of view to have right and perspective because we do do that and no one takes us out of that. Yeah, yeah. So sometimes take a break, I feel like, yeah, definitely. Good stuff. Then I'm going to round it off here. Thank you for listening

everyone. I'm going to put all Tom socials in his in description below, check him out, let him know you came from our episode. And with that being said, thank you for listening. We'll see you on the next one.