Hey, a quick message, for those of you who are listening to this episode on Spotify, I have a small favor to ask Spotify. Now allows mobile users to rate podcasts, I would really appreciate it. If you can take a quick, pause to go to the technique Journal podcast page, and leave your favorite show. Your best rating on Spotify. It will help me a lot to get this podcast to reach more people on the platform. Thanks a lot. Focus on what really matters. If everything matters, the
nothing matters. So Figure out what really matters and use that kind of as a guide to help you make decisions about pretty much everything. But certainly how you use your time, how your team's use, your time, how your company's use their time, make sure that what you do is aligned with what really matters and if you do, then you will almost surely become that person or company or product or whatever it is that you want to be Hey everyone. My name is Henry Surya with Robin.
And you're listening to the technology, you know, podcast the show where I'll be bringing you the greatest technical leaders practitioners and thought leaders in the industry to discuss about their Journey ideas and practices that we all can learn and apply to build a highly performing technical team and to make an impact in your personal work. So let's dive into our Journal. Hello again, to all of you, my
friends and listeners. It's really great to be back here again with another new episode of the Tecla Journal podcast. I am your host Henry Surya with Robin. Thank you for tuning in listening to this episode. If this is your first time listening to tackle it Juno, subscribe, and follow the show on your favorite podcast app and social media on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. And if you are a regular listener and enjoy listening to the the episodes.
Will you subscribe as a patron at package? You know, dot, f / Patron and support my journey to continue producing great technology. No episodes every week. Have you ever felt that despite many things that you have done, you still feel that you're going nowhere or if you are a high performer, despite accomplishing. So many things, you still feel not fulfilled. And thus, feel unhappy or for some of us, you just don't know where to start in order to live the life you want.
Life can be challenging at times and despite wherever you are in your journey, we are going to learn a powerful framework called personal agility system in our episode today. My guest, for today's episode, our Peter Stevens, and Maria, Mozzarella Pizza and Maria are the co-founders of the personal agility Institute and the authors of personal agility book in this episode, Peter and Maria shared, what personal agility system is, and how we can apply this framework in our daily
lives. Learning from their own stories and lessons, Peter and Maria highlighted how many people face typical challenges that hinder them from true. Only getting what they want by using the life, is an ocean method for both of them, then give a complete walkthrough of the six. Powerful questions in personal agility system, especially highlighting the key.
Question, to find what really matters Peter and Maria, then shared how this framework is not just applicable to individual, but also applicable to leadership and organizational agility, and how you can help leaders and teams create alignment and Trust within an organization. I really enjoyed my conversation with both Peter and Maria learning about personal agility system, the six powerful questions and how we can use them to achieve what really
matters in our lives. Not to mention that, this is my first episode having more than one guest at one time. If you also enjoy and find this episode useful, please share it with someone, you know, either your friends or colleagues, who would also benefit from listening to this episode, also leave a rating and review on your podcast. Cast app or share this episode on your social media. It is my ultimate mission to make this podcast and the knowledge available to more people.
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It's free to join. And you will find it easy to keep up with the latest tech Trends. Hello everyone. Welcome back to another new episode of the package. You know, podcast today is very special for me because this is my first time having two guests in one episode. So we have Peter Stevens here
and Maria materially both. Actually co-founder of the personal agility Institute, they have a mission to help people and organizations to align, what they do with, what really matters to become, who they want to be and achieve. What they want to achieve. So today, we'll be talking a lot about this personal agility, what is this concept? All about how it helps people. And maybe you can also implement it in your life. So Peter Maria, really looking
forward to this conversation. So, hopefully, we have a great conversation today. Yeah, thank you, Henry. We're excited to be here. Yes. Thank you. We're delighted to be here. So I always tried in the beginning to ask my guests to share your courage, your knee, or any highlights turning points in your career. I guess we can take turns As for you to spend, maybe one or two minutes to share your journey so far Maria. Ladies first, my background
started actually start working. When I was 15 and work three jobs to pay my way through college. One of those jobs, actually got me into the professional it world. So I started working at caterpillar Incorporated Fortune 100 company managing some IT projects using Six Sigma that was my first exposure to Something. In the agile Rel, we were always looking at streamlining, the process has increasing efficiencies I went on to work at State Farm Insurance
corporate headquarters. Is in their Systems, Technology Department. That's why I was managing about five million dollar projects telling people twice my AIDS. When we need in Milestones done, it felt a lot overwhelming. I really realized I was really good at project management.
We started using traditional project management though with a background in lean Six Sigma was able to streamline the processes, reduce the inefficiencies in the project, on the Enterprise server, release windows and Unix server. Upgrades are able to go from two releases, two, three releases a year, streamline the projects, or we could offshore Or an Outsource, some of the work to other teams free up, our on-site
people from more strategic work and save the company. 1.5 million passive residual cost savings every year, and then began to explore using scrum as a framework on many projects. So how incredibly efficient and effective that was long. The journey decided to get more into coaching and training and discovered. I loved it over the years. Started exploring agile outside of it. What can you add Gillette marketing? I co-founded the agile marketing Academy.
Some of the first companies that we worked with we've got some incredible results 300% increase revenue and six months. Seven hundred eighty percent increase Revenue in a year from their realize, we're on to something here, lunch to case
study program. The first person that invested five thousand returned over 30,000 dollars on their first agile marketing campaign and we continue to explore ads outside of it. That's where Peter and I connected I started looking at this concept of agile peed in your life to do more of what matters and that's her personal agility really began to Grow as we began working together in the industry. So it's absolutely incredible to see the results. People, get with agile.
I love sharing these Concepts, strategies specific Frame Works with people and just helping them work better, and live better. Thanks Maria. Olivia Peter. Okay, so for me, it's funny my voice. I think starts in high school. When I was an exchange student to France, somehow my mom passed, her love of French on to be at my revenge was becoming an exchange student, a couple years later, I'd finished University.
I said, he computer science. I went to work for this little company called Microsoft, which no one had heard of at the time, but you've probably heard his have in the meantime, spent three years there, I, which point the calling to France kind of started ringing in my ear again, and I decided to come on a European Vacation. Which led me to learn German and moved to Switzerland. Switzerland is one of those places where if you survive your first six months, you're never
going to want to leave. I think it took me a little bit longer than six months. But really I decided to stay here and I've been there ever since my journey took me through a variety of things including system management while I was doing that, this is 1993. I kind of discovered scrum Without Really knowing it. And that's kind of interesting because Jeff Sutherland was creating scrum back that I didn't really realize what I had done.
But for 10 years after that, I all that my best project. In fact, sometimes I still do, it was really a great project. It was the basis of my career, in my business, for quite some time, thereafter fast forward, quite a bit later. I stumbled on this book called agile project management with scrum and I opened it up and it was really life-changing for me, you know, finally, a way to organize people that made sense
and I found a scrum project. We took the worst project in the company, made it into the best project in the company and I never looked back. I've been doing scrum ever since. So today if you ask me, It's my day job. I still say that I'm a certified scrum. Trainer, I take exactly the same thing. Fact, that's how we met is because we were both scrum trainers.
We first met through the community and then connected a bit later at a conference around scrum and so agility has been center of my life since 2006 2008. It's been a calling for me and personal agility is a continuation of that Voyage. Thanks for sharing both of your stories. Really interesting. Both of you actually came from different backgrounds but actually met through, Common interest, which is age.
Alright, so today we are not going to talk a gel in a sense of age, our project management or agile methodology, but more about applying a gel or agility here to your personal life and maybe initially to personal life, then maybe we can talk about how to apply them to organization. But tell me more about personal agility concept from my conversation with you before this actually Peter started out with this concept earlier, right.
So maybe Peter can you tell us more about how did you come up with this concept and what kind of problems did you see back then? Okay, so as I told you I discovered scrum and decided, I wanted to be a scrum trainer. I eventually became a certified scrum trainer and I was basically running a sole proprietorship with a couple of people in orbit around me kind of helping me out. After about four years of this, I realized the business was going good but I was working like crazy.
It was going good, but I didn't feel like I was making progress. I felt like the wheel was just kind of spinning over and over. I'd been trying things like personal kanban, or desktop kanban or the Pomodoro method. I tried Doing things like that and somehow they weren't helping. And then, one day I said, wait a minute, you're a scrum trainer. Why don't you try doing scrum? I think what a radical concept there were reasons that speak for it.
Nor reasons to said, maybe this won't work, but I thought I'd give it a try and experiment. One of the things that I realized, first of all, the problem wasn't limiting my work in progress. So you hear a lot of people say literature work in progress, so this is good advice. I don't disagree with it, okay? But the problem is work in progress is about what you're doing, but the other thing you've got to pay attention to is your backlog.
A list of things to do and that was really my problem. My backlog was endless, no matter how much I got done. There was always something coming in to replace it. And so I finished every week exhausted and I just didn't feel like I was making any progress. This kind of led me to start reflecting a bit more not just on the work that I did. But why did it matter? And, in fact, it took about maybe three months to find this question.
What really matters, a colleague of mine talked about the Eisenhower method was urgent and what's important much, much later, we discovered the question It makes you happy, another colleague of mine. I was sharing with this talking about productivity and impact and he says, you need something more profound than that. The question that came out of that was what really matters by the end of about six months. So, we're now talking October and November of 2016.
The basics of personal agility were kind of coming into place. This is where Maria, and I met each other at a conference. At the time, it was known as scrum de Portugal today. That's grown into experience agile in the world agility form. So I had a brief chat with Maria and said, Marie, I think I'm Something there and I was really intrigued by her concept of a child marketing because I realized that she was doing
something very similar. I thought maybe a job marketing, could be helpful and I thought yeah, whatever. So let's see where this leads so we met again at the scrum Gathering and we sat down for half an hour to talk about what I was doing. I asked her question at the center of everything which is what really matters to you, and she thought that was kind of the first iteration, which was about the things that she was doing in the people. She was with and what she was trying to accomplish.
I'll let her tell the full Details of it, but she realized that what really mattered to her or what needed to matter to her wasn't on her radar screen. At that point, she says, Peter, you need to learn about marketing because this could help millions of people. And if you want to reach millions of people, you got to learn about marketing.
Well, let Maria tell the story about marketing because this was really the birth of moment for the personal agility Institute, that was personal agility, which kind of started here and took shape over the course of about six months. And then there's the personal agility Institute, which is kind of, taking this idea. And realizing that it's important, It enough and then sharing it with the world.
So at this point, I think I'll pass the Talking Stick to Maria and say, how do we go from this cute little idea to The Institute and maybe something that could change the world. Yeah, thank you. Peter. I remember when we were talking and Lisbon Portugal that first time you're saying, hey, Marie, I'd love to get your thoughts on this. I just finished my angel marketing presentations, I could you take a look, I've been doing something, I think I'm on to something.
I remember just being like, Oh yeah, Peter oh yeah, of course, Angela work in your personal life. Yeah, everyone knows that like, of course. Yeah, that's great. I don't remember really listening. I don't remember it. Really sinking in exactly how impactful this concept was over the years. I've applied agile, my life to achieve so many incredible things. I remember it works. It's very effective.
Active though, I had the common challenge that a lot of teams, have the classic challenge, the sustainable pace. And so you can apply agile in your life and I did and I was achieving all kinds of things, but it was not at a sustainable pace. And I realized that the way that agile teams struggle with it when you apply it in your life, it's easy to struggle with that as well.
And so when Peter and I reconnected in Munich Germany, a couple weeks later, I remember sitting in the lobby of the Westin Grand in Munich at the scrum Gathering, Sorry, I'd love to get your thoughts one more time as he asked me that core question, what really matters that time? I actually heard him. I actually thought about that in my context and I remember thinking, of course, this is really powerful and I was like, what matters to me?
Freedom of flexibility. I've been traveling the world and had always want to get out of that 9 to 5 job office started. My own consulting company had that freedom, but that was really lonely. And I realized that what really mattered was also like meaningful conversations and relationships with people that matter. Read throughout this life.
I was like, wow, that's something that really matters to me. Because sometimes when you travel every day every week, you don't really see those people from day-to-day, also quality and brand. That's so important to me. And I was like, oh yeah, I know what matters to me, Peter. But then I realized that there was something that didn't even hit my radar. And in fact, nothing that mattered really mattered at all without this other item and that was my health.
My health had been so challenged because after I left my glass Consulting engagement in, Go. I literally started traveling the world for five years with no home, just City to City Country to country while that was helping me achieve. These other goals that I thought mattered my health completely tanked and I realized I couldn't enjoy anything. If I didn't have my help, you got so bad that I ended up in the hospital in and out of the hospital in a wheelchair for a year. I couldn't walk.
It was so severe that I realized I had to completely shift my life. Having that core question. What really matters? Help me to do that. I put held as the Over one thing on my priorities map, and started completely re navigating the lens at which I looked through life. And I've been using personal Julie, ever since, and have been so incredibly passionate about helping, share this concept of the world, and working with Peter helped. Make this framework available
for the world. Wow, thank you for sharing such beautiful story when I listen to both of you explaining it. I can see literally myself. Maybe following you from this bun to Munich, seeing your life journey and how you implement it in your life. It's really fascinating. So, for people to actually Get the gist of this personality. After all your journey through life and now coming up with this institute, can you maybe tell us like the elevator pitch.
What is actually personal agility system for me. The personal agility is a simple coaching based framework to align what you do with what really matters. You know. We can explain the core of it in five minutes. It's really just six questions or the core of it is six questions. There are other things that you can build on coaching. Based, what we do is we use the tools of coaching to help you figure. Figure out what really matters and connect what you do with what really matters.
So this is where alignment comes. In the first alignment is you with yourself, one of the things that we discovered along the way, the kind of emerged is the same techniques that you can use with yourself. That is asking powerful questions and using them to make sense of the situation. You can apply them with the
people around you. You can ask powerful questions to your manager, as you can ask powerful questions to your stakeholders, you can ask powerful questions to your customers and all sorts of amazing things. Then when you do because a powerful question is an invitation to think the start of a powerful conversation. This is where personal agility took on its character as a
leadership framework. So we could just as easily say personal agility is a simple leadership framework to help you create alignment around what really matters. This is what's happened with our case studies. We find some very personal case studies but we've also found cases of startups achieving their profitability goals of their valuation goals. We've seen companies avoiding bankruptcy, we vote. All kinds of people getting
their life. Sorted out what really matters question and the techniques for creating alignment have proved to be really powerful. That's what our book is about, and this is what the personal agility system is about Maria. Would you like to add something to that? Did I miss anything important that was phenomenal? Peter, I really feel that being able to see the application of this framework and individual context, and the business
context. What's been incredibly impressive, is that the versatility of the application So, before we actually go into these powerful coaching questions, what you mentioned as six powerful questions. Actually, when I read the juice of the book, I kind of stumbled into this life, is the ocean metaphor. I know, like, we could in the beginning, your intro, about your journey, but maybe you can walk us through about this metaphor for people to actually sink in and look at their life.
Using this metaphor may be either you marry of Peter can narrate. What is this? Life is the ocean metaphor. Yeah. So several years ago, I had invited Peter to join me on agile marketing Crews that we were doing. Basically it was just a group of 400 marketers coming together as coordinating. A group of ten, cabins who doesn't love a conference on a cruise ship and so, Peter flew over from Switzerland with his wife, and they joined us as we
left. The port and set sail for several days to some fancy Caribbean islands. There's one morning that Peter was sitting outside the coffee shop, and he saw the screen that they had. That had the tracking of Our destination and our journey so far, you'll see the same thing on airplanes. It was marveling how when you look at this journey, you could kind of see an indicator where you've been and where you're
going. As we were talking about this, we were realizing, this is a great metaphor for your life. We have, where we've been, we have an idea of the destination but then we realized that you could get blown off course. And so, where we intend to go is not always where we go.
When you look at a goal that you set or an ambition or dream that you've had, look at parents for Sample, you end up having a child or a couple of children and then they become your world and you're so concerned about helping them. A lot of times, we forget about ourselves, putting other people in front of our own well-being, our own goals, our own dreams. And yes, we care for our family. But if you don't take care of yourself first, how can you be your best for everyone else?
And so it's important and it's okay to prioritize your own health to prioritize the things that make you happy because then that is an uplift for everyone else around you. And so we realize that while you have this long Longer term goal or destination. You're trying to get to. We often get blown off course. Personal jewelry is very kind of framework if you get blown off course. It's okay. Just recognize that you've been blown off course, and get back, on course.
So we often refer to the destination of Jamaica because that was one of our destinations on the cruise ship. Yes. Actually, we were sailing to and I came up with a metaphor, that's why it was Jamaica and not someplace else. Yes. It's so we talked about, you know, where is your Jamaica? Where is the destination you want to get to?
And often times, we may get so rolled up in the busyness of life that we miss getting that progress toward our longer-term goals so we don't want to lose sight of Jamaica. We want to be able to keep sight of that. Personal Julie system really is helpful in helping you visualize and identify those longer-term goals. Also while not losing sight of the shorter-term initiatives and helping you maintain on your course. Even if you get blown off, course to get back on course
toward that destination. I really love that metaphor actually because when I see myself as well and having listened to your journey as well, I could resonate with some of the challenges that I'm also experiencing, for example, like Peter said, unless back luck. Yeah, I mean, maybe we can be efficient and execute tasks, or with us, but yeah, the backlog seems to be endless. You know, it's never ending and
tomorrow. There's another huge amount of backlogs that I need to do. And Maria saying about sustainable Pace, we have that many backlogs. Of course, we seem to have the energy to actually execute all those things. Is it sustainable over the long Term period. We don't know, right? That's why. I think I love this metaphor to seek. Where is your Jamaica? So, where is the destination that you want to go? Maybe using me, as the target coaching?
Can you walk us through the six powerful questions that you have in this personal agility? So let me take a shot at. I have to say Maria is a great coach and it's her coaching skills that have really brought the first really compelling case studies to the surface. We actually start this kind of a question 0, which is, why do you want to do personal agility? What's the change? What you're trying to achieve or what's the state that you're trying to achieve?
We think of Jamaica is the destination. So, having some clarity as to what your destination is, what's this important goal that you're trying to achieve or state that you're trying to maintain, this Clarity can be really helpful when we get to leadership, will talk about how you can use this notion of Jamaica. The first question is, what really matters. So if we come back to our navigation metaphor today, we use the GPS before.
There was GPS and radio navigation, we navigated by the Stars. You had the pole star in the north. You have the Southern Cross in the South. You had Orion's Belt that was going around the equator. You know what time does this Orion's Belt come up or go down? Where is the North Star? How high in the sky? It is knowing what time it is and kind of figure out where you are. So the navigation Stars they help you take a fix and
understand what you're going. So the first question is what really matters the first time you ask it, it's going to be a really powerful question because you may not know and it may even take you a while to really come up with the right answers. I mean, think of Maria's example. She thought she knew and then she thought about it, she kind
of the Sarika moment actually. Okay this is what really matters and this led to her making big changes in her life and that by the way, is a concept which scales to any size organization once you get clarity on what matters you get, everyone pointing in the right direction and you can start moving forward. Once you've got that, then the question is, were kind of a reminder of what you care about. Just kind of setting the stage for setting the frame, then you
go on to the next question. Which is, what did you get done last week? How have you been spending? During your time, this is like looking at that trail of breadcrumbs, it'll think henslin Gradle going through the forest leaving a trail of breadcrumbs so they can find their way back. That trail of breadcrumbs not only shows you where you came from but it also gives you a hint about where you're going. So for instance Maria realize that my health is really
important. You look at what you did, what have I done for my health in the last week? Actually nothing. So what does that mean for my health? Going forward? We got a course. We say we want to go to Jamaica but actually we're heading towards Antarctica right now. Wait a minute. Where's Oh, I tried to because their Wares Jamaica, I should make his about 90 degrees to the right. So what do we do? Moving forward, we're going to start changing how we use our
time. So this comes to the, what do you do with your backlog? The first thing is, what's on your backlog, what could you do? You notice how we use the word, what could you do, rather than, what do I have to do, or what must get done, or things like that? What does my spouse significant other manager? Whoever telling me has to get done, these are possibilities now. Why are they possibilities? Simple reality, is you got too much to do so.
You're not going to be able to do everything and you're certainly not going to be able to do everything this week. So the more interesting question is of all the things you could do, what are you going to do this week? That's what the next two questions are about. Now remember Eisenhower, you know, Eisenhower was a former Army, general commanded, the Allies in World War Two, When The War became president, he talked about was urgent.
And what's important, there's a third element at that we've added which is what's going to make me. Happy governments, don't really care, what makes you happy, but they care about what's urgent and important. Okay, so what we say, well, first is, what could you do, what side your backlog. Let's look at those things on the backlog. What's important, what's urgent?
What's going to make you happy? Eisenhower was in a very interesting position as president or as general the stuff that he doesn't have time for, he can delegate, but you and I in our daily lives that you can't delegate the work of your life. This is where you can either actively make choices, or you can let the Winds of Fate. Make the choices for you, but at the end of the week, some things aren't going to get done. And some things are going to get done. Maybe some things are going to
get done. This is we're getting intentional about how you use your time. Gets to be important of all the things I could do, what's urgent, what's important? What's going to make me happy? And this is the next question. What I really want to get done this week and so this is like setting a course I'm setting a course, which I think is going to take me to Jamaica. This is what you focus on. So as you kind of go through the week, we've got this week column, which is the list of
things. What you want to get done this week in scrum, that's what you expect to get done in personal agility. This is what you're going to come back to when you get blown off course. Because the problem is now now especially with covid, but even before covid life happens, faster than you can plan. So your son walks in and he's got a skinned knee. Can you tell him to go away? Maybe I'll some father's you never know. Moms would never send their kids away. On the other hand.
Your boss comes in, at your customer comes in calls the phone. I need you to do something right away. Are you going to say no sooner or later? That gets to be a much tougher choice. And even though you've set this course, here's this heavy cross wind blowing you off course. So what do you do? Well, you deal with it and you get it done. You do what you have to do and then you celebrate it. What did I get done? You celebrate. Whatever.
You got done even though this was different than what you set out to do. Hey, that boat is still floating. This is where we talk about storms. Storms, blow you off course. Rumor has it. There were pirates in the Caribbean. They can do all kinds of wild
and crazy things to your course. So you deal with, you got to have to do when you get back a moment to do what you want to be doing, or what you care about, you come back to that stuff that you put on your this week column or your today column. And so, we're using our short list of things to do, too. Get us back. On course when we get blown off course to go through the we can you get things done?
Some of the things with things, you'd planned at the beginning of the week and some of the things were things that came up and then you get to the end of the week and you celebrate what you get done. Okay? We call this celebrate and shoes, celebrate. What you got done before, choose what you want to do, moving forward, that boat is somewhere out in the ocean. You've made some progress. Maybe you're closer to Jamaica at the end of the week that you were at the beginning, but maybe
not. And maybe you still care about Jamaica, and maybe you've decided to set a new course but the Idea is to be intentional aware of where you're going. Let's go through the questions. First one is what really matters. It's like, it is what I get done last week which is the celebration part. The next one is, what could I do this week? The one after that is of those things was urgent. What's important or what's going to make you happy of those things? Which ones do I really want to
get done this week? And those are five questions to kind of help you navigate through life. Now, some of you are counting and say, wait a minute, where's the sixth question? Maria, would you like to take the six question? Yeah, what we've realized is that there is a need for sometimes taking a step back and look at your situation and saying. If I could do this myself I would have already had it done by now and maybe just maybe you might need to ask for help.
So the sixth question is, who can help one of the things that I've realized over the last couple of years, you can get almost anything done. If you get stuck by either asking someone for help someone, that's a friend, a family member, someone who you can share the vision or just share the situation and say, hey, can you Help me. They may say, yes, they may say no or we have an incredible opportunity to hire Freelancers off the internet today.
You look at Craigslist, you look at Angie's List, you look at freelancer websites, like there's so many freelance or websites. You could probably either just ask for help from someone else who might care, or delegate or Outsource, or hire someone, that, could assist you with what it is. You're stuck on because chances are, if you can't get through that roadblock, if you can get through that today, you might have the same roadblock a week. Later, that same roadblock might be there.
A month later and now we've completely stopped our progress toward our goal. The couple of the things that Peter mentioned, that I really want to highlight that were impactful for me was there's one day where he was talking about the idea of asking what's urgent. And the idea is we want to actually start to work on the important things before they become urgent. That was a game-changer for me to be able to realize, wait a
minute. If you have a lot of things that are Urgent, why are they becoming urgent? So if we can sprinkle in kind of Salt Bay in some of these Things that along the way are important and get to them before they hit that point of urgency. Now, we could start to get better Rhythm of the way that we're working, the flow that we
have. And then we added in that question a little bit later of, what would make you happy that wasn't even on my radar until recently, I remember was actually about five years ago, I was talking to Alistair cockburn and he's become a good friend over the years. Many people know him. As one of the co-authors of the agile Manifesto. We are talking about goals and setting goals for the new year. And I remember he was like, where's your happiness or joy? Where's joy in your goals and
had money goals? I had Fame goals, I had achievement goals, I was like, I don't understand the question. I literally did not even understand. The question of what brings me joy in Life or what makes me happy because I was so focused on achieving things. But what I've realized is that even if you use agile to get things done, more effectively achieve those goals faster. Sometimes, there can be an emptiness after achieving goals.
Really think is profound about personal agility, is it helps you really take that step back and look at happiness and fulfillment. How do I feel about the things I got done? And so there's so much more meaning behind what you've achieved when you take that time to celebrate and choose and see, wow! I got more done than I thought, or oh, wow, look at this.
You can actually make those better decisions of where you want to go based on what you've done and it all really comes together in a very impactful way. Thanks for explaining all this. These six powerful questions concept really powerful. In my view, I want to go back to the first question which I think is really important to kick-start this thinking process. This one quote that probably, I'll read it first to let it sink because I think it's really important for us to look back
and reflect, right? So the court says that if time is your most valuable currency than how you spend your time, how you ought to spend your time and how you want to spend your time, all actually give insights into what really matters to you. I This is really a powerful statement as well to actually look back and think what actually matters to us because how you actually spend your time actually explains what matters to you. Maybe you can dive a little bit
deeper here. How should people actually look for? What really matters to them. So any kind of powerful techniques to find out what really people want or how about if people have both Jamaica, Paris, Europe, whatever. Yeah, so when we look at the question of what really matters, there's a couple of Weights that you can begin here. Sometimes it might be clear, you might know what matters, right? Some categories that tend to
emerge some common things. We see are people that care about their health or Fitness relationships. People, their life family children, looking at their career, advancing their career goals, or starting a business or maybe some hobby. Something they've always wanted to Achieve Financial Freedom. These are things that we tend to see over and over. Sometimes people know that they say, hey, this is important to me, this is important.
This is important to me, but sometimes it might not be so obvious. So if that's the case, we With the question of what did you do last week, just like, Peter just mentioned. Apparently, what you did last week is What mattered to you, because that's what you did. Some people might say, well, no, I didn't do what I wanted to do last week. Okay, well, that's Nick. That too is a valuable Insight so great that still tells us
something. So if we start with the breadcrumb trail, we might start with okay? What really matters and people might know they might list it off the other day. I was bringing someone through personal Julie system you have Add the first thing, maybe the second thing. But then kind of got stomped.
I'm like hey let's look at what you did last week as we started creating the breadcrumb trail, we started to notice some themes that emerged as we can look at those things and say hey which of these things really do matter to you that you want to matter and are there any things that aren't where you want to spend your time so we can kind of see empirically.
We are what you've done and if you continue that if you carbon copy last week, till next week, last month, till next month, last year, to next year, will you be where you want to? Fast forward a year from now, and if the answer is no, then what do you want to do differently? What do you want to matter? Sometimes people might have things on the parties map that really matter. We recommend limiting this to three or four things not more. Because if everything matters, the nothing matters.
That's a quote that Peter and I always like to use because there's so much that we could do and there's so many possibilities that you might make it into progress in multiple areas, but not a mild progress in any one area.
So We tend to see when people have more than three or four, those other items don't really get their attention or they're spread so thin they don't really make the progress, they ultimately want and desire so we can start looking at what you think matters and look at what you've done. You look at what themes emerge and then once you start going through your parties map, you might say, hey, I noticed this one thing isn't getting as much attention.
Does this really matter to me? Either do I want to spend more attention toward it, or do I want to change? What really matters is that actually not as important as I say. I would just add to that. One of the things you'll notice is these patterns repeat themselves, they scale. Or if you want to get fancy, you could say they have fractal. You see them at the personal level, the team level the organization level, you know, it's like this question of what really matters.
And what are we trying to work on? How many things are we working on in parallel too many things matter and we don't make any progress on anything. Most companies that I've visited. They've all got way too many initiatives going to many things matter. So nothing matters in their progress comes to a crawl. But they saying yes to this. Later to, that is one of the deepest challenges of personal agility or any other form of agility any level.
Because they don't Focus means saying, yes, to this saying later to that, we're not going to say no, because we won't even talk about how difficult it is to say no, but just getting us to focus on a couple of small things, this proved to be very powerful Concepts that you can scale really up and down your organization. Not just you as an individual where it seems very easy to explain and very obvious.
But as I said, all the way up to the entire company, So if I can maybe recap a little bit what Maria is suggesting. So sometimes at least out of the year we all make resolutions, we know what goals we want to do but actually over the time we actually didn't achieve those. I think one thing that we could do is actually to do like time audit or what did we do past week past month past year? And look at themes.
What actually you spent in those time and then from there actually you can also see which one that you want to prioritize and which one you actually don't want to do. So this is also coming back to the concept. Depth of good habits bad habits, right? So you also have to choose what things that you want to continue doing or you want to stop doing. And then at the same time, once you identify the important things, you should limit it coming back to the work in progress, limit and maybe what
matters to you? You should also limit it to three to four so that you actually don't work on too many things. Having your energy and focus scattered, and then in the end, maybe it's not maximal impact. Thanks for sharing this story. I think Peter you add on later on in the explanation that you can actually use this for other things outside of personal life. Including the Isolation and Leadership, maybe let's move into that segment.
So how do you actually use this same technique to improve your leadership and also your organizational agility? One technique that I've had a lot of success with you come into an organization, it could be at any level, you got stakeholders for purely important people in the company. But I've also seen it at the board level and the top management, everybody is passionate about what they do.
Everyone's got their mental model about what's important and what they want to achieve, some of the they talk about Out explicitly. One of the things you start to see is the concept of hidden agendas to stomachs. I'm not even sure if people intentionally do that, they see that they have goals that they want to achieve. But they don't have agreement across the organization on these goals. And so they fight about these things without knowing how to do it.
What I say, we want to get an organization to do a turnaround or a project to do a turnaround or we've got issues for me. The first thing to do is listen, I would actually go and kind of identify who are the people who I need to talk to Stakeholders in the broadest sense, not just important, managers and customers who can helicopter in and completely change everything. But also people who are really doing the work, who really understand the problem?
The idea is to get the whole picture and then you go and you talk to them about what are we trying to achieve? Why are we trying to achieve it? What's the outcome? We're trying to achieve. What's making this difficult? We can look at this in a motional level. What are you afraid of? What are you frustrated by? And we start trying to build this picture at the beginning. It's like a mosaic you talk to you. Each person individually and get their version of the picture.
What this does is it helps you identify common themes. So, like, I had this case, once where I was working with a start-up, they had some goals which I would describe as change the world, make life better for our customers and their customers and another version of it. Which was, I want to make a lot of money through our exit to a different people with different focuses because they had
different priorities. When it came to talking about what to do, they wanted to do different things because they did not have it. I meant on the priorities, they had lots of argument about what they should do. So what we did is we basically help them discover what it is that they could be. Notice that word could is a really powerful word because could is an idea that's kind of floating out there in space. It doesn't really belong to anyone. Whereas what should we do?
This is the start of an arm wrestling tournament. We're going to do my thing or your thing. And one of us is going to lose that actually makes it very difficult to have a conversation about the real problem. So we get into talking about what we could do. What could be important Aunt. And then we start to look around that we can build a consensus about what really is important and once we've got this common understanding this consensus on
what really matters. Now it's possible for us to take decisions and the decisions are all focused in the same way. So we call this process creating alignment, if the first half of personal agility is having individual, get their act together. The second half is about the interactions. By the way, you may have heard of this little document, called the agile Manifesto which starts out talking about individuals and interactions. They got it right? 100% perfect.
You get your own act together and then, you can start working on the interactions with the people around. You, with that, you can create things bigger than yourselves that your department really becomes a team. So the basic approach is to facilitate these discussions around what really matters get agreement on what really matters. And then it's relatively easy thing to get an agreement about what to do to achieve our goals and you get everyone working in the same direction.
I love the way you explained about quote physician Shield sometimes we as Leaders unconscious. SLI, what should we do? So, in a way, it is on wrestling people, right? But instead, when we asked, what could you do? We expose ourselves to different options and different possibilities and at the Eddie can choose which one is the best. Be the may be true decision-making together or its maybe based on leadership or maybe some priorities and goals
that we align together. If you could actually drill down more towards alignment, I think one fact that you quote in the book as well, you mentioned that less than 10% organization actually could successfully execute their strategies. Due to this lack of alignment, maybe you can explore it a bit. What do you mean by these alignment? How can we actually create alignment easily inside the organization? So that quote comes from a correspondent on Forbes Magazine?
I had stumbled on a quote about alignment. This is back in 2012, that started working with Steve Denning on his radical management. I found this interesting web page that, you know, alignment is a big problem in organizations. It's kind of the Holy Grail of organizations. I thought, wow, that's cool. Two days later, Later. I went to look for that link again and I couldn't find the tree because the forest was too big. There was just so much about how challenging alignment is.
I've come to believe that the reason why alignment is so challenging is because most organizations first think about what who does what by when the main objective of a good project leader is to identify who's going to do what by when the problem is, the why question, what are we trying to achieve, what's the outcome? There's nowhere near enough discussion about that one of the quotes actually.
Came from one of our personal agility, ambassadors guy named PR nights, who's currently based in Zurich. He said it his observation coaching is the new management. We have conversations first about the outcome that we're trying to achieve and why this is important and then we go from the outcome to the problem to the solution. Whereas, the more traditional approach is to dive straight into the solution, which is really easy to do, what is the
easiest question to answer? Why is really tough and who's going to buy? It is even tougher but so is actually, by going after the hard questions first First by having this clear, understanding of who would, why this is what enables true alignment. And once you get this alignment, then it's much, much easier to align themselves around the. Why just to give you a very short example?
I heard this in the context of SpaceX SpaceX wants to fly to Mars. So that means we were talking about doing something or when we're looking at a behavior, we can say, how does this help us? Get to Mars and if the answer is, it's helping, then great will do more of it. If the answer is, it's not helping then we stopped doing it, right? Out examples of Ellen, Mustang. Hey guys, no Kingdom building. No. Channeling communication through the manager.
This is about going to Mars. Okay, this is not about building
your kingdom. That's a let's stay focused on the mission and by having this clear, understanding of what really matters, this allows you to give simple guidance to help people move in the right direction and this was really an incredible discovery of ours because we initially started looking at how does personal agility apply for the individual and when we started seeing the results people are getting applying the personal agility system. The context of an organization, it blew us away.
There's one gentleman Walter from Switzerland as well, who was turning a company around, they were pretty close to going bankrupt. They were able to ask what really matters, cut down so many initiatives that they had that were ongoing and say know what really matters and turn the entire company around to being in the green and avoiding bankruptcy. We have a consultant from Denver
Colorado in the u.s. Larry and he was only complaining about 24% of projects on time 24% is very low after using the personal The system over 90% of his projects were being completed on time. We look at Ben Seaver, the CEO of eBay remedy here in Tampa Bay, Florida. They had a three-year roadmap. They achieved in one year and had a thirty. Five million dollar valuation in just a year and a half and during a global pandemic.
And so when you look at what's possible, we took his entire leadership, team through using personal agility. We were training them, and doing coaching calls every week. It's absolutely incredible to see the results to the bottom line that businesses get. When they apply this and ask what really matters and then have that alignment the organization. So this has really been an incredible Discovery. A how well personal agility scales from the individual to the organizational to get real
results in business? Yes, I agree Lima is really powerful. Once you get to agree on the, why the common statement of the problem? Two people can work out on some solutions together but there's an element of alignment which you also emphasized in the book which is about trust, right? Because when you want to, Together, fully aligned. You also have to trust the other parties. Can you also elaborate a little bit more about this trust? How is it, so important?
And how we can cultivate trust within organizations may be using techniques in this personal agility system. Yeah, so trust is a really interesting word because it means a lot of things to a lot of different people in the agile Community. We talked a lot about a trust culture, Google uses the term psychological safety to mean, basically, the same thing, this is what I'll call, one of the basic forms of trust, which we often try to.
To create an agile environment. Now, having said that the closer you get to the money to the top layers of the company, the harder it is to achieve that because there's a lot of competing interests in this. There's a lot of winning and losing that goes on in the upper floors. So how do you do that? We talked about a lot of different kinds of trusts the term that we've actually coined
is what we call alignment trust. Which is basically, I listen to you, you listen to me and we care about what each other is saying notice. It doesn't mean that we agree. But it means that we're listening. If you go into an organization and you look at the discussions that they're having either among stakeholders to a project or even the Border than c-suites, you see how people argue with each other? They don't even let each other
finish. Each other's sentences where they get cut off and they start shouting, and what are they trying to do? They're trying to be heard. So what do you do? We kind of turn this around and it's like Judo Jujitsu, you kind of turn it around and the first thing that you do is you listen to them. You let them not only finish their sentences, but finish their thoughts. One of our case studies we will
Lorenzo in Portugal at the time. He was working for a major consulting company and he says people were practically in tears because no one ever listen to them before. I mean we totally agree with the whole issues around psychological safety and creating that because that makes it possible to have open and honest conversations about what the real problems are. One of the first ways, what are
the first steps to achieving? That is what we call alignment, trust, which is really listening to the people. That's basically our segment on leadership is teaching people
how to listen. How to ask questions that elicit real answers but also how to really wait for the end of the sentence and then make sure oh how I understood you correctly, kind of like the pilot talking to air traffic control, air, traffic control, says, Singapore, flight 325, clear for takeoff, Runway 27 and the pilot response, Singapore, 325 clear for takeoff, Runway 27, and they get that confirmation that they've heard each other for airplanes that safety relevant.
So, in the company, this read back this making sure that I've understood you. This is also say Safety relevant. But the thing is after you've listened to the other person, after that person has been able to finish their sentence, that's the moment where you can start to say, oh, yeah. Well, and in my experience, we also need to look at this. Oh, what is that?
Okay, all you got to do is deposit the idea but they've heard you now, you've gotten the chance to introduce your idea and that starts a new process of thinking and discussion. So, this combination of listening, you know, using Code rather than should this is all kind of a collection of techniques that we teach to it. For people to have really constructive conversations at the leadership level, to figure out what really matters and what are we going to do next?
You're really when you look at trust, it's really the foundation of so many things. When you look at a dysfunctional team usually that is missing, right? And so at the foundation, it's really understanding it. When you understand what really matters when you're in alignment that looking go back to that and when you can assume best intent and reconnect with people, listen for understanding, when we can assume, Zoom best intent and say, you know what we agreed
upon what really matters. We're both in agreement on that. There's some misunderstanding here but trusting that someone else is really just doing the best that they can. So there must be something misalign there must be something that's just misunderstood or miscommunicated.
And so when we have that foundational Assumption of best intent and we have that clear alignment, it really helps that Foundation of trust to be there so that we can get past those roadblocks or miscommunications, much faster. And move on closer toward that goal. So sometimes I see this listening is counter-intuitive to trust when people think about trust. It's like trusting someone who can do the work, get things done, maybe in a high quality manner so that's how I trust
them. But actually you brought up a counter intuitive way of also. Exhibiting trust while actually listening getting that person understood and also at the same time you also convey your own message. I think that's also critical. I think that's a really important point that you just mentioned. I say I'm going to do something and I actually do it. We call that commitment. Trust. I do what I say I'm going to do. That is the basis of everything.
If you say you're going to do something and you don't do it or better still you say, you're going to do something and then you go do something else. This undermines the trust. So let's come back to those interviews. One of my favorite techniques is, you know, I'm trying to build a lineman trust. The first thing I do is I look for a way to build commitment Trust. First, I'll ask the other person. Is there anything I can do right away to help us?
Get started. Oh, could you send me a link to this book? Yeah, sure. I'll send you the link to the book and then the first thing I do is send the link to the book that's helpful. At two levels, what? It gives him the information that he's asked for, but it's also sent him a message. I'm trustworthy, okay? I'm going to pay attention to him and because of that, he's going to be more likely to trust me and he's also going to be more likely to fill his own
commitments. This very simple tools like this that you can use to start building If we take this to the level of agile, teams, one of the big challenges that many agile teams have is they don't produce something that works every Sprint. So where are we on commitment trust? We're nowhere. And so their poor management that says you told me that all this was going to get better when we do scrum and it's not better. Sorry, I'm getting excited but
I'm just doing a role play here. So, one of the things that agile teams can work on is to say our first goal as an agile team is to create commitment, Trust. The we say, okay, we're going to create something that's done and my definition of done is something you can use in real life test in real life, or better. Yet tell in real life, so use test or sell. Not something that you pass on to the Q&A Department, something you can use something you can
test in real life. They do think SpaceX. Let's put that rock it up, light it up and see what happens. That's test in real life, even if it's only a little, tiny bit, a lot of teams their stakeholders, their managers, they want the moon tomorrow, and it's hard to resist that pressure. But even if they Liver a little bit and they deliver that little bit every two weeks that creates this commitment. Trust and then all of a sudden,
the pressure goes away. So I know I might not get at this bread but I can get it next. French build commitment. Trust. That would be one of my tips for the road. So yeah, I mean like I'm also looking back to my own team, sometimes we run a gel doesn't actually necessarily mean. We will deliver incremental working product at the end of the Sprint based on what we commit. So thanks for reminding. All of us here to actually look back and how you actually run your sprin, you're on your a
job. I'll also emphasize on the outcome. So in real life, not just finish development of finished testing, it has to be deployed in production. Thank you so much for spending your time. I think it's really a pleasant conversation, but we are going to reach the end here. Normally before I let my guests go actually, I ask this one last question, which is what I call three technical leadership wisdom. So today I will get six in total
technical leadership wisdom. So maybe either one of you can start. What do you want to leave our listeners here to think about, as a Learning maybe from you or maybe some kind of gist of your career Journey so far. You're so looking at three takeaways as a leader. First thing I would say would be lead by example, so that you can really maximize your results in agile too.
Often we see leaders say, oh, agile team go, get trained, you go do the agile, but they don't necessarily get that as well as a leader. And we've seen time, after time, when leadership really gets it. That's where huge transformation happens. There's several different examples and case studies that we have read, this really is impactful. So actually understanding agile and that's why personal ability as a leadership framework. Is so incredibly important and Lisa Adkins even talks about
this. The benefits you can get as a leader by understanding concepts, like limiting work in progress and understanding what it's like to have. Not a sustainable Pace in your own backlog or priorities map second. I would say, listen with empathy and connect with people too often. We hear the team's the running into roadblocks are trying to escalate impediments, but nobody's listening.
So if you can truly listen, with empathy, and truly, look for opportunities to connect with people, and listen for Being help them feel heard actually follow up on the things that are in their way. That's going to help your team's Thrive, but it really does start with yourself as a leader to get those optimal results in your organization. And then, third, I would say watch your blind spots. Your teams often have the answers and you aren't
listening. We see this time and time again when we go into organizations and I just had this a couple weeks ago, I doing it on, psych consult the team members, they know exactly. Where all the bodies are buried. They know where the inefficiencies are, they know where the opportunities lie and the leaders are listening. And so really, to be able to listen to your team's watch those blind spots that can really make a huge difference.
And the results that you get with your teams in your organization and help you really lead, by example as an inspirational leader. So one thing you've already heard from me, is Hill commitment trust, get good. At making small promises and delivering on them. This process increases your credibility and just make your life so much easier. In fact, if you're an agile team and you can deliver something that works every Sprint, most of your problems with the stakeholders just go away if pit
because they're so stunned. We've talked a lot about listening. I phrase it as listen before you talk. Ask before you tell, and when you ask clarifying questions, There's a big difference between a clarifying, question, and an inquisitive question, or a confrontational question. There's no such thing as a healthy debate, debate, drives people in their Corners, it puts the emphasis on winning rather than the emphasis on coming up
with a good answer. So as I say, listen before you talk, ask before you tell, and when you ask clarifying questions, I think the last thing is also something that you've heard today is remember focus on what really matters. If everything matters, the nothing matters. So figure out what really matters and use that kind of as a guide to help you make decisions about pretty much
everything. But certainly how you use your time, how your team's use your time, how your companies, use their time, make sure that what you do is aligned with what really matters. And if you do, then you will almost surely become that person or company or product or whatever that you want to be. I really left how you wrap it up. I don't know whether it's well rehearse or not but you wrap it up. But yeah, you know, emphasizing the most important question.
So what really matters? But where is your job? Thanks so much for sharing your concept about personal agility system, really appreciate that for people who want to learn more about this. I know you are publishing a book. Where can they find it online? Maybe you can share a little bit about this. We are excited to be publishing the book through the business agility Institute and it will be available on Amazon for purchase and you can also get a link to that from our website at
personal agility. Institute.org one of the things I'd like to say we're really excited about the launch because we're going to be working with With Partners world today is a network, they need value, and they produce value. What the Network's can do is they can help each other. Remember, that question who can help.
So, what we're looking to do with the launch of our book, is basically help people in their Network and they're helping us so we could reaching out to our partners asking them for free gifts, for buyers of the book. Now, we don't have enough free gifts for all the buyers of the book. Do we have enough? Free gifts for the first buyers
of the book. We're still building that network but we've already got some commitments for several thousand dollars worth of gifts that are worth Two dollars of each. So the book is probably going to be around 20 or $30, depending on the version whether it's Kindle or whether it's hardback or something like that and they'll probably be some sale prices. But the key thing is, you spend your twenty or thirty dollars
for a book. Be sure you're the first one because then you'll be the first one to get a token to claim a free gift and that free gift could be worth hundreds of dollars. So, we're really excited about that Steve doubting. By the way pioneered, this concept with the age of agile. And so, we appreciate learning from the Masters Steve Dunham by the way, is also one of three
agile. Thinkers, who has written Introduction for our book next to Lisa, Adkins and Alistair, cockburn something that we're very just beyond delighted about that. We're getting this kind of High Caliber support. So anyway, the book is available for another couple weeks, as kind of a pre beta test. Download, for early adopters, who want to participate in the launch will be taking it off the website. I think we said the 6th of February.
So, basically a week from Sunday and then after that, the launch will probably be somewhere between two and three months later, depending on how the promotional program goes, we're hoping for something really exciting. So mark, your And get into the early Reader Program so that you can participate in this and there's an invitation, you know? Hey if you're out there hearing this, wow I'm not quite sure when we're going to be broadcast.
But you know, if someone's out there saying gee I like to participate in this program would certainly be open to new participants who are looking to leverage their Network to profit from the entire network of all of our partners to generate business Factor them. So this could be a fun thing. Thanks. Good luck for your launch of the book and also with your experiment with this network. Hopefully you get to save people. Has life and also transform their lives to be more happy and
do more important things. So thanks be then Maria. Thank you, Henry. They took pleasure to be here. Thank you for listening to this episode and for staying, right until the end if you highly enjoyed it. I would appreciate if you share it with your friends and colleagues who you think would also benefit from listening to this episode. And if you are new to the podcast, make sure to subscribe and leave me your valuable review and feedback. It helps me a lot.
In order to grow this podcast better. You can also find the full show notes of this conversation on the episode page at technology Arnold death website, including the full transcript, Interesting quotes and links to the resources mentioned, from the conversation. And lastly, make sure to subscribe to the shows mailing list on pack leader dot f to get notified for any future episodes. Stay tuned for the next technology, no episode. And until then goodbye.