Are we having fun yet?

Welcome to Definitely Navy Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale.

Hello, Dave. How are you today? So, Peter, I gather you're on the different side of the Atlantic to the usual. Yes, yes.

I'm in the UK uh this week, which uh makes for a bit of a change, you know.

It's uh your accent's gonna strengthen, right? You're gonna get more and more strongly English. Yes.

Uh as this call goes on. Yeah, that's by the end of this, I'll just sound completely English. That's it. That's the way it's gonna go. It uh yeah, and I'm operating on about two hours' sleep. So you're probably gonna get the cynical side of me today.

I look forward to it. So actually, this is a great uh great starting point. So I just came from a conference where one of the speakers, a business agility institute conference in New York last week. And one of the speakers there started his talk with, Are we having fun yet? So, Peter, are we having fun yet?

Oh, I don't know about you, but I am sure. Uh we were talking about this a little before about uh this the reference to as we go in as as coaches and change agents into organizations, the the the ultimate outcome we're looking for is to help the organization improve. And one of the things we understand really, really well is that happy teams are high performing teams. Improving uh the how the organization feels about itself is a great way to improve the productivity and well just just make people happier. I mean, that's a good thing, right? It's like it's uh where we all want to be.

It's well, I I mean, I think the context that we're talking about, this is uh for for the for the topic of of uh our conversation today. Sometimes we get so uh zoomed in or focused in on particular aspects of the transformation, whether it's how leadership interacts with the transformation process or technology side or whatever it might be. There's lots of different topics that we might look at, but every now and again it's good to kind of back draw back from our conversations and just remember what is it that the organizations that we're working with and helping are trying to achieve. And that's that bit of are we having fun yet? We've got to remember the purpose, the reason that we're going in there is not to is actually to get some results, to see some impact as a result of the work that we're doing.

Yeah, and and and the one of the key elements underlying that is that anytime you go into an organization, that organization is made up of the individuals that work in that particular organization. Yeah, so thinking you can come in and cookie-cut a something that happens somewhere else and just slide it right on in into this organization. It's like taking a stamp. We're just gonna like cut out this bit and we're gonna take a model and we're gonna put it over the top of this, and expecting that you're gonna get exactly the same results, it that that that's where things start to fail. And I I think uh one of John Smart's comments, I don't know if he was the original one to say it, but the whole uh invite over inflict. I I find quite often that uh some when these transformations come in, it ends up being inflict over invite. It's like do it my way. It's well restructure.

Yeah, I think what what's really important to reflect on and as change agents when we're working with organizations is to I I really like just drawing back to the fact that we started the call saying you've had a couple of hours sleep, obviously you've traveled over, and and you know, that can play merry, whatever it is with whatever we're going through, right? But the I think the the critical thing is maintaining our energy levels and keeping people's focus on the purpose that we're working with them, and rather than drilling in and inflicting, as you said, inflicting practices and policies and and so on onto the teams and the leadership that we work with is much more a case of being that sort of inspirational visionary uh individual to keep people's mind on where they're going and the purpose for what we're doing, that impact. So when I think of business agility, no organization that has agility in their business is tied to specific agile practices. They're continuously modifying and improving them because the context, the situation within which they're working is changing. Their eye is not on the practice, it's on the impact that they are having on the market. Well, are their customers uh are they exceeding their customers' expectations? Are they a trusted partner with their customers that is relied on to deliver whatever product or service that they are delivering rather than do they have a stand-up every day and is it 15 minutes long and not 35 minutes long?

Yeah, are we getting the outcomes that we're looking for? Are we uh I and so as we because as we look at the practices and the the methods that we do, we we know that we've some things will work, but it's introducing them in a way that we we're looking to create those outcomes. It isn't that the it isn't the practice for the sake of the practice. It's the practice for the sake of the outcome. And if we if we try something and it doesn't have the outcome that we're expecting, we need to be open to say to changing, to looking at something else and considering, okay, what might work instead? Like, but maybe there's just there's different structures, different things that have happened here before. There's more resistance to certain ways of thinking about things, or that there are certain ways of thinking about things that are that people will leap on and say, that's fantastic. I'm gonna take that, I'm gonna run with it, I'm gonna, and it'll be even more successful because people are bought into that concept, or they'll expand or build on it and create something completely new. But it's it's it's helping them experiment and look at the different practices and see where they can go with that. And uh essentially, like uh, are they having fun yet? Yeah, are we getting to where we want to?

Well, yeah, I mean, we as you were just walking through that uh that idea there, Peter, I was just thinking we've got to keep in mind what the outcome is that we're after. And I feel that um in especially in these larger transformations or in organizations where I mean we're under a lot of pressure to get things done. So we focus on the things that we can control, like in introducing a new activity or new practice, rather than focusing on the outcomes that we desire as a result of them. And and I think our role as change agents is first and foremost to remind everyone, to first of all identify what that outcome is, make sure it's clearly defined and locked in, but then is continually come back and remind the the individuals, the teams, the the leadership that we're working with, this is the outcome. Are we making progress towards? Are we having fun and making progress towards this outcome? Let's put it that way.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh and when we when we look at this even down to that uh the technical practice level, when we're talking about um things like what are we actually trying to achieve? Uh we're not trying to achieve um the like the implementation of the underlying tooling that we're and the onboarding onto that tool with uh or the a particular method. What we're trying to achieve is we're trying to shorten feedback, we're trying to make things visible, we're trying to uh understand where the bottlenecks are in the work so that we can know where to focus and we know what to address. So that's the outcome we're looking for, uh not the the thing that gets us there.

Well, it's it's it this is you we we touched on, I think you mentioned earlier on that I know I've certainly seen this where individuals bring to the table the practices that worked in their previous workplace, their previous group, whatever it might be, division and so on. And so they bring those practices, and we've got to bear in mind that the practices are contextually driven. So the practices that worked yesterday in the previous place that we were applying them may not be the right practices for today, but the principles carry over. And I feel that's one of those things that when we apply certain practices, we always have to recognize that these practices are a way of driving certain principles forward. The principles we bring to our next change program that we're working on, our next transformation, but the practices may have to adjust. And I'm reminded of this, I had a conversation yesterday with a technical team, and that technical team was talking about CICD, continuous integration and continuous deployment and delivery. And their idea of continuous integration and deployment was the team committing, like sending out merge requests, basically, to get senior engineers to do the review, a manual review on that before those merge requests were merged and sent through to development and production. And what's interesting is when I look at that, I'm thinking that's a manual process that is not going to scale. And what we actually want to do is look at test automation and how do we automate that process so that feedback is generated automatically. The key here is the practices are irrelevant. They are situationally dependent. Depending on what your needs are, you may want to go for a fully automated process. You may want to go for a manual process that's a little bit more kind of point and click, if you like. However, the principles are the same in both cases. The principle is about rapid feedback and about getting that feedback as fast as possible. The difference is in some cases, feedback in hours or even overnight is actually very, very rapid and fantastic and just what's needed. In other cases, that feedback, that rapid feedback has to be measured in seconds. So, again, totally different contexts will have different solutions to the same problem. And the principles are what we want to look at, not the practices.

I agree. And I think uh one of the interesting conversations I had last week with uh this lady was talking about her organization and some of the challenges that uh they'd run into. And uh one of them was they'd uh they'd they'd adopted a principle of continuous improvement and uh continuous improvement as a as a uh a mindset and a way of approaching things, and they'd introduced various sort of practices alongside this, but then they'd also started to hire people with a continuous improvement background. And one of the things they'd noticed over time was that the as they brought in people all with continuous improvement, the title, they all had different practices. So even though there was kind of this idea of constitutional, they all wanted to do it a different way. And so when they all started to try and do their things, uh the way they had done it before, they weren't aligned at all.

It's interesting, isn't it? Because you get used to it, you use the tools that you're familiar with, and and so even though the principle we can all agree on identically, and and I think this is, you know, we've seen that when we're working together as well. The fact that we agree on the principles doesn't mean we agree on the practices as to how to achieve that. And I think this is where I mean, you know, if we take anything away from this kind of conversation, this back and forth here is is in order to understand how to apply those principles, first of all, we need to know the outcome. What is it that we're trying to achieve? And secondly, we need contextual information. We need we need to understand the sorts of pressures the organization is under, what they're competing with in the marketplace, what sort of environment they're in, so that we can understand what practices are appropriate, given the outcomes they're trying to achieve and the context or the situation that they are currently in, that situational awareness.

The the uh and I said I was gonna be more cynical, but one of the uh comments that I that I've always really liked was this idea that nobody cares about your methodology. It's like it's everything your uh whatever your you're tied to is uh as that material, that's not the thing that they that they care about. They want the outcomes, they want the thing that you're looking to create for them.

And and as you're describing that, Peter, I'm just thinking straight away, it's like, and are we having fun yet? They don't care about the methodology because they they're gonna go hang out with you and and apply your methodology because A, it gets the outcomes they they want, and B, they're having fun while they do it.

Yeah, well, if they come have hang out with me and then uh Maharia buy them a beer, and then we can all have some fun.

I'm gonna feel in one beer and you'll be asleep.

So so how should we sum this conversation up for our listeners?

Right. So I I really uh let's, you know, are we having fun yet? The two things that we care about, are we having fun yet? And I feel I don't know that we touched on it very much, but definitely like that has to be a you know a big piece of what we're thinking about. People want to hang around people who are fun to be with rather and the the the results are are kind of we're enjoying the results, right? And sometimes that we've got to we've got to remind ourselves of that. So that's that are we having fun yet piece. Yeah, I think that's an interesting one.

I was gonna add that so and and generally we are having more fun when things are going well. There's a whole conversation there around that uh how do you have fun when things aren't going well, and how does how do you respond in those instances and what that generates as a as a cultural norm, but maybe for another day. I think we touched on that on a number of occasions, but yeah, well, yeah, and then I think that's that other one is around the outcomes, right?

So so and what what I'm reminded of as we're having this conversation, I think, is make sure we know the outcomes at right at the beginning. We need to know those outcomes. We've got to be able to articulate them, we've got to be able to see them, measure them, and make progress because it's that old adage of playing football without a goalpost, right? If you can't score a goal, what you're not playing anything, you're just running around in circles or whatever it might be. So we've got to create some sort of purpose and measurable outcome that we can chase.

Yeah. And I think uh and I think as the the last point there, or the third one, is because we like to have our threes, is the uh not copying somebody else's model. Like don't inflict what you saw work somewhere else on your organization, look at what the outcomes are. Maybe and there is the caveat there, maybe what worked elsewhere will work where you are. I mean, by all means try it. I mean, like see it. But remember to be looking for the outcomes you're looking to create from that, and don't get tied into that method being the way to do it because it worked elsewhere, so it's got to work here with these people in this context, with this business. It's gotta be sp what you need, that what's gonna work here.

Well, and I and and for me, the thing that that you carry over are the principles and understanding of the principles, the practices you can adjust.

So fantastic. Well, well, with the with that in mind, I mean if anybody has any feedback at uh feedback at definitemabile.com. And don't forget to hit subscribe because we've got to remember to remind people to do that.

Right. And you have a fantastic uh few days in the UK. Enjoy, get that accent strengthened as you come back.

So I'll definitely try.

And until next time, thanks again, Peter, as always a pleasure.

Until next time. Thanks. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.