Hello everyone, quick heads up before we start today's episode. The Global Agile Summit is happening on May the 4th. Yes, May the 4th and even with a big blowout Star Wars party, you have to join. It will be online and it's, like always, free to attend. We have four tracks this year that I'm really excited about and I think you will too. Stick around to the end of the episode to know what they are. If you want to check it out already now, you can check it out at bit.ly forward slash global agile 26. That's the numerals two and six at the end. So one more time, that's bit.ly forward slash global agile 26. All one word, all lowercase. And two and six are the numerals two and six. So stick around till the end of the episode and I'll tell you what's in store. But for now, on to today's episode. Hello, everybody. It is Thursday here on the podcast. This week we have with us Peter Merle. Hey, Peter. Welcome back. Hey, Basker. It's a pleasure to be here again. Likewise. And we had a great conversation yesterday about throughput accounting and being scientific about our work. So the next question is definitely in that line. And we'll talk about success in a minute, and there will be some science involved, I'm sure. But first, the core role or sorry, the core cycle or loop of being scientific is learning from experience. And that's what we try to do in Agile Retrospective. So I want to know, what's your favorite Agile Retrospective and why? So in XScale, we have a structure we call the Kemalot model. and it's not that different from a lot of other models but it takes advantage of a technique that was kind of forgotten or lost after some of the early toyota production system manufacturing breakthroughs and it's a technique called a quality circle so the idea is very simple let's say that we have teams of six people i'm going to pick that relatively arbitrary early um there's a whole bunch of stuff from dunbar that explains why that's not a number and i'm not going to go there let's say it's six people we've got a number of these teams why do we only have retrospectives inside a single team how is learning going to flow from one team to another well we can have big all hands meetings we do workshops we can do all kinds of we can do open spaces and it's all slow it would be really good if learning could flow continuously across the fabric of teams throughout our swarm or throughout our organization. How can we do that? Well, let's say that we're going to break three teams of six into six quality circles of three people each, one from each team. And they're going to meet for 10 minutes, half an hour, once a week. And they're going to talk about the problems they're facing and the ideas that have come up and how they can help each other and how they can enable things for each other and how they can solve constraints for each other. And they're going to take two kinds of idea back to their team. The first kind of idea is a proposal for a piece of work something that would make life better for the teams as a whole Second kind of idea is a way of aligning their ways of working a treaty a working agreement between the teams. And then the teams are still autonomous. They can decide whether they're going to take these ideas on or prioritize how they're going to respond to them and so on. But the neat thing with quality circles is if you hold them regularly and you hold them before your team gets together and makes its decisions about what it wants to do to plan its next bit of work, if it's going to do continuous planning. And maybe it's more a matter of just sticking these things on a board. If you're swarming off, you're mobbing, going, okay, what's the next thing we're going to do above everything else? And we're not going to do any queuing theory at all. There's lots of ways of doing that. But the neat thing about doing this regularly is that learnings flow across the organization. And that's more valuable than anything you can come up with with a retrospective in your team by yourself. Absolutely. Cross-team retrospectives and quality circles. Quality circles, which is a very old practice from the industrial world that we can still benefit from. I will say, three people is magic for sharing learnings. Because while one person is explaining something, another person is listening to them, third person is thinking about where's the conversation going to go next. So you get this beautiful hum. If you get your quality circles to meet in parallel, standing next to whiteboards, you know, as a coach, you listen for a certain noise that a healthy self-organizing team makes. It's a hum, and you know that noise as well as I do. When you have six of these three-person quality circles, you will hear the most beautiful symphony of that noise you ever hear in your life. And the beautiful thing about this quality circle idea is, you know, it's not limited to just three teams. you can do this at multiple levels and you can actually have people go and take part in representing a group of teams so in terms of a swarm or larger structures and you can keep doing this face-to-face doing a face-to-face minimizes the middlemen and that means i mean it's in the manifesto face-to-face communication is always the best way to go about doing this so this gives us a mechanism for doing that across organizations you can make a fabric of it we'll put the link in the show notes for people to go in and check out quality circles. And of course, we do this retros because we want to succeed as Scrum Masters. And obviously, before we can do that, we need to define what that is. So when you talk to agile coaches and Scrum Masters all over the world these days, Peter, what do you define success for Scrum Masters? I think that Scrum Masters is a self-defeating role. I don't think that it should be a permanent thing. I don't think it should be an organizational role at all. I love the idea of leadership as a service, that every member of a team is providing their team. Every member of a swarm is providing their swarm. So the question then is, what is the protocol of leadership as a service without middlemen, without product owners, scrum masters, without these roles? How do we do this? And there is a very simple protocol you can apply that we get from the Haudenosaunee. If no one heard of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy before, they were the successful direct democratic version of a republic that existed in North America before the USA A lot of the founding fathers of the USA borrowed their stuff but there were limiting factors in what the Haudenosaunee did as well The neat thing with leadership as a service is it's such a simple protocol that you can apply this generally, no matter what structure your organization takes and get huge benefits from it. And the neat thing from the point of view of a scrum master or a coach is, you can get this to be something that people are using peer to peer, treating each other as adults, not looking at you as the parent and themselves as disempowered children, this is going to be a self-organizing team, then they have to be able to self-organize whether you're there or not. And once they can do it without you, well, then you need to go and do the next thing because they don't need you now. One of the things that I always ask, because this is the we should work ourselves out of a job answer is something that recurringly comes up. And one of the things that I want to ask is, all right, but let's assume that is the definition of success. How do I know if I'm getting closer? Because, I mean, let's be honest, nobody wants to see themselves as not necessary anymore. So how do we keep ourselves honest to that premise of what success means? That's a really good question. So I mentioned that this leadership as a service is a protocol and we'll include that protocol in the show notes. but if I can do these things quickly, if I can make that steel thread of alignment happen, then my next job is to grow it. How do I grow it? Well, I'll split it in two and I will backfill with the next most progressive people in the organization because I always want to start with the most progressive people. I can find them with an open space. So the neat thing about leveraging this idea of growing capability is that now I always have a next thing to do. I always have more challenges until I have transformed the organization as a whole. Or at that point, obviously, the organization doesn't need me. That's great. That's a wonderful thing to have on your resume. But the neat thing about doing these little engagements, these little change actions, is that you can make people happy in, let's say, an eight to 12-week period and get a really good reference internal to the organization. People will recommend you to the people they trust. Hey, this guy solved a problem for me. He can solve your problem. That's the kind of stuff that you want. You don't want to be constantly relying on the mercurial boss of bosses for your daily bread. You want to make that person happy, but you want to be able to show them a whole bunch of wins that you were able to get without depending on them. And the neat thing about this idea of growing the capability, growing the new organization outside of the bottom that is the old organization, is that there's no friction out there. It's like a superconductor for change. And everybody who's involved wants this to work. So when you bring new people in, all you have to tell them is, if you don't like the way you're working with these people you already know and trust. It doesn't depend on me. It depends on your relationships with them. If you don't like that, you can go back to the other organization. It's fine. As long as they're not in a place where they're risking something, they're keen to make it work as well. They want to see this work. It's much better than what used to happen. So you can grow it fast. I did this with a group of 300 in nine months prior to going into the Commonwealth Bank gig That was what actually got me that job the second time and proved that this and I was the only change agent there And I began to think the change agent was itself the wrong way to look at this What we really want is change participants and change leaders. And what you're doing as a coach or as a scrum master, I'm just going to call it the same thing for now. What you're doing is transforming change participants into change leaders. i really like the distributed leadership model uh leadership as a service sounds like another great bonus episode so you got two in the backlog now peter i hope you have enough time for us to book those it's going to be a lovely conversation i'm sure thank you for sharing that with us peter no worries my pleasure hi there friends thanks for sticking around till the end of the episode so let me tell you what's coming. On May 4th, we're running the Global Agile Summit. It will be online and I want you there. This year, we have four tracks and each one is built around real conversations with practitioners. No slides, no keynote theater, just honest interviews with people doing the work, just like you. The first track is AI in organizations, where practitioners show what actually works. No hype, just AI that makes your Monday better. Happy Monday, everybody. And then we have the people track. Honest conversations about putting humans at the center of how we work and keeping them there. And third is agile in construction. And yes, I really mean brick and mortar construction. Lean and agile actual job sites. Field leaders removing waste. Teams transforming how buildings get built. Stay tuned for what I think will be a super track on agile in construction. And the fourth track is agile in gaming. How game studios ship without burning out. agile inside the creative pressure cooker. Over the years, we've had more than 12,000 participants since 2017, the time of the first summit organized with the podcast. And this year, we're making it easier than ever to join. You can register for free and get access to the summit sessions live during the event week. That's May 4th to May 6th. Or you can grab the practitioner pass and get immediate access to last year's keynotes from Jurgen Apelo, Goiko Adzic and Mirete Kangas. Right now, even before the summit starts. So grab your practitioner pass and start learning today. Head on over to bit.ly forward slash global agile 26. That's two six, the numerals two and six. sign up and I'll see you on May the 4th. And one more time, here we go. bit.ly forward slash global agile 26, all lowercase, all one word and 26. That's the numeral two and the numeral six. I'll see you on the conference floor. Thank you.
