“Q”
Hi welcome to the scrum sessions podcast episode number four. I’m kill here in Dallas, Texas with my good friend Gary on in Berlin, Germany. Welcome, Gereon.

Gereon
Hi, everyone. Hi, “Q”, good to see you again.

“Q”
Good to see you again, my friend. So we are going to talk about agile mindset and why that matters to a leader. Because we talk a lot about mindset, mindset mindset. And leaders always come to me and say, whew, why do I care about this stuff? So Girion? what’s your what’s your take? Why do you think a leader should care about agile mindset?

Gereon
So, to be quite honest, when people I have the impression that people talk too much about mindset, right? Because it seems to be one of these topics that coaches just regurgitate whenever there’s a problem that’s coming up. And I’m not saying the mindset isn’t important. I think it’s really important. But what I’m sometimes struggling with is, you know, okay, so you notice that the mindset isn’t there, right? And might be in a leader, that’s usually one of the cases or it might be in a team member. And I think these are actually kind of separate cases. What I’m always struggling with is, that’s good. But how can we actually change that? Right? Because the mindset, what is it’s kind of like a set of beliefs, something that the person holds, dear. And that’s not as easily changed, as I think a lot of people would like it to be right. And so this is why I like when people say it, I find I find it very good that they notice it, that there’s maybe an issue and maybe a room for improvement. But for me, it’s not necessarily as practical or as tangible as I would like it to be in that situation.

“Q”
Yes, and I totally agree with you. Our so called coaches, and everybody in the community know my opinion about what we call coaches always default on this thing about mindset. And mindset is a big change for people. And people overall. I wouldn’t say they don’t like change, but they’re not comfortable with change, if you look at the statistics, is, I believe is 2.4% of people who actually love change for the sake of it. That’s me, right? You know, me for years in Ohio, I’m always buying new things and trying new things, and etc. But about 64% of the people. They’re either pragmatists, or they’re very conservative. And it’s really hard to say, well, we have to change our mindset. And I think in the minds of several coaches, it’s like, oh, yeah, we just flipped the switch. And now you have a different mindset doesn’t work that way. And then you have to count for the team, the 13% of the people who are skeptics. But what I think it matters for a leader. And then we’ll know if the word mindset is the best one is, is to model the behavior that you would like to see your teams have. By modeling the behaviors say, Well, we have to have a culture of continuous learning. And then, when was the last time you actually took a new class. I remember when Satya Nadella was chosen to be the CEO for Microsoft. One of the things I read on on his interviews was that he signs up to a bunch of training classes. And he managed to attend just a few. But the key thing is, he was actually managed to attending a few. That is modeling the behavior.

Gereon
But you know, the thing is, I think we as coaches, as agile coaches, we need to do a better job of really making it practical, right? And the thing is, we always talk about the mindset change, oh, we need to have an agile mindset as if it were easy, right? You were just citing those statistics that they’re like different groups of people who relate differently to change. But you know, I’ve been asking myself, if we always talk about mindset, what are some other mindsets that people have? Right? And so one thing that came to mind, which a lot of people know is like scarcity versus abundance, right, scarcity oriented people think that everything, everything is a zero sum game, right? They need to be making sure that nobody’s taking something from them and abundance, mindset. People are thinking, well, the world is growing, there’s enough to go around for everyone, and we can just grow all together. And everyone will be satisfied after that. And so, you know, if we think about other mindset like this one, or like a growth mindset and so on. Do we think it’s actually easy to change a person’s mindset as it refers to scarcity, for example, or to growth? And I would say, No, it’s really, really difficult, right? We haven’t even defined what an agile mindset is. is, but everybody’s talking about like, we are actually in agreement, what an agile mindset is. And if it were easy to change it, and I actually, I don’t agree with any of those, I think it’s super hard to change your mindset, even for your own self, right? And then I don’t even think we are in agreement in the community or in industry, what the agile mindset actually encompasses.

“Q”
Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. And we talk about growth mindset? Well, it’s easy to say you have to adopt this growth mindset. But that’s not how most people think because you pointed out, some people are really good and say, Okay, I am good at this thing. And the one gets even better that. So their focus is very narrow. And that also, it’s even more critical when you’re talking about leadership. Because having very narrow focus and leadership, create some level blindness, that can get you into a lot of trouble, because you’re not paying attention to market developers or not pay attention to customer feedback. And it said, but it is hard to change mindset. And perhaps, what I feel from coaches, as they think is, again, going back to the metaphor of flipping a switch. The thing is, if you’re talking to a very conservative person, or even a pragmatist, a pragmatist is gonna get Okay, I need to adapt. Maybe not as fast as this coach you want. Because it’s an it’s an imperative. The Conservatives say, okay, perhaps I can adapt. But what’s the benefit of that? Let’s think about this. Now, the script is a different story. You cannot expect 100% of the people to buy into anything. But I think the importance for me I go back is, if you’re a leader, if your organization decided that agile was the way to go, and more specifically Scrum, because you and I, that’s the majority of what we do, you still have to model the behavior. Because if you don’t show that you’re doing what you are asking people to do, it’s not gonna go anywhere, it’s not believable. Or when I talk about data, we say that the thing about data is it has to be credible, because anybody can vomit numbers at any point is the same thing about behavior, it has to be credible. Otherwise, people are not going to help you achieve the goals that were set to you as a leader by your organization.

Gereon
Absolutely. So what for you? What are some parts of an agile mindset you said, like continuous improvement, continuous learning? What else would you consider to be part of an agile mindset?

“Q”
I think it’s the idea that you use, feedback, continuous learning, continuous, growing, continuous adapting to build resiliency. I think the agile mindset is first and foremost about resiliency. A company must be resilient. And in order to be resilient, you have to be very good at adapting, which, again, it’s a big leap of faith for a lot of people. But resiliency is key in business, because things change all the time, right? We just get into a situation right now the economy is taking a downturn, and everybody has to adapt. Now, if you’re not very good at adapt, you’re probably not going to survive, or many companies didn’t survive the crisis in 2008. And that is what I think when I think about agile mindset, is learning. Learning is not just taking a training class or going to a boot camp to learn something. Learning is understanding people is understand the conditions is learning about where you can go if the company next if there is a contingency like right now. That’s what I call a learning culture. Learning Culture is not only educational, it’s understanding the experiences that are put in front of you, and making the best out of it.

Gereon
Now, that’s really interesting. And you know, like a minute ago, was complaining that we don’t have agreement in inside the community, at least in my opinion. And at the same time, my I totally agree with what you’re saying. And my mind went to something else first. And so this goes for leaders. But this I think is even more prevalent in teams is that often people don’t have an orientation to get things done. And this is I think, like, you know, when you say in a team or that person is kind of lacking the agile mind Send, it’s usually around that, right? It’s usually not that they’re not learning, even though that’s very, a very important part, or the part of the continuous improvement, but at least in my experience is often they’re not getting things done right, and they don’t have the pull, they don’t have that mindset that that almost like a hunter mindset to get to the finish line. And so what I always think about, so I sometimes get the feedback that I’m using too many military metaphors, but I like them, because they have a sense of urgency in them, right, because if you mess something up in the military, some people are usually going to die. And you can find other industries, areas, and so on where you can have this situation. But you know, let’s imagine you’re sitting somewhere in a cafe, and you have a two year old, a three year old, and you don’t pay attention for a second and the kid wanders off, right, and you see your son maybe getting close to the waterline, and he will probably fall into the water into the ocean pretty soon, right? And so what do you do, you jump up, and you only have one goal, you’re single minded, right? Whatever is happening around you, your coffee is falling down, maybe there’s some light traffic going on, you don’t care anymore, because you have that single mindedness that target focus, and you’re going to get to your child, so he doesn’t fall into the ocean. And so for me, there’s like a lot going on. And this is actually what I’m missing in team members, and sometimes in leaders as well, is that, in that situation, if you have found a critical target to pursue, a lot of the other stuff has to fall by the wayside, right? So maybe you’re not behaving as people are expecting you to maybe the coffee is falling down and the porcelain is breaking. Maybe you cause a little bit of a kerfuffle in the traffic situation, right. But you don’t care because you have that focus. And so this is one of the things that to me is really important, if everyone is this goal oriented, and they want to get things done, and they move impediments out of the way, or they just ignore a lot of stuff. This is like, at least for team members, this is the first thing that comes to my mind.

“Q”
Yeah, no, you’re absolutely right. And I always tell people, especially teach OKRs the best possible result? It’s never the most probable result. People if I don’t mind mindsets, they don’t say okay, you know what, this quarter, we can three power output. And we know we can do that? No, they’re going to say we’re going to multiply by five instead of multiplying by three. Because that’s what pushes people to be excellent at what they do. Look at professional athletes, they’re always trying to do that, right. Lately, we’ve been talking a lot, there are some I don’t know if they already did. But running a marathon in two hours, they are aiming to do that. Five years ago, nobody even would think about it. But a professional athlete is always trying to progress is always trying to aim for the best possible result, not the most probable result. And what I see in teams, and what I see leaders is, we go for the most probable not the best possible because we fear failure. Now, failure is a good thing, because we learned by failing, when you were a baby, probably you don’t remember, I don’t remember total days, right? When you are learning, when you are learning to walk, you fall many times. And by falling, you learn how to balance your body. And then when you learn to run, or anyone want to walk, you start running and then you forget, because you knew how to balance at low speed, but you don’t know how to balance at high speed. So we are always failing in order to learn. And I one thing I see in leadership is there is this aversion to failure. Oh, failing, oh, man, you screwed up royally. That’s really bad. But you don’t learn unless you fail. Now the thing with failure is you have to be very careful because failure involves risk. Now there is a huge difference between risk and reckless behavior. I was just talking to somebody else and I said well, I did skydiving for a number of years and after a while it became boring. Some people do their whole life for me became building but we always carry to canopy as a main canopy and the reserve canopy. And lots of the people used to go get out of the plane or want to see how the reserve deploy and release the main canopy and fall a little bit again and reserve goes up. Great. I never saw anybody getting in trouble doing that. I never did that. Because I think is a bit of being read. plus. And if I was to try that, I would have a My ama careful guy, I would have two reserves. So I read I deploy main canopy. Okay, good reserve. Are we going to open? But if it doesn’t, I just ejected a perfectly functioning canopy to see how things work. I don’t know if that’s the best example of reckless behavior. But there is, I think part of leadership is setting up some guardrails, some guidance, what is an acceptable level of risk. But it’s part to leadership to motivate people to go for the best possible result.

Gereon
I guess, for me, you know, with the example of hunting after your child that’s about to fall down, you have this worthwhile goal, and you’re pursuing it with all your force, what’s actually critical is what you’re not doing right at that point of time. And you’re actually letting go of a lot of stuff, like the four hour saying, okay, maybe you’re doing something that’s not culturally appropriate, right, you’re throwing something down. And usually you don’t, you don’t throw it on your coffee cup, right? And but in that situation, you don’t care anymore. And so you’re letting go of this cultural construct that something should happen, or you shouldn’t be doing something. And I think this is where it also transfers to leadership. Because what we often see is that leaders have a hard time of letting go right, as far as the risk is concerned, what you just mentioned, but also letting go of the control. Right now I have this old mindset, I need to control everything. You know, I need to know at every minute what people are doing, they need to check in check out bla bla bla bla bla. And the essence is letting go, right letting go of all these ideas of needing to control people letting go of being error free. This idea, it’s just an idea and right, you need to be perfect. You cannot take any risks. Of course, you can take risk, you need to take risks, if you don’t, you are going to fail. This is almost a certainty in quickly changing times. And so for me, the ability, especially as we move over to leaders, the ability to let go is super critical.

“Q”
Yep, I agree. And another question I get all the time for leaders is but cute. Your scrum guide? Right, sir? Yeah, well, I look the scrum guide, I know see a role for me there. And then, of course, you explain in your talk a lot of the things but they say okay, so, um, where’s my role with this self managing thing, self directing self, whatever you want to call it right? And I say, Well, think about this. First of all, self managing self, managing self directing is not as easy as most people think, actually, it’s very hard. Your role is to support a team to be successful. So you have to set up goals for a team or a group of teams, you have to tell them what you expect from them. You have to create those guardrails so that things don’t happen, etcetera. But you also have to think about how to hold them accountable. You also have to think about developing their skills, because they may or may not have the skills that are required to do whatever you’re set to do. And even if they have the skills they may need improving those skills. So those are all things that leaders do. And more important. Sometimes people misbehave. Some, sometimes people are not a good fit for a team, somebody has to eject them from the team and find a place where they fit much better. And those are things that leadership has to do. leadership has to guide the leadership has to participate. But it should never interfere unless things start to go in a bad direction. And the team itself doesn’t see how to correct it. So we’re gonna have bumps on the road all the time. And as people learn, there’ll be many bumps in the road. That leadership role is key in overcoming those bumps in the road, is supporting people in their pursuit. It’s telling them what their focus should be.

Gereon
And I still come back to letting it go, right? Because the role is something that’s also something to let go of, right? Because, oh, yeah, you have this position in the hierarchy that maybe doesn’t serve the needs of the organization anymore, because you have 50,000 layers in your in your organization, and you actually need to cut down on it, and everybody knows it, right. So if we’re talking about the agile mindset, we have said that actually, it’s hard to define and there’s not a lot of agreement, but I think we agree on the fact that we’re talking about continuous learning their continuous improvement, the mindset forward, right. Um, Being goal oriented, especially with team members. So for managers or leaders, that’s usually not a problem, they are doing that anyway. And then also letting go of some, some old notions letting go of control, but also at the same time, and this is kind of like a yin yang, right? So yes, let go. But that doesn’t mean don’t do anything anymore, right? Because somebody needs to hold people accountable, set the standards and so on. Because otherwise, you’re going to get into a lot of trouble.

“Q”
Yep. And another thing they always ask is, but Q, what else can I do in my role, and I always point out, two things that I didn’t say tend to be neglected, but people forget about them until they actually happen. One is the proverbial word, the I word impediment. Some things the team can take care of, by themselves, but many things, they need somebody above them, they may need, they need funding, maybe they need equipment that and that becomes an impediment really quick, it’s slowing them down. And that’s where a leader has to act and say, Hey, you have a problem come to me. I’ll take care of this and you guys go do whatever you have to do. Don’t don’t bother with this. That’s my job to remove the impact. The second one, and I see this unfortunate a lot this in organizations, even in not so big ones, dinner, this great ideas that come from one particular side of the organization. And they never propagate. So another part, where are you leadership is key is how do we channel that information to other parts of the organization, so they can benefit from that. And further, they can improve on those ideas. Or they can or those ideas can generate new ideas. So communication between the team is this key, which gets us to the D word dependencies. So communication and coordination between the teams is just not a matter of propagating knowledge. That’s key. But it’s also when teams are working to different parts of a product or suite of products. But once in a while a team or a group of teams need something for not for another team or group of teams. How do we coordinate that that’s part of leadership. So there are many things an agile leader can have, in effect, to make things better for the teams to make food to make things more efficient. Whether you want to call this agile mindset, growth mindset, those are all words, but the practicality of thing is you have to support your teams, you have to get stuff out of their way. And you have to make sure that information flows freely freely in your organization. So everybody can learn. So you want to call that a learning culture. Great. I don’t care about the buzzwords, I care about the results. Yeah, and leadership is key that

Gereon
Yeah, and I think we’re talking more and more about adult leadership. But you know, you brought something up for me, which is, so I’ve I’m a leader, right. And I know that I’m failing in like, all different dimensions all the time and have been for many, many years. And I think all leaders are doing it, right. And why because usually, there’s way too much stuff on our plate, you know, stuff was going on around the clock, and you have so many things to do. And CINAHL Angelou comes along and actually takes something off your plate, it’s still going to be too much. But it’s taking a lot of stuff away from you because we’re just decentralizing command to us to a certain degree, right? And what’s our reaction as leaders say, oh, no, I’ve been doing this for the past. Or knowing that we haven’t been doing that great, because it’s way too much to do anyway, right. But we want to hold on to it. And again, I know I’m getting on peoples nerves right now. But letting that go and saying there’s always enough stuff to do, even if the team self organize itself managers, I mean, think about how many functions a leader has to fulfill, right? There’s the whole vision thing that nobody really takes care of right? There is holding people responsible. And yeah, we can go through a list. And we can probably do several episodes of this on all the responsibilities that remain with the leader, right? We’re just getting rid of a couple of them. And we should actually welcome that. And it’s totally natural to just, you know, cramp up and say, Oh, no, but I still need to do it, what’s my role, your role is still the same, you’re still the leader, and you still have a lot of responsibilities, you just have more time to focus on them and do them better. And I at least can say for myself, I do benefit from that. And I need that. And I think most leaders can because it’s, you know, it’s an infinite game, you can always get better and focusing on less areas, you know, like you said, dependencies and making sure new initiatives are spread through throughout the organization. You can use more energy on that and actually make the organization more agile by doing that.

“Q”
Yes, and you see, I don’t know if I told you but I’ve been working on it. Two things, Decision Matrix and responsibility matrices. Because there is a misunderstanding where the where the scrum master stops and where the line manager starts and stuff like that. And I think it’s also important for leadership is to clearly define responsibilities. Because otherwise you have the, you run the risk of having two people with the same responsibility. And you know how well that goes. One person should have clear responsibilities. And that’s the role of leadership. Because once the responsibility, your level of responsibility is exhausted, you have to escalate quickly, because that is decision delay that gets eliminated the processes more efficient, and etc. And that also makes the time of a leader more allocated easier, right? Because you, you don’t have to deal with a bunch of things. Because you know, there are people who are responsible for that accountable for that they’re doing that. And only when they are, those layers are exhausted, it comes to you. So you can concentrate in other aspects like market directions, or whatever else it is your job. But it’s important to understand that the responsibilities, the accountabilities of each role, and we have to make sure there’s no overlapping. And that’s another thing that leadership should do to support the whole effort.

Gereon
So this is really interesting, the more we talk about it, the more my understanding is being sharpened. So like, what’s coming out of this, for me is the following. I still think that this, you know, getting to the goal as quickly as possible is the critical part. And I know that there are many more parts, but I think this is for me, the most important one. And there’s a there’s a fairly famous quote by a Marine, Colonel. And he said, I don’t want to control my Marines, I want to unleash them on the enemy, right? And so this unleashing, I mean, think about the word it’s like, you know, speeding forward and, and attacking. And I think this is what I want the team to do. And this is what I want the leader to do, to first of all, not control, let go of this stupid idea of controlling people, because you can control people anyway, it’s it was never true. And it certainly isn’t true today. And then rather focus on what can I do? So they can be unleashed? You know? Do they have the orientation? Do they have the vision? Have you removed the impediments? Have they all the support and training have they the empowerment that they need, and then get out of the way and be happy that they are doing the job, you can always find something else right in support that. And this is, you know, if we want to boil it down, if we had to boil it down, this is for me, the essence of the agile mindset for a leader. And of course, all of this stuff like learning, continuous learning, continuous improvement all plays into there, but I think it’s this forward movement is unleashing of powers, what is really critical for me,

“Q”
it’s a great point control, slow things down. Yeah, control creates bottlenecks, control create single points of failure. Yeah, I’m totally there with you. Let it go that give people goals, support them, keep them accountable, and let things flow. People will surprise you. People definitely will surprise you, when you put all these things in place that was not set by me is by a guy called general pattern and word work. You’ll tell people what you want, and they’ll surprise you with their creativity. So let control go Ctrl only slowed things down. So Gary on I think we already talked quite a bit about this subject. I think we may actually revisit this in the future, we may expand it on the future episodes. So I think it’s called it’s time to say goodbye. And from Dallas, yours Q. And the last word stays with my good friend Gary on in Berlin.

Gereon
Oh, there you go again. So for those people who aren’t joining our regular scrum sessions that we do every first day of the month, which are free, you can go to scrum sessions.com. He was always finishing up the session. And then when everybody’s about to leave, he hands it over to me and have to say something and he puts me on the spot. So now you guys know this as well. So thank you everyone for joining us. Stay tuned for the next episode. And yeah, hope to see you soon again. Take care bye bye