Ray Arell: 0:33

Good morning, good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Agile Community Network. It's 2026. It took me a second to actually get those words out. I think that the it's weird. I think 2025 just I remember it being January, and then suddenly it was December. Last year seemed to just fly by. I'm not sure if you guys all experienced that as well. But it felt like that to me. This little get together, if this is your first time here, I just wanna just say that what we do is we surround a topic with all of the wisdom of everyone here that's in the room. Today we're gonna talk about change that sticks. And the that way that we actually the horrible word of transformation within organizations, we're gonna talk about that. But before we get going, I wanna go ahead and thank all of my co-hosts for last year. Shauna, Diana, Yorg, Sheila Eckhart, Sheila McGrath, April Mills, Hendrick. Unfortunately, Shauna and Hendrick will not be here today. They had some other things that came up, and there's a possibility that April might have to drop off early. So she warned us of that. So if we want to engage something with her, we're gonna probably pick on her first, which will be really good. The Agile Coaching Network is actually I said coaching community network, we used to be the coaching network. We've expanded that, is brought to you by all these lovely companies. And our prime sponsor, which is Agile Alliance, they've been with us for a number of years. If you guys ever went to a big Agile Alliance event, I actually used to be a part of that organization. It's a great organization, it's a nonprofit. You need to go up to agilealliance.org and become a member. It's actually really cheap to go do that. It's really $59 a year, and you get a whole bunch of different bonus events that are there. And those dollars, believe it or not, help us to pay for our webinar system and all of the rest of the things we do to get us going. 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One other pitch, and this is something that I'm helping with this year, Agile Open Northwest. If you have not been to that event, it's over here in Portland, Oregon. It is a great event where guess what? You don't have to go submit a paper in order to go speak. Meaning, all you gotta do is show up and they open up a marketplace and you can pitch your topic and share what you've learned this last year. It's a great group of people. It's gonna be at the Kennedy School. If you've never heard of that place, it's McMeneman's. It has a really great vibe to it. It's an old, I think, 1930s or earlier school that's been converted into a hotel. And the people that come to this and have been to this multiple times are just some of the best people and sharing people. Go to agileopenorthwest.org and come join us. Also, if you're a company, I'm looking for sponsors. They're a nonprofit organization too, and they need support in order to continue to bring on this great event. So today's topic, change that sticks. The reason why I bring it up, and I'm I know I'm gonna probably make a couple of people mad when I say transformation, that word, because we've all in we've all had this, we've all had transformations that we've been a part of. And transformation seems to be the selling point that leadership comes in and they say, you know what, we're gonna start a transformation. And the transformation isn't really sold as a we're gonna go build something. It's actually sold more like a campaign. It's a it does not resonate that we are going to do something that is going to stick because we've been through so many of these campaigns that where we saw that maybe all we have to do is wait a year and this campaign will end and we can get on back to our jobs. And I think that's partly due to the fact that we treat transformations as projects. We have project plans, it's gonna start here, it's gonna end here, it's gonna have this really highly structured maybe a product manager that's going to be leading it. And it's sold as this huge shift to the organization. Agile transformations are guilty of this. They're guilty all the time for this. And I know that when things say that there's gonna be a big shift in the environment, that really does trigger the immune system of the company and the resistance engine starts up and the policy the politics associated with it. I've seen so many different transformations where there was much more opposition than there was the positive stream moving it forward. I think they are overfocused on frameworks. Agile is very guilty of this. We're gonna go scrum, we're gonna scrum over or we're gonna scale scrum, we're gonna do safe, we're gonna do whatever. And everything is gonna comply to this one framework. And if you don't follow this framework, then you're out of compliance. And that compliance engine also helps to fuel the resistance because it's something that's not it's being you're being volunteer what to go do versus this is something that we genuinely want in our organization. Leadership, not to pick on them, but I was a director of engineering for a number of years. That whole voluntole thing is you go off and go do agile, you guys over there, and we leadership are not going to change at all. We're just gonna go about the same way that we approach things. And that builds, I think, resentment in the system, and also the fact that they're not realizing that they're piling this on top of existing work. Meaning they say we're gonna go have an agile transformation, but there's never any funding that comes with it. There's inadequate coaching, there's inadequate training, there's inadequate. I can go down the list of different things of it's something you guys just need to go pick up in your spare time. You got AI now, so you must have free time to go do this stuff. You're uh 300% faster now that you have the AI system. So therefore you should be able to go do this. It's no problem whatsoever. Anyway, I'm being a little sarcastic. But I think and we're gonna get to the questions, but I I really think we could do these things, these things differently. And specifically, what we're really trying to do in the under the word of transformation is we're trying to build infrastructure. We're trying to go build up a new operating system of how we approach things within our companies. And not to step back into an old concept that I think that we don't talk about enough, but continuous improvement of the organization where we're not just changing for chain's sake, we change because we need to change uh continuously in order to stay a viable business. And I do I did highlight the word fund, funded model, meaning that we would expect that yes, we're gonna deliver the product, but also what have we funded within the time that's given to people in order to improve? And I think that is one of the big things that is the linchpin of most organizations that I see that are doing this well, is it's well funded as well. Fixing the outdated systems, I can keep going down this list. If you think about it, and this is standing in the agile space, is that the product and the flow of value out of the organization is the change that we're producing that. And if it is, then I can tell you then that's what makes it sticky. Because the customers get addicted to great products and they end up funding us, which is great. The last one is the concept of fit for purpose. Fit for purpose is don't go put Scrum into a system that needs to do daily deliveries. And I say this all the time where if you're saying, well, we're gonna be on a two-week cadence, but the customers need things daily. A call center that's trying to go resolve things should not be saying, in two weeks we'll have the answer for you. No, we need to do it now. We need a continuous delivery system for it. And so where agile might work, an agile scrum system might work for one team, a Kanban system might work for another. It would be better. Or even, and I hate to say this, even the old waterfall system might be better depending on what's being built. So the questions to get us going is what are the first signs you see when a transformation is failing? What do you see in the environment? And you can sp spin this question however you want. Second question is with Agile, what approach needs to change to make the biggest difference? Meaning if what's your top thing that we could do differently? It doesn't have to be the things I chose. You pick ones that you think that are and have been proven to you to work very well. And lastly, give me some examples of what you did last in the past year. I'd love to hear how 2025 had some really great successes. If you want, you can also say the really not so successful things too. If you want to, we'd love to learn from you on that. And lastly, if these questions don't resonate with you, ask us another question. It's all open. So, with that, to get us going, April, what do you have on this?

April Mills: 11:40

Thanks, right? I think on the change that sticks argument, one of the things we tend to see is folks hoping that leadership will be the reason why change sticks. Right? You want somebody to come in, you want them to stay long enough, you want them to have the willpower long enough to create the space. So the change you want, forgive me, I've got a cold, can happen. But what I've found over my career and what we did years ago at Intel was giving the individuals, the folks like you that are on this call, the skills you can use to create change that sticks where you're at with what you have right now. And I think starting with that smallest node of change being the change agent, the individual who says, I choose to be different and clear the obstacles for others on my team or in my organization or at leadership levels to join me, is a sustaining node or spark of change or transformation that perpetuates. And so in the years since we've been trying to do these larger scale programs, I spend most of my time with those individuals, equipping the individuals with the skills they need. Because the reality is the half-life of leaders, the tenure is shrinking. So if you hope a leader's going to come in and stay long enough to create the space for this to be the new normal, we're not seeing that, right? They're rotating out so quickly. We're not seeing organizations have the staying power of committing to five years of an investment in something to improve or transform. That's why I actually think we're seeing a lot less announcements about transformation programs in the past five years in corporations. There's a lot of like tool transformations, but not the work practices, business habit conversations, right? So they want to go buy tools that force you to transform, but not necessarily invest in the individual or the total system transformations like we were doing 15 years ago with where agile transformation was sitting. It had a multi-layered approach. And so, in an environment where there's a lot of push the tool on people, get them to comply with the tool, I think there's a huge opportunity for change agents to be the place where change sticks. And that can be you become an early adopter of the flavor of the month tool, use it to create value and show that. And then can have that conversation with leadership about thank you for getting me this tool. Here's how I'm using it to transform the way I work. I'd love to share that with other people. Or, hey, I'm using this, and here's the way it's breaking my flow because you actually got rid of something else and this isn't working. Sometimes you're using it to good effect. Sometimes you're the agent helping the system repair itself from a bad suggestion. Maybe somebody meant well, but the tool they bought or the thing they're driving isn't helping. And so that's where I spend a lot of my time these days is helping the individuals because it's the spark that you can sustain, even while these winds of change blow in and out of organizations. And once you start there and practice those change agent techniques, you have the ability to maintain community around you, whether it's in your organization or through things like this, your investment of your own time for eight years to maintain the spark of an agile community while the winds of change have shifted in the corporate environment is very noble to keep that spark of the conversation going. Because without a change agent like you doing that, so many of the agile conversations are missing now. Right? It's the voices crying out in the wilderness line from right Star Wars just suddenly silenced, where there used to be a huge agile conversation, and the agile conversation is much smaller today across the companies.

Ray Arell: 16:04

So I'm curious, you helping individuals tool them up in order to you're working on the human system. Yeah, you're helping to build up their infrastructure, the human infrastructure of an organization. And I'm curious, because again, back to that whole funding question, that takes investment. And are you finding that in your work that there are companies that one they're making those investments and two, they're working really hard to retain those individuals? Because what I find is that one, being a change agent is hard. So I'm just curious, what's your perspective on one, the investment and two helping to keep these individuals healthy and happy?

April Mills: 16:50

Yeah. Yeah. So I would say that the trend that I've seen as a shift in corporate is there is because there's more of this gig or hookup culture of employment, right? Employers aren't figuring they're hiring you for a career, they're hiring you for now. Is there isn't as much investment in the individual like there used to be even 15 years ago, right? Where there were leadership development plans and set aside budgets for your development or buying classes or training. That's a lot of that is gone. So I've expressly put a lot of my content out there, either free or in easy and affordable books, because a lot more of it is self-directed versus corporate directed. That's a big change. That said, the organizations that are succeeding and maintaining that success are doing what the companies used to do, which is appreciating the fact that it's a co-creation of value with the individual change agent and the company that supports it, to take that extra energy that a change agent brings and apply it to improving the company. I think if we actually look across a lot of the corporate environment today, we see a lot of companies that are still profitable, but their systems are in decline because they're not investing in the change agents, who, if we use a technical term, right? A change agent brings that negative entropy. They're intentionally improving the system. That's just how they show up. If you don't have that, the company deteriorates just by time and will draining out of it. And the companies that are succeeding are the ones that are still supporting, encouraging, amplifying their change agents. And there's a lot of profitable companies that are slowly draining out their strength to be able to leap and move into that next phase. And I think this is going to be a time of immense sorting. And so for individuals, the key is to become a change agent. So whether you can be that positive force in any company you're in, and you'll have that ability to be more resilient to move, say, to another company or another opportunity, because you're seen as a person who adds value, doesn't just ride on the inherited capital of past products or past generations. But the systems are not going to be very supportive, I would say, for the folks who aren't change agents in the coming years. And if you're waiting for somebody else to do it, you're in that camp of not acting as a change agent. So folks on this call are obviously change agents because you chose to give an hour your time to come and learn something so you could do better going back to wherever you're at. So kudos to you already for being in that rare group that's adding energy back by investing in yourself.

Ray Arell: 19:47

Great. Thank you. Scott, you put up your hand. What do you have?

Caller 1: 19:51

Hi, good afternoon, everyone, or good morning, depending on where you are. What I've noticed in doing or being part of quite a few agile transformations or so-called agile transformations, is a lot of transformations come in through teams. So managers get hired as vice president of development or whatever, and they come from an agile environment. And so they bring that with them and they start to transform their organizations or teams into Scrum teams or Kanban teams. And so the teams start to work in these new frameworks, and they really like a lot of the concepts. And you get a lot of benefit from that. And then that gets bubbled up to senior management, and they're like, oh, that's fantastic. Now, do they do anything necessarily to support that transformation? Not necessarily. Do they change in any way in how they think or manage or lead? Not necessarily. And then middle management kind of gets squeezed in the middle of, I spent my whole career in command and control waterfall management, and I've been very successful. And I don't want to change. And I don't see where I fit in this new environment where these teams have all of this responsibility and newfound power, I guess I would say. And so you get a lot of pushback from middle management. Upper management's, yeah, sure, sounds good. Go for it, but not a lot of other commitment. And then you got the teams down below looking for that support, but not really getting it. And then these transformations tend to languish for years and years. And I think there's folks in middle management that hope it goes away at some point, but that kind of floundering nature kind of just persists. And you are living in this weird world of where you have command and control mashed with servant leadership and waterfall still hanging around and trying to fit in with scrum or combine at times. And you get these kind of weird environments, I guess I would say.

Ray Arell: 22:00

One thing I think I used to blame middle management on a lot of things, but I got to really thinking about it deeply about what why we hired them. And if you look at their job description, it typically says, go maintain this system. Go maintain it. And I think that the resistance to change that comes in that case is you're not inviting me into the new thing. I used to take care of the old thing. And now I don't know what I'm going to be afterwards. Scott, do you remember when they used to say that managers weren't going to be needed when agile transformations were started?

Caller 1: 22:41

And I don't know, I don't agree with that kind of assessment either. I've spent a lot of time doing kind of liberating structures to try to show middle managers where they can really flourish in an agile environment, especially when it comes to things like impediments that teams cannot solve for themselves. We need that upper management support with people that have that experience and have that kind of juice to go get things done, where say it's like unstable nonprofit environments. There's not a single team that's going to solve that issue. We need middle management to step up and lead that effort. And if they can solve that effort for us, they're going to solve it for 20 teams, not one team. It's hugely impactful and very supportive of your teams. And when teams see that from middle management, they get very excited about the future.

Ray Arell: 23:34

No disagreement on that at all. Diana, what do you have on this?

Diana Larsen: 23:38

I was just taking a little time to see if I could find it. When you talk about middle managers and the role of middle managers, it was making me think of an article that Esther Derby and I wrote in 2004 called You Are Still Needed, in reaction to the we don't need no stinking managers movement. And we outlined 20 years ago what value that management role can contribute, particularly in large organizations, where the communication flows get really difficult. There are just so many channels, so many people, so many departments. We need help making sure that our information and our communications flow to the places where they need to go. And so there is a role for managers. And that's not how the world works anymore. The change is continuous. And what we need are, like April was saying, are systems that can continually reinvent them, that may not be the right word, but reinvent themselves to meet the moment. Do we have the resilience to see the chaos or the crisis that's coming toward us and be prepared to work our way through that and learn the new things we need to learn to get through this next new big thing? Because it's not just the change the organization chooses that we're dealing with, it's the change that's going on all around us that we're dealing with. It's a tricky problem. I enjoy reading some of the things that Liza Passer Jensen has been writing. She's a Danish colleague, and she is very focused on the shift in many organizations, and she keeps a list of the organizations in Denmark who are making these changes to self-management, to the organizations that aren't this strict hierarchy, but have a lot more flexibility in who's stepping into a leadership role at which time, and who's willing to follow at which time, and how are we together collaboratively uh producing the value that we want to produce, delivering to our customers. And I'm not totally ready to jump on board with her yet, but I think the questions she's asking and the examples that she's providing are really, really interesting and have implications for where our future is heading. I like picking up on trends that are that I'm seeing out in the world. And that's one of the trends I'm seeing. I think we are undergoing a into what organizations, corporate organizations, business organizations are going to be looking like in the coming years. And I don't think we are at all prepared for it. And so that will be a transformation that people aren't going to get to necessarily choose. It's going to be dropped on us. And I love your second question here with Agile, what approach needs to change to make the biggest difference? It's not Agile as a framework. It's not scrum, it's not extreme programming, it's not Kanban, it's not, but it is that idea of continuous feedback, having the courage to speak up, many of those values that agile and hence true business agility carries with it, that is still, again, it's still needed, right? And it will continue to be needed because it was constructed to help meet the moment as these changes come to us, responding to change over following a plan, and even anticipating change over spending a lot of time planning. And so anyway, that's as I've been listening to April and Scott and reading the chat, those are some of the things that have been coming up for me. And I like April, I think it we do need to focus on helping the individuals who are in influence roles to find their place in this, to find the approach that's going to work for them in this. And so I'm also working in that arena trying to find how do we help people? I love the term I've that I've been using lately called valiant leadership, right? It's that ability to see what's coming, to have the courage to engage with it, have the resilience to say, well, we can figure out our way through this, and to create work environments where people can thrive. And like you said, it's not always going to be the same framework or methodology or whatever. There isn't a one size fits all. But there are approaches out there that fit different situations. And that's when James Shore and I wrote the algebra fluency model. That's the what we were trying to get at with that. But but I don't even think that was quite big enough. Now a few years of reflection on it. So yeah.

Ray Arell: 29:55

It was a good game.

Diana Larsen: 29:56

Yeah, it's a good game. It's a good model, but it's a good model, yes. Yeah.

Ray Arell: 30:01

Thank you for that.

Diana Larsen: 30:03

Let's see. Ray, is it okay if I step in or no?

Ray Arell: 30:09

Someone had their hand up real quick.

Diana Larsen: 30:12

Kyle has been waiting for some time.

Ray Arell: 30:14

Yeah.

Diana Larsen: 30:15

Kyle, are you there?

Caller 2: 30:16

Yeah, I could keep waiting. I don't have to jump in right away.

Ray Arell: 30:20

Okay. Why don't you ask Sheila a question? Sheila. No, go ahead, Sheila. You go first and then Kyle.

Sheila Eckert: 30:27

Yeah, this should be a little bit quick. Um, I I just want to one, I do have a book that's going to be coming out soon, Agile Meets AI. I'm not going to talk about AI. It should be coming out within the next two weeks, but I want to read something from the chapter two, the first, the first paragraph for you. It's chapter two is why agile fails. So this is so very goes right into my a lot of things that are in my books. Why agile fails? It doesn't. Agile itself doesn't fail. Transformations fail due to unrealistic expectations rooted in misconceptions, rigid adherence to frameworks, and misguided definitions of agility. Too often the emphasis shifts from Agile's core principles of collaboration, adaptability, and value delivery to the rituals, the rules, the metrics. Organizations mistakenly measure their agile maturity based on strict framework compliance, which you were talking about, you all have brought this up. Based on strict framework compliance rather than the behaviors and the outcomes that are being produced by the change in those behaviors. And to go further in, like with the other two questions that you have here, one of the best transformations I put in quotes there, I've seen the company didn't say, oh, we're going to implement safe or oh, I want everybody to use Scrum. They said, okay, we need to become more adaptable, we need to change certain behaviors, we need to empower our teams more. And so they went at it in that approach. So that's to me, was like the biggest difference was doing the approach in what are the cultural roadblocks that we have that we need to fix. And once that was worked on, the rest of it came into this team saying, hey, if we use Scrum, this would help us in this particular way. And another team saying, Yeah, that doesn't work for us. We're going to use Kanban. And then the entire organization created their own customized like scaling on how they worked together when there were initiatives that crossed products. And that was like the best that I've ever seen as far as a transformation was approaching it in that manner.

Ray Arell: 33:04

Curious on that. Was that during a crisis? Or was it in we're thinking far enough ahead strategically in order to, we know we've got a roadblock several quarters down?

Diana Larsen: 33:15

It was because of the way that particular business was evolving. So this was, I'm not sure, like it was the music business, and the music business was evolving with digital. So when it came to what was happening, those changes were rapid. And the culture needed to be able to support that. It needed to be able to support that rapid change. It needed to be able to allow teams to get information quickly so that they knew what was happening, and that it wasn't like this trickle-down management and you do this and all this delegation. So it that was the catalyst or the driver for we need to change some of how our culture is working because we need to be better at these quick changes that are coming our way.

Ray Arell: 34:16

Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So you're gonna be at Agile Open Northwest.

Diana Larsen: 34:21

I am, I'm so excited. This is my that'll be my first time doing that. I'm very excited.

Ray Arell: 34:26

Bring a signed copy of that.

Diana Larsen: 34:28

I am going to, yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna bring a few of them.

Ray Arell: 34:32

Okay, cool. Yes, I would definitely want to read it. And we'll do maybe a we could do a book review or something on a future podcast.

Diana Larsen: 34:41

Awesome. Thank you.

Ray Arell: 34:42

Cool. Kyle, you've been so patient.

Caller 2: 34:46

No problem. I was just gonna bring up that. So the first question, what's that first sign that your transformation is failing? And one of the things I've noticed in repeated organizations, repeatedly happening in organizations that I've worked with, is when there are times of stress, whether it's the economy or just revenue or what whatever it is, change that organizations, particularly management, will fall back to the traditional way of doing things to get things done. So as opposed to saying we need to deliver value to our customers faster sooner. So let's continue the agile approaches that we've been doing and improve them. They'll say, all right, we don't have time for agile. We need to go back to our traditional waterfall approach or whatever their approach was. And they sit in that that area. And it becomes a source of friction then for your agile transformation, and they lose support for it. And oftentimes, whether it's whether it's better or not, because they got whatever it was done using their old way, it reinforces that the old way is better than the agile way. And I just I've seen that a lot. I think it's it's a difficult challenge. And I think when you're in that stressful time, when you get there, it's probably too late to stop it. It's got to be set up ahead of time so that you're thinking about okay, where are the stressors going to come from and how talking to management, talking to others about how you deal with that, that those stressors using an agile approach. So I don't know. That's just been my kind of my experience with that.

Ray Arell: 36:31

Yeah, I think you you bring up a very interesting point about snapping back to old ways. That's how in the military, my my father was in the army, but he had lots of stories about how they would create crisis in order to see whether or not the training stuck. They might have uh a drill, an operational drill going on, and then they will have like a fire breakout someplace, just to see whether or not people didn't suddenly run around and panic. And I think that the question of and I say certain companies they'll do uh what's it called? Monkey testing, where they somebody will go up to a server rack and pull it out and say, Hey, chaos monkey.

Diana Larsen: 37:13

Chaos monkey. Yeah, chaos monkeys. Yeah.

Ray Arell: 37:15

I I think companies need to do that more. Um, and especially with that stepping back into bad habits and everyone putting on their capes and being super people tends to be the issue that really it's bad. So I fully agree with your comments. Thank you for that. Uh there's a lot of hands that are still up. I'm I'm gonna be coming down the list to you, just it'll be just a bit. Let me go ahead and bring in Jorg. What do you have on this?

Jorg Pietruszka: 37:40

Yeah, a few thoughts, so to say, for middle management, because that's still my role somehow. And the first signs that I often see is misappropriation of the results. When something starts to work in a transformation, people will suddenly claim either they are responsible or even you are responsible as soon as it turns down to a person instead of an understanding of the concept. That the concept works, that we we have a certain mechanism that works instead of just talking about this, or from other way from teams that say this is enough. That as well it shows you they they didn't get it. And I think that the way out of this is to combine practice and knowledge. You don't not only show them how to do it, you explain why it should be working. Because then they can say actually it's not working as it should. It's doing something, but it doesn't feel like liberating or creating ideas. So what are we doing wrong? And I think that makes a big difference if we only stick with practices or if we only stick with theory. We need to bring both together. And then we have the cultural challenge that some people need to a theory to come first because they don't believe that you know what you're doing if you don't, and others don't care in the beginning for the theory because they want to see that it works. Especially if those cultures mix, then getting the right way can be challenging. So I think that's a big thing. Because going to the third question, the the biggest thing for me was I had to step out of a project during 2025 to focus more on other things and I had been running in other product development as a P more or less PO coach combination and it worked for the company fabulously. I I would say there's still higher room for improvement, but you start small and then you go up. And everybody was pretty happy, and then we switched, so I had to move out a bit. Team was still working quite well, but in the end they said we missed those on those results that you had been given to us before. We tried to get them, but we didn't on our own. Give us a chance to talk about how we get them. They didn't say come back and do more work. They said we understand what the benefits are and how to get them. So they're really moving forward, and that tells me that transformation actually is working. So that that really makes me rather proud. And the last question actually is how do we get more randomness into discovering new things? Because I'm a strong believer that the random surprises that really work have the longest leverage and they give us the largest. just leap forward or sideways or whatever and and they make us survive the really unexpected things because we if we do it often enough we will not be scared we will just jump and if we're scared we will be struck by whatever comes in it.

Ray Arell: 40:44

I agree with that. I I think Dave Snowden once talked about when you're in chaos, you know the there's a chaotic situation going on. Have an innovation team watching the people fix it the problem. Because more than likely an innovation's gonna pop out and they're gonna be so in wrapped up in the chaos they're just gonna it's just gonna go by 'em. They're not gonna see it. So always probe for that. I'm curious Diana, you brought up the fact that you're you have a colleague and they're building up the data in order. I was just I was curious about the Western culture versus Eastern cultures versus Europe and it's interesting. It struck me as the prove to me, give me all the data. I need that I need the analytical proof points before I try it.

Diana Larsen: 41:36

I was just curious about how do we as change agents sense that out and how do we get past the barrier of that curious yeah there's lots and lots of people out there collecting lots and lots of things about lots and lots of things that they have seen work. People who say show me the data don't really want to see the data in my experience. It is not about seeing the data it's I want you to say that there isn't enough so that I can ignore this because there's a whole movement in the Netherlands called corporate rebels. They've been going out all over the world finding the companies where shifting to a completely new way of doing things has really worked for them and every from China from India from all over Europe just everywhere in Africa. So corporate rebels that's one of the sources that Liza looks at I actually I put her contact information in the chat in case somebody wants to go check her out because she's a great clearinghouse for this the Doug McGregor Doug McGregor I think that's his last name and the Morningstar folks in California they did a huge change and it's still perking along it's still working the I think back to the first question what's the first sign a transformation will fail it's how it's initiated. If it's initiated as a top down we're all going to use this framework no matter where you are in the organization it's gonna fail. Right? If we're just going to re-jigger the titles the job titles that people have to make them sound more agile it's gonna fail. You can you can tell by the initial investment of budget and effort and mind share and all of those things whether or not this chosen change is going to get the outcomes that they think it's gonna get and that's the biggest thing are do they have a plan like April was talking about do they have a plan for supporting people as they shift from how it was before to where we want it to be next when as roles change as all of those if there's no plan that transformation is going to fail. I'm sorry I'm really on a brand now that's it okay but that's it's so we can go out and we can find millions of examples maybe not millions hundreds of examples of places where this has worked but the people who ask for that are unlikely to be persuaded by it because they're only asking that question as one more attempt at not having to do it.

Ray Arell: 44:44

I've always saw it as the bring me a rock and you bring a rock and they go that's the wrong rock I wanted a rounder rock no not that kind of data I wanted this other kind of data.

Caller 3: 44:53

Dennis you've had your hand up for a little bit what do you have on this thanks Ray I was taken by Diana's discussion earlier about saying that we should be constantly reinventing and then she was a little hesitant about the word reinventing and I think of it reinventing as being too grandiose. And we're listening to Kyle saying we get into trouble and we fall back to traditional York basically says yeah but what we really need is some more randomness. So my experience and this has been 25 years I do what we call selective sidetracking it's exploration. It's how would this work if we did it a little bit differently it's Agile came out because we were at a time when technology was rapidly exploding and you needed to be light on your feet. If you did the same kinds of rigid process that IBM did back in the 1960s, you weren't going to be able to use all of the tools that you had. You just became a cog in the machine. And the people who had the creative thinking and said hey let's try to do this, let's try to do that, they're the ones who said oh yeah we need a process that actually makes that possible so I if I think what approach needs to change to make the biggest difference we have to be willing to do some lateral thinking and we need to have the opportunity to do selective sidetracking. Okay that's it.

Ray Arell: 46:32

No I appreciate that we got a couple more hands up and Sheila we need to get you in Sheila McGrath just hold on for one second.

Caller 4: 46:39

Jasmine what do you have working for a federal organization and some nonprofit right sometimes so how do you deal I know transformation is like in the OKR to to be agile resiliency security when they constantly ask what does the management want to see and you try to do all these ceremonies but then they I know the bottom line right they don't want to see they don't want to adapt like that the ceremonies at the end of the day they're very operational. But then the management is pushing that so I guess that's the question I wanted to pose like at the end of the day I know you could use Kanban right but still they put that question out what does the constant almost like just uh a regular sort of uh conversation that doesn't end in I guess it's it does it have something to do with culture is a middle manager is it yeah I just wanted to see like in some what transformation work for some on this group?

Ray Arell: 47:39

Okay that's a good question. I have a couple of suggestions and I know the rest of the panelists and other callers might also have some suggestions as well I find that when talking to business people they seem to bury everything in business language meaning that how if I come in with a metric like story you know how many story points did we burn? That really just flies over people's heads it says what value did we create what's the customer feedback that we're getting what's the metric that's associated with say someone had a happiness metric. No happiness metric is nice but how about retention employee retention data? Bury it in their language and have a meaningful discussion with your leadership of what are the key things the key things that they want to see change maybe it's higher revenue for nonprofits it could be maybe our fundraising is going up we're getting our message out further whatever it might be that key metric that they use as a normal measurement of their business bury your metrics into it does that kind of make sense and someone posted in there Dennis I think posted always point out delighting the customers it's like customer both the um quantitative and qualitative data mixed together also has a really good effect meaning if you've got a really great customer review share it this is and again for been a member of multiple nonprofits and been on their board the board of directors when they're looking at their organizations they typically look at it in the way of are we growing our reach? Are we growing our ability to fund our mission and if you can take the mission of your nonprofit and break those into key metrics associated to it that also works really well. And I'm gonna stop talking anyone else want to go shirt on this?

Jorg Pietruszka: 49:46

Yeah if I may I would recommend ask the team because if you're working for a nonprofit you probably align with their goal in in in some way so if you turn it into that's why we're here if it's environment if it's whatever then probably they can tell you what actually is getting better towards that goal.

Ray Arell: 50:07

So that might make a good story as well hey Sheila can I bring you in and you can take a first stab at this question?

Sheila McGrath: 50:16

Sheila McGrath at this question yeah and also the other question as well I was the question of measure on the other question and I'm not sure I know what to say on this one. Okay go ahead when you talk about what's the first sign a transformation will fail it's if you call it a transformation because that's finite and agile evolves and it's a misnomer to use transformation for agile. The other thing that we've talked about is when people get their titles changed but their responsibilities don't really change and they haven't really gotten any training and I've seen that in a number of organizations. Because and I've also seen where someone senior really wants the transformation or wants agile to succeed but they watch a bunch of I don't know YouTube videos or something and they know the right words but they're going through the motions. They don't really they haven't really thought it through another thing that makes it difficult for Agile to succeed is when you box it in and say sprints must be two weeks. I've done anywhere from one to four weeks depending on what made sense for the project we were doing and for the people available and the other another thing is if you expect everyone to adhere to one framework because it's not a one size fits all. What works for one isn't necessarily gonna work for everybody. And again you're just pigeonholing people in a new set of pigeonholes which still isn't really giving them the freedom to do what needs to be done effectively and another example of that is people assume a standup has to be first thing in the morning except it doesn't because if you're working with a global team which I've done quite a few times which morning are we going with are we going with morning where I am are we going with morning in India? Are we going with morning in Europe? So it's what makes sense for the team and especially if you've got teams that are operating 24 hours a day which a lot of times you are if you've got teams in different parts of the world you're all working toward a common goal but saying that there's some magic about a specific time a day doesn't make much sense and if you've got people and a lot of times you have specific resources that are scarce specific knowledge like a DBA that you need on more than one project and you want them to have that big picture so you really don't want a separate one for each project or each team but they can't be every place at once. So if you have all your meetings that are the same kind of meeting at the same time there's no way they can be in them all. But the other aspect of that is if you've got them in meetings all day when are they going to actually be able to do any work and those are all things that can be points of failure. Another one is finance wants certainty. They want all the budgets to be done in a standard way they don't want any deviation they don't want to see too we've talked about this before too much or too little if your budget doesn't match what you actually do if you're under or you're over in a lot of organizations you're penalized either way but if you're doing something that's at all cutting edge and innovative you don't necessarily know what you're gonna run into and your budget is going to have to be a little more flexible. So they're basically stifling creativity and innovation when they do that but they don't know that because they like to count beans as many ways as possible. So to them this is a good thing.

Ray Arell: 54:12

We're hitting the top of the hour with that I want to just go ahead and say that our next live event is going to be on February 27th. It's the topic will be posted a couple days beforehand. Some people have said hey Ray could you like share the topic uh in advance uh itself I sometimes don't do that by the way because I want to get really fresh answers from people I don't want people to study up it's just I want to hear what's top of mind for people. Anyway I appreciate everyone of course I appreciate all of my co-hosts man 2026 we're here you guys are welcome to send us proposals um things that we should go talk about ways we can mix up the format of the show whether or not we should do it more often do it less all of those please just go up to acnpodcast.org you can send me a message through there or you can reach me through the new agility email link. Other than that I want to just thank you all for the high participation today. This was great you guys must have been bottled up over the holidays and I gotta get my club out you guys did great. I want to thank everyone ACM podcast is for educational and informative use only if you'd like to know more about the ACM community please come up to ACN podcast dot or g and support our show