Well, good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. It's another podcast. Oh, hang on a minute. My show notes say it's a podcast from enterprise agility mastery. Ricardo, what's going on?
Our audience found us.
Found us. It's exactly right. We've, we've Reaper, it's great to be back. By the way, Ricardo, we've had a bit of a bit of a break deliberately because of workload and things like that, which is good news, because that means we do know what we're talking about. Because we've been planning to do stuff. We have good stuff. We have new stuff to do. Yeah, so what this particular podcast is about, oh, I should I shouldn't let the ID guide coming soon. We are paying for it. Yeah, here we go. Yeah. Hi,
and welcome to another podcast on enterprise agility brought to you by the agility crew. Our crew consists of leading experts in the industry who give their knowledge freely to invest in the skills we all need. Each week, we'll be discussing the hot topics around enterprise agility. Sometimes, it'll be our main crew discussing a topic. Sometimes it'll be an interview with an industry expert, sometimes straight from the trenches with a practitioner like yourself. And sometimes it'll be a q&a session. Based on your question on our social channels. You can reach out to Ricardo and Ian on Twitter, Ian is in big agility. And Ricardo is Rick flip our IC l IV. You can also send us a voice question on Twitter. Now let's join our crew for this week's episode.
Well, thank you very much, Mr. Man. I'm personally very excited about the interviews got to be honest with you. The
goals are going to be a basic, simple days straight from the trenches episode, right?
Yes. Right from the trek, it sort of is. Yes, it is. Yeah, so the idea is we're what is our promise to our audience usual promised 20 minutes bit more, possibly, the interviews might go on a bit more, because we got some really, really good speakers. And although we'd like to keep them short, usable, but you know, it'd be good that we don't sort of limit them to try to. So no, mundra, um, it could talk for hours too. So knock on you. I mean, you couldn't be 19 podcast, you know.
Now we could beat
Lex Friedman's record seven, seven and a half hours going, going, talking good. Sunil and not even get started? Seven and a half hours on? Yeah, you're right. Yes, I want to do as well as like, what do they think I want to do a little bit about who they are and where they came from. And all that. Yeah. Anyway, so I think those episodes are going to be at least one and a half our age. Maybe it's three, then who knows. So we're on an adventure, really new, new date, we've loved what we've done previously, it's gone very well, thank you for your attendance, we just wanted to, I guess pivot look at what the audience is find out what they want to talk about go to that kind of content.
That's sort of the thought that less than 20% of our audience were actually coaches. Most were people deep in the trenches, changing companies and doing awesome stuff. And I think our content was a bit targeted at cultures in that it was still interesting. But I think now we can really, by knowing who our audiences, we can target the language, we can target the topics, to really reach deep and help everyone in the trenches get some really great change going.
Yeah, I mean, my story on this is I did a writing course where I created this, I created this, what's called a tweet thread, about some content on mental health. And I did an experiment, a data experiment, Ricardo, I sort of put the content out with the title as an enterprise coach, yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. And then about a week later, I put the same thing out with a title as a leader looking at change,
and the response like a TEDx.
Yeah, the the response on the as a leader was the same content. But the response on the leader looking for change was just an order of magnitude higher than the one for the coaching. So sort of opened my eyes a bit. And then you and I had that conversation that really sent me going on this years, this is the way so
let's just talk a bit about the whole five seconds for the site.
Like, oh,
because I was coughing and couldn't speak.
So I'm no coughing who said the cough would you say? So we've got you know, what, why did we chain one talk about that we want to talk about, Let's reboot. What Why do we do podcasts anyway? Ricardo, I
think we want to help people work in valuable ways. We want people to really reduce ways to people to find their focus at work to be able to have a wave of work that is really, really inspiring.
Yeah, I'm still in whenever I do any training. I'm inspired by the difference it seems to make to people. You know, I was doing some training this weekend. And one of the, one of the points I made was, the higher the He grew up in an organization that is it's really a team. And more, it's a bunch of ambassadors protecting their areas. And one of the guys on the call, who is essentially, transformation lead for a large pharmaceutical just burst into laughter, the truth of that line. And he said afterwards, it really helped me see things and I thought, I want to do more of that. I want to explain that more to people. I want to hear more from people and learn more myself. That's that's actually, I think I want the podcast to help me be better. If that makes sense.
I think it should help everyone be at their best, including ours. I learned so much from you. And I learned so much from the feedback we get from from the audience. Our audience reaches, how can our audience reaches every question? Oh, yeah, yeah. So
we're slight. I'm worried about this tactic now actually recorded because we said what we do is we would funnel via Twitter. Yeah. Is that a good idea? I don't quite know now.
We'll find out. We apologize for him replying to a 10th of last week's questions, but 1553 questions in a week. Are you guys nuts? But also, the electricity problem? Yeah,
it might be the case we go. We did find some questions. Once we got past all the adverts. It took a while though. It took a while to get there. So yeah, we'll Yeah. So how can we get over? So my Twitter handle is Ian at Big agility and the act is 80. So it's all one it's all word is not the outside? Because the outside comes at the front of Twitter. And yes, that is confusing. And yes, the number of people who've told me off of that, but I can't think of a better handle that's, you know, not not already used. So you, is it?
My mind is a bit more cryptic, but it's just the first three letters of my first and last name. So Ric for Ricardo li be deliberate. Reclaim,
reclaim, and that's a cryptocurrency statement, then is it?
Yes. It's also my wallet. Feel free to send me a donation regularly. Please don't?
Do you know what we should do is we should sell it one of those buy me a coffee things, you know, if you've seen us, where, if you like what someone does, you just buy him a coffee, it's $5, you know, nearly gonna be the cost of Twitter.
We could, we could be so caffeinated. The next step is on the level of reality. We just got down to 15 coffees.
That will be so funny if we said, if you if you click Buy me a coffee, we promised to go and get the coffee. We're not just to take the money. We're gonna go and buy the coffee and drink it. That will be so yes,
you have. It's made me a coffee, you can only use the money for coffee.
So who's our audience? Then who are we targeting with this series? You want to? I guess I'm thinking of people who are listening? And how can we validate to them that it's worth their time? What are we looking for?
I think anyone that is a leader, or an aspiring leader in a company is our target audience. Yeah, in a way, our audience hasn't really changed, because we are targeting change agents. And coaches are change agents, which is targeting all of them,
all of them. Those that aren't coaches. And I mean, if you took some of the trends that are unreal, like Michael Bungay, Stanier is the Coaching Habit, he would imply whoever you are, you should use the coaching techniques anyway, to do your job. Any leader should just do the coat use the coaching frame all the time. So so
that one was accused of being so much more of a mentor than a coach anyway. Yeah.
Okay, so that's our audience. What sort of things are we going to get up to? Why should play the golden question but mentioned, shall I play that? Or is there anything else you want to say before
I do that? Or are you ready at 20 minutes?
Now we're about eight. Right? Wow. Okay. But there's a lot. There's a lot of things we could talk about isn't about what to do. But is there any more on that sort of? Who's the audience why we've changed, we should say, Ricardo, I don't know. I'll take your lead on it.
I think we just believe that by focusing on the people that are actually on the trenches, we can have a bigger impact on enterprise agility than just by focusing on traditional change agents. So that's the summary for me of why why we are changing.
Yeah, and I want to, I want to help the people in the trenches, particularly let me give you an example of that. Yesterday, I was talking to a lovely lady who is Philadelphia based for a fintech. And she was talking about the leadership of the FinTech imposing lots of things on her team. And we she wanted to get some answers, practical answers about what to do about that. And it wasn't a theory it wasn't that you can go and read Lisa's book, brilliant book, or Michael spades book, brilliant book, but it was the practical side of where do I start? How do I do I do next? Do I actually do this? I mean, I was listening to some podcasts on scrum mastery awhile ago, and one of them was this big discussion about whether Scrum Masters should take two or one teams. And I think it really lacked somebody going. I'm afraid I've been allocated five teams. What do I do about that? How do I put that right? I'm just, I'm just some episodes about that. Yeah, I was, I was sort of, and forgive me for saying you like this. And you know, the podcasts are really well known when I was screaming at the my phone going, yes. But how you've got to talk about how you get that sorted. When you're in an organization where they're insisting you look after four teams, and you're pushing your scrum model down to an admin model. How do you get out of it, you know, so, so I think a lot of what I want to do with this is get real practical. If that makes sense. That means we might be a bit pioneering we might say, shall I say very
pragmatic, you like that you put the word pragmatic in somewhere, we might get a few sort of, you know, doomsayers going at us for, you know, denying something that's in one of the tablets of stone on high of our industry, maybe, but and that could be right. I don't know, I just want to explore it a bit. Talk about what we've learned. See what works experiment? Really, you know, we're an industry that experiments, I think, yeah. So that was why I was keen on a move. So are we doing? Are we going to use in the past, we actually used we did a lot of stuff on clubhouse, didn't we? Are we going to do that? Do you think?
Not for now, I think it was a bit of a distraction may be for the interviews, and maybe not clubhouse, maybe we'll try to eat two spaces. The good thing is we are doing this in a natural way. And we only need to decide about that before the first interview, which is a couple of weeks, you have two weeks to figure it out to make sure you're telling you where to reach us,
if you want to come on and ask questions as well. Yeah. All right. So what we'll do most episodes, because another thing we we think we learned was to be a bit more forecasting in what we're up to, as we move forward. And so we've, we've got our station ID guy to do a little thing that we'll do each weekend. Let's have a press the right button. No, no, that didn't work. Let me try again. Oh, technology. Let's try one more time
golden question. What's next week about? Golden question, what's next week about?
So the idea is that most weeks, we'll do that to let everyone know what's coming up. Only in a minute. So it's not going to meant to be a big thing.
Should we give a sneak preview of what's coming up in a few weeks?
That's exactly what we've used the golden question for today. What's coming up? I could do remember those. You may not know this was a famous radio two in the UK broadcaster that did a recipe every day. And he had this jingle went what's the recipe today, Jim? So this is our equivalent golden
question. What's next week about?
Yeah, well, we'll just the next week, Ian thinks that he's going to do an episode about the enterprise coach mission. But it's actually going to be the enterprise change agent nation?
It is yes, yes. In my scribble notes, I said that but change it. What's our mission? How does it work? I do want to speak to coaches a little bit and say, yes,
they are really important change agents. We're not let we're not don't run away. We want everyone.
But I do think the one I want to talk about there is the the enterprise coach mission is changing. It's blurring a little bit on the edges. As you say it's moving to more change agent. It's an area on a lot of the ICAO courses we don't cover well enough, the coaching courses do not cover change agent will have you said that two years ago, when we first did a session together on that I remember. So we do want to do that we want to you know, I'm I'm against this idea that particularly certain kinds of leaders stay in a box and don't do anything other than the bit they're supposed to do. You know, we all talk about T shaped leaders moving forward, which is your ability to do things and certainly in startups, you do whatever is needed, don't you? You know, when you get to the big enterprise side, you sort of suddenly go no, don't do that. Colleague does not You're
not just in startups. I'm in a telco that is now trying to reinvent itself. And if I look at the change agents that are doing what would be traditionally the mission of an enterprise culture, and some of them were before in coaching roles, they have jobs like Portfolio Manager, Process Manager, all jobs where they have influence either on the flow of work, or on the way of work, but much more hands on, not just coaching and telling people but actually making things happen. And I think that's fantastic. And we all have skills for that. So let's stop talking about it and start doing it. Spot on.
My current gig is It is a bit secret sauce. I'm not supposed to talk about it. But I will say this when we arrived at the head of agility, so we have a big team then are built a big team of 25 people so far growing bigger. If you're a really good coach who knows how to deliver, and you can work in the UK do get in touch. I'm always looking, I'm always looking for extra people to come. But the day we arrived, the head of agility took me to one side, they had just sacked two companies who were supposed to be doing the job for not doing it very well won't name them. But they just got rid of them terminated the contract. Sorry, they handed over to the company I help with. And he said to me, can I give you some advice? Please don't just give us advice. Please, you know, please don't go well. What do you think? You know, please don't take a coaching stance, because that's where it's all gone wrong. So far. What we need is help to deliver. We'll ask you to do some delivery will ask you to diagnose what's going on. I'll go through all this in another episode.
How many stances of a coach they've listed say we had eight and was it a 12? I think a lot of people forget that you need to use all 12 of them.
I think there's 12 in the X Wing model.
Yeah.
My my version of that based on not an evolution of it, but more as a reaction to where we are right now. It's got 10 stances that we have to pick up. And use would we might talk about that a little bit last week, but I refer you to our previous podcast series on that where we did all of those in the past. And so you can always go look them up.
Okay, so that's coming in a couple of weeks, we're going to start talking about something that sounds very fancy, complex adaptive systems and goals law being really, really hands on. Again, there'll be a bit of theory, we do need to understand why companies and teams work the way they do. But the key things is how do they behave? And how do you change them? Why do they behave like this? So I think it'll be the most hands on Introduction to complex adaptive systems that I've seen. We're working on that one. Yeah, I don't know if we get the word theoretical, reach out to us on the channels and say, Hey, come back to the ground, you're up in the clouds again.
I mean, I see this a lot. I was a while ago, we were doing, I got everyone to do presentations on different things. Big, big day, not in my current company, a previous one. And one of the coaches, instead of going this is how we'll do it decided to open up the manual from safe on what it was. It's always like a teaching point. And we didn't need teaching. Nobody needed the teaching. Nobody needed the high ID 1000 foot view, they wanted practically how we're going to do it. So yeah, so when we do the CAS, that's the abbreviation for complex adaptive systems will be very practical about what to do about that kind of thing.
And we hope that we can fit in the calendar, let's do a couple of episodes around that. And then you have the master of cast, telling us how wrong we were in the previous two episodes. Now, it's such a nice person, he would never say we were wrong. There was a say. And we thought about these other things.
This is, of course, so no, it's no wonder for Neil. Fantastic book, enterprise agility, which we love. And he's actually where I first read all about complex adaptive systems. I think, you know, there's probably, you always remember who told you some of the really big ideas, don't you? Certainly Sunil is the person I linked to when I think of complex adaptive systems and what he expressed in that book about where we are. And I always remember a talk we we had with him when he when I said what is a complex adaptive system? And he said, it's a system that's capable of evolving and always remember when he said that me going, Oh, I wish I wish I was that brainy it.
It was like getting killed, hit by a gold brick wrapped wrapped in wisdom. That's exactly so heavy. And we're going to do some we're going to compete with Linus tech tips and all those podcasts because we're going to talk about cool tools, cool tools for facilitation. Yeah, that should be our video episode, I saw one off my desk.
For anyone who doesn't know, Ricardo, you have to allocate 10 minutes at the start of every meeting for him to show you his new toy, whatever it is. It's a competition because I also do very similar things myself. So
you're pretty close.
Yeah. What else are we going to be doing out there?
It's not the competition.
Because I'd lose everything after 90 minutes what else we have to as we go forward,
then, probably we'll talk a lot about the current things that you are doing, for example, at this moment and trying to take a client from having quarterly planning to continuous planning. There are quite a few interesting lessons that have been Learn sorry, for sure that will be me. If we don't find anyone to be coming deep from the trenches, I can be the one on that one. Or you can be the one on something that could be a from the trenches episode with ourselves. I'd like to go so much more.
I'd like to go through why change doesn't when it doesn't work, why it doesn't work and what goes wrong, you know, again, I've got someone I'm doing some training with who, you know, has had three years of safe, it's just been thrown away. There's no chaos while they're trying to organize what they do instead. You know, she, I really empathize with her going, this is really hard. This is really hard. It doesn't look on the books does it? It doesn't look hard in the books, but it is.
One of my product owners came from Scania where they have a safe implementation that actually works. And she was saying, why can't we just do safe? It works. And I said, you're in one of the 3% of the places where it actually worked. Not particularly has worked. How many places that we've been scanning? Yeah.
So for her that's 100% though, isn't it? Yeah, it's worked everywhere for her No wonder,
because for her, it's like, we were doing stuff that was in the book. It is when safe works. It's magical. Isn't that the truth? Yeah, the problem is going teleporting to safe rather than walking the journey. Well, so if you want to teleport to safe then you better fire everyone rehired the real gold away. Do a Twitter most companies don't don't don't do don't do it all the way. They do it. How fast Oh, sorry. Now we have to put explicitly Rex
is on behalf of the podcast production team. We'd like to apologize for that rude word that was just put out that we want to talk about deep on how to do remote events Well, oh,
that's gonna be fantastic. That's a whole series, isn't it? To have a remote event with one person with 10 persons with 100 people with 500 people with 1000 we get both done that guy that size. But I can really share some lessons on that.
I wouldn't mind. I'm gonna say Merode. But I might be wrong. Who's the mood? Is it a Molood?
Yeah, we have to get around, we have to get on board. She's so cool. Yeah, put a name that. I'll text her. I'll text her.
So that's what we're up to. So we've promised about 20/25 minutes to start with, we've wanted to give you a taster of what we're going to do. What we want you to do is hit the subscribe button. We are now and in the past recorded we recorded them and really put them out almost immediately because we know clubhouse audience, and therefore the clubhead audience just heard it, they wanted it immediately. We're going to go a bit ahead of ourselves here we're going to be recording and then publishing probably three, four weeks later, as we move into our schedule. So what that does mean though, is the questions you send us may be a week or two before we get to them. That's just what what we really felt I think is we wanted to OPI quality of prep,
work quality of prep consistency. So I think that's important. And these are Timeless Lessons. None of what we're doing is urgent. Well, kind of it's it's all urgent, urgent, but not urgent is
evergreen, that's the phrase that we would use in English evergreen, it's relevant all the time.
Yeah. We want to be on the important quadrant not on the urgent quadrant.
Yeah, yeah. What else we got coming up, then more from the trenches more how you work with partners on agility, one of the big areas I'm struggling with is I've got three or four suppliers, you know, and how we deal with that. Yeah, that they're coming up. The immediate ones, though, are a bit of a bit of an understanding of the lay of the land across the sort of northern hemisphere worlds. And possibly, we might see what CINAHL gets to when we talk to someone as well, on what's really happening and how the, how the change agent roles have sort of merging a bit, we want to do that quite quickly as well. And then also, I do want to pick your brain about what you're up to it the places you're up to. And you know, we could have an episode where we go give me three things. You've learned Ricardo, and I'll give you three things I've learned and that kind of thing. So they're all coming up. I hope you listen to them.
Yeah. And I think a few calls series will be like their first 10 days playbook has. We have we have one for scrum master, really, based on that feedback from you on that course, on that podcast that was like, but tell me how to do it. So I think it's a really nice, what do you do in your first 10 days as is really nice series?
Yeah, I'm writing one on first N days when you do flow to work at the moment, which is it's a bit of a kanban concept. And if you're a safe person, it's shared services. Kanban is basically in how you use them well, so we're doing that one and I'm out Having to redefine what a team coach does as opposed to an enterprise coach. Because the team coach and the scrum master are blurring a bit at the moment. So be good to get that clear and they're all coming up. It's probably it will help with tasted you or not taste you teased you. I hope we've encouraged you to think about, you know, what we're going to do. And as we say, in the ideas, if you Twitter us, because we are twits, if you Twitter us, we can we can react to what you give us. I certainly have learned a lot from a course, which is a data driven writing course where you react considerably to feedback, whatever you get you instantly. Part of the course is if you put an article out and someone makes a comment, you just message them, you ask them what else they'd like to hear about you talk to them, you validate them, you know, never let a reaction go on used is one of the mantras of this course.
aren't what we are teaching about creating feedback loops and you need to use them ourselves. Practice what you preach. That's our our sprint review and retrospective happens on Twitter. And we just listen and great. I mean, listen and smile.
Smile. Yeah, that's it. So get in touch with us on Twitter, I think. I think the guy does say that. Let's we have a new let's give him the outgoing new hire a new Hi. Good to go. Ricardo, anything else you want to add before we close?
Thanks for coming back to us. Yeah, looking forward to speaking with all of you again.
That's it for this episode. Why not check out our back catalogue of previous episodes and show notes. Go to enterprise agility dot info to connect and sign up. See you next time on the Enterprise agility mastery podcast.
