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Author: Alexis

  • Belonging, Identity, and Better Hiring,

    Belonging, Identity, and Better Hiring,

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure to welcome Ally Kouao, Developer Advocate and Solution Architect at Red Hat. We talked about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), not as an abstract concept, but as something that shows up in daily conversations, hiring decisions, and the small moments that shape belonging.

    Allyship is not a label

    One of the strongest points Ally makes early is simple: saying you are an ally is not enough. What matters is what you do.

    Ally shares a definition that captures the intent and the posture of allyship:

    Allyship means acknowledging, accepting, and embracing our similarities and differences. It means being open to listening, avoiding complacency, making an effort to understand, and being proactive where helpful, while continuously educating ourselves and others with empathy, respect, and kindness.

    The part that stayed with me is the humanity of it: you will not do everything perfectly, and still you can show up with sincerity and effort.

    Education gives power, especially when history is incomplete

    We also talk about how much recent history is missing from many school curricula, and how this shapes our understanding of today.

    Ally’s suggestion is direct: educate yourself beyond what school offered, seek perspectives that are not centered on a single narrative, and do it continuously. The internet is free, but the intention to learn must be real.

    Belonging can be fragile for immigrants and their children

    We discuss a painful pattern: people who are second or third generation immigrants can feel they do not belong in the country where they live, while also being seen as outsiders in the country of their parents or grandparents.

    The result is a kind of “nowhere to go” feeling that can last for years. Ally’s response is not to offer a quick fix, but to name what helps: surrounding yourself with people who are open to learning and listening. You cannot force someone to change, but you can choose environments where curiosity becomes respect, not interrogation.

    The question “Where are you from?” and what it can signal

    This episode includes a moment of discomfort that is worth sitting with.

    I share how I used to love the question “Where are you from?” because it can open many doors. Ally explains why the same question can land very differently depending on context, intent, and what happens next.

    If someone answers “I’m from London” and the next question is “No, where are you really from?” the question stops being small talk. It becomes a signal: you do not fully belong here.

    Ally offers a line that should make all of us pause:

    When you ask that question, you may be prioritizing your curiosity over their feelings.

    The intent may be innocent. The impact may not be.

    Bias in hiring is real, even when we believe we are fair

    We then move into hiring, and the discomfort that comes with it.

    Most people believe they are objective. And still, patterns appear: leadership teams that are overwhelmingly similar, interview processes that favor familiar backgrounds, and subtle filters that exclude people before the conversation even begins.

    We discuss a concrete practice that reduces bias in resume screening: stripping out signals that invite stereotyping (name, address, school prestige, formatting differences) so that reviewers focus on relevant criteria.

    Ally also addresses a common argument:

    “Are we compromising on quality to increase representation?”

    Her answer is clear: we do not have to compromise. Talent exists everywhere. What changes is the effort and the system used to find it, evaluate it, and give it a fair chance.

    A simple test for hiring managers

    One story Ally shares is both funny and brutal: a recruiter gave interviewers their own early-career resumes and asked them to evaluate them. Many rejected themselves.

    It highlights a blind spot: we often forget that everyone has a starting point. We judge potential through a narrow lens, and then call it “quality.”

    A good question to sit with is:

    Would you hire yourself today for the first job you took in your current company?

    Where to start

    Ally recommends a book that offers multiple perspectives across generations:

    • Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo

    More broadly, her advice is practical:

    • use the internet intentionally, not passively
    • learn from diverse perspectives
    • have real conversations with people you do not yet know well
    • be open to noticing what you did not notice before

    Because improvement starts with awareness, and awareness starts with paying attention.

    Below is the transcript of the podcast:

    Ally Kouao:

    In that moment when you’re asking that question, you’re really prioritizing your curiosity over their feelings.

    Alexis Monville:

    That’s Ally Kouao, developer advocate and solution architect at Red Hat.

    Ally Kouao:

    Honestly, allyship means something different to everyone, and I think just having that shared understanding and that shared motivation to listen and to be there for the people who want their voices heard.

    Alexis Monville:

    Ally Kouao explaining what allyship means. Diversity, equality and inclusion are what we explore in this new episode of Le Podcast. Le Podcast equips you to make a positive change in your organization. Each episode turns insight into actions that you can use straight away to build momentum and create lasting change from yourself to your team, from your team to other teams, and from other teams to the entire organization. I’m your host, Alexis Monville, and I believe in the ability of people and teams to find better ways to increase their impact and satisfaction.

    Alexis Monville:

    Let’s jump right into the conversation with Ally to learn more about what it means. Hey, Ally. Can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

    Ally Kouao:

    Yeah, so first of all, thank you for having me on this podcast. I joined Red Hat back in 2019. Prior to that, I was actually a software engineering student in a university in Wales. In terms of my personal background, I actually grew up in London. I’ve lived in London my whole life, and I moved to Wales for university when I was 19. The rest is history. I’ve been at Red Hat for just over a year now. I’m a solution architect on the Red Hat graduate program, and yeah, it’s been a really good experience so far.

    Alexis Monville:

    Excellent. I think I first heard about you because you ran a 14-day program, To a More Knowledgeable You. And it was fantastic. Each day resonated with me big time. Could you tell us the motivation behind the program?

    Ally Kouao:

    Yeah, sure. I feel like the main reason this program came about was aside from the fluctuating levels of COVID globally, it felt like there was definitely a bark to highlight the continued civil unrest that’s been magnified and brought back to the surface after the brutalities and documented injustice that has been going on in the US. What I thought was important to do alongside one of my colleagues was to make a point of the fact that not only is it possible for black people located outside of the US to be affected by what’s going on, but there are experiences shared by black people and some other minorities in their everyday lives that have been frequently glazed over, or not much attention’s been paid to it.

    Ally Kouao:

    Yeah, so as a result, some Red Hatters and I came together and created an initiative that we now know as 14 Days To a More Knowledgeable You, that provides the safe space to offer daily insight, be it through an article or podcast episode or a personal story, into the realities of their fellow black colleagues, friends and family in the UK and Ireland.

    Alexis Monville:

    What would you say are the main aspects of the program?

    Ally Kouao:

    That’s a really good question. I feel like what really brings the program to life I would say are people’s personal stories. I think we had a total of three personal stories from three different people who contributed to the initiative. I felt like it really brought things closer to home. I think it definitely helped make people realize that there definitely is another person behind the screen, or another person at Red Hat who can relate to this sort of thing. I think it makes it even more significant that it’s personal stories in the UK.

    Ally Kouao:

    Something that I’ve definitely heard throughout my life really, even until now, just the fact that … not the fact, but just people’s opinions that black people here don’t have it as hard as in the US, I would say it’s definitely true to an extent in regards to the brutalities, but I feel like in the UK, that there’s so much more that happens under the surface such as microaggressions, that I feel would be really beneficial for people to keep an eye out for and be conscious of.

    Alexis Monville:

    It made me think a lot. It’s really comfortable for me to say that at Red Hat, we are an open, inclusive meritocracy, and I can repeat that every day, and I’m really comfortable with that, and I think it’s really good and so on. There’s no question about that. But one thing that made me realize, and I will draw a parallel with, I have three kids. I have two daughters. The youngest one is 18, so they are not really young any more. I bought from a charity organization feminism T-shirts, that were really … I thought they were really fun, and I wore one, and I offered the others to the girls and to everybody in the family in reality. The message was fun, because I thought it was fun. That will not work with everybody. And it was written, “Girls just want to have fun.” Then under that, it said, “Fundamental rights.” So it’s a good joke from my perspective.

    Alexis Monville:

    Once, I remember one of the girls saying, “Oh, and you are doing that and you’re saying you are a feminist.” I was puzzled because I thought there was no necessary connection between what she was observing and the fact that I thought I would want to consider a woman as equal, and there was no question about that in my mind. But I realized that the connection was not obvious.

    Alexis Monville:

    During the program … That was a long intro to that. During the program, I realized that in my young age, I was actively involved in anti-racism organizations, and I was demonstrating about that. And after some time, it faded away. All that introduction to ask a question. I thought I was an ally, and I wonder if I am really an ally, and I wonder even if being an ally is enough. What do you think?

    Ally Kouao:

    That was such a lovely intro to that question. I would honestly say that well, at least from my personal experience and from my personal opinion, that to just say that you’re an ally probably isn’t enough. It’s more so what you do. So obviously going back to your personal examples, it’s really good that you were active in terms of being feminist, so wearing the T-shirt supporting them … I think it’s quite hard, because quite a lot of people compare what their standards of being an ally is to what other people’s standards of being an ally is. I would say overall there is no real checklist of what it takes to be an ally, because everyone has their own interpretation of the term, and there’s no one way to do it.

    Ally Kouao:

    But something that I would say is the gist of being an ally, personally, is listening and amplifying the voice of marginalized groups, so like you said when you did it before, people who did experience racism or advocating women’s rights. I do have an extract with me of my input of what allyship means to me in one of my colleagues’ blogs on the importance of allies. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just quickly go through it.

    Ally Kouao:

    On the blog, I said, “Personally, allyship to me means acknowledging, accepting and embracing our similarities and differences. Where are differences are present, this branches out to being open to listening, avoiding complacency, and making an effort to understand and be proactive where helpful, while continuously educating ourselves and others with empathy, respect and kindness in areas where we may fall short. Allyship means understanding that at the end of the day, we are all human, and even if you can’t do everything perfectly, you’re wholeheartedly making an effort to do what it is you do to the best of your ability.”

    Ally Kouao:

    That’s just a little sneak peek of my input. For anyone who is listening to this who also works at Red Hat, I would also recommend that you check out part two of the Diversity and Inclusion: the Importance of Allies series blog post, where you’ll see a bit more about what I have to say about allyship in more detail, and hear from all the other wonderful diversity and inclusion leaders at Red Hat.

    Ally Kouao:

    Just to sum up everything that I’ve said in just one sentence, I would say honestly, allyship means something different to everyone, and I think just having that shared understanding and that shared motivation to listen, and to be there for the people who want their voices heard.

    Alexis Monville:

    Yeah, it’s beautifully written. I need to copy/paste the extract in the blog post that will be a companion to this podcast. It’s really beautiful, and it really resonates with me. It really says, “Being human,” and being your whole self and being human is something really important. I wonder if it’s suddenly that I’m getting old, and I realize more things now, but I feel I’ve learned a lot during those past years, and I continue to learn. I feel the more I learn about that, the more I have to learn and to understand.

    Alexis Monville:

    I will give you another example. I spent 15 hours with Laurence Fishburne, the American actor, and he told me the story of Malcolm X. Of course, I did not really spend 15 hours with Laurence Fishburne. It’s an audio book, and it’s the autobiography of Malcolm X, and the narrator is Laurence Fishburne. But I had that feeling, and that’s always the feeling with audio book, that you have someone who is telling you a story.

    Alexis Monville:

    All that to say that at some point, Malcolm X described the fact that he is considering the people from New York, fighting for social rights, going into Alabama, and he’s saying they are totally wrong. They should not do that, and when I read that, I said, “No, no, no, no. That’s … What is wrong with that?” He said, “They should fight for civil rights in New York, because there’s a lot to do there.” I realized that yeah, I did in a way the same thing. I was demonstrating against apartheid in Strasbourg while apartheid was in South Africa, and I hope it had an impact, but I’m not really sure about that. But what was I doing in Strasbourg?

    Alexis Monville:

    I remember one of my friends at that time coming from Algeria. He was French, but he was born in Algeria. That’s the kind of thing that you will wear all your life on your face. And he was telling me, “I’m considered a stranger, a foreigner, by everybody in there.” And I have to admit that at that time, I hope it changed, foreigners were not necessarily welcome in small cities in the country. And he told me, “I tried to back to Algeria, to say, ‘Okay, I will end my study there, and I will continue my study in Algeria.’” And he told me, “It’s not possible, because over there, they are calling me the French guy, and so I have nowhere to go.”

    Alexis Monville:

    I was horrified by that, and I didn’t know what I could do for that person. How would you say we can deal with our past as a country, and we can have people that … I don’t really know how to formulate the question, but how to deal with that kind of situation for people?

    Ally Kouao:

    Yeah. Honestly, I would say that that’s probably not the first time I’ve heard a story where someone’s recounted their experiences of going to one place and feeling like they don’t belong, and then going to place that people say they belong, and then not belonging there either. I think that’s something that is experienced by quite a lot of people, but also I can’t put a number to it. But in terms of addressing that … Sorry, could you remind me of your question?

    Alexis Monville:

    In a way, it’s addressing our colonial past, or addressing the fact that we have people that are coming from probably the … They are the second- or third-generation immigrants from another country.

    Ally Kouao:

    Yeah. Okay, brilliant. That’s put me back on track. I was just going off on a tangent forgetting what the question was. So yeah, in terms of second- and third-generation immigrants or people who’ve moved to a country because their parents did or family did, I would say in order to educate people who are already in that country, or probably not even educate people, because everyone is accountable for their own learning, I think it’s definitely worth keeping in mind that it’s important to surround yourself with people who you know are open to learning. You can’t really force it down anyone’s throat. You have to be open to the fact that people probably don’t want to change the way they want to think, or be open to the fact that people are really interested in learning more, like learning about ways that they can become closer to you or learn more about an ethnicity or a culture in more detail.

    Ally Kouao:

    I think if I had to give advice to younger generations out there, I would honestly say it’s important to educate yourselves as well, even if some people say that they belong to generations of immigrants or anything. We don’t know everything, right? There’s always something more to learn, and especially in terms of the educational curriculum, it can’t cover completely everything. And that was definitely another topic that was touched on in the 14 Days to a More Knowledgeable You initiative. Something that we noted was that in the British education curriculum, they don’t really cover all aspects of slavery or all aspects of the things that happened in the past or things that happened that wasn’t quite so English or quite so European-centric.

    Ally Kouao:

    Obviously, it’s something … In terms of the world’s history, it’s quite hard to encapsulate that all into one history lesson and one history curriculum. So I would advise younger generations of immigrants and other people who would like to learn more, to just go out and educate yourselves. The internet is very much free. There’s probably a lot of sources, a lot of stories, a lot of recounts of things that have happened in the past, and there’s no such thing as knowing it all or knowing too much, because there’s always some sort of learning that you can do.

    Ally Kouao:

    My main point here is education, that where there is knowledge there is power, and as long as more people are … I feel like the younger generation’s definitely becoming … From what I’ve seen from the Black Lives Matter protests and not even protests, but the Black Lives Matter movement, people are taking a stance on what’s going on, and people are realizing that it’s wrong, people are taking this opportunity to educate themselves a lot more, or in greater depth. I think that’s definitely a step in the right direction, but there’s definitely a lot more education or self-education that needs to be taught and given to oneself, for there to be that good amount of change and to avoid more recounts of experiences, as you’ve previously mentioned with your Algerian friend.

    Alexis Monville:

    Yeah, I love the advice of learning more about history, and especially the recent history. That’s definitely something I did not learn in school, and I had to learn that by myself, and there was a really good series in France about … It was Behind the Maps, and that was fascinating, about our recent history and all the things that we don’t know, but in a way we think we know, and in reality, we absolutely don’t know. We don’t know why it happens and when it happens, really, and all the reasons behind. And when we know something, we know only one perspective of it, and that perspective is of course biased. It’s only one perspective. So that’s a very, very good advice.

    Alexis Monville:

    I think connected to that question, there’s that question that I love to ask to people, and I realize that it’s not a good question. I love to ask a question that is, “Where are you from?” I love to ask that question, because in some contexts, people answer, “Oh, I’m from the finance department,” or, “I’m from Alabama.” And I love that, because it was a question that could open so many doors, and so many different doors, because based on what the people are thinking at the moment, they answer something different. So I love that question.

    Alexis Monville:

    I realized that that question was not so good when we moved to the US with my family a few years back, and of course, my accent, people are able to catch that I’m not from Boston, even if I just say hello or thank you. The next question from people, “Where are you from?”, and I realized it was not a good question because my wife was a little bit offended by that question, and she was systematically answering, “We are from …”, and the town where we lived at that time. So I had that discussion with her, and she was saying, “Yeah, why are people asking me where I’m from like if I don’t belong? I live here. That’s where I live. That’s my home.” She was really sensitive with that. What do you think is happening in that situation?

    Ally Kouao:

    I don’t know. I think that sort of question is a matter of people not really saying what they want to say, but not wanting to be impolite. But either way, they come out … I guess the interpretation of the receiver of that question can vary so widely, so yes, there’d be some people who wouldn’t take offense, and there would be some people who … like you mentioned with your wife, would take offense because it’s just like, “What do you really want to know from that question?” It’s not … If I give you an answer would you be like, “Where am I really from?”, or would you keep pushing until you get the answer, like you want that validation, that confirmation, that you had in your mind?

    Ally Kouao:

    This is definitely something that we touched on in the 14 Days to a More Knowledgeable You initiative, where that’s a question that’s commonly asked, and it’s not just asked of people of color, but it’s also asked of people in places where people … I don’t know. I guess it’s sometimes seen as a conversation starter, and I can see why it is, but I think it’s the way in which the question’s asked. It also depends on what answer the person who’s asking the question is willing to settle for in front of the person they’re asking it to.

    Ally Kouao:

    In terms of the initiative, we really tackled the “Where are you really from?” question, because an experience that many other black associates have been able to relate to, and I’m sure many other people would be able to relate to, being at a party or something or just meeting someone in a formal professional context, and people asking where you’re from. So if I had to give a personal example, so for example if I went to someone and they asked me, “Where are you from?”, I would naturally say, “Oh, I’m from London.” A response that I do often get is, “Oh, okay,” and then there’d be that really awkward pause, and then they’d be like, “But where are you really from? I know you’re from London, but where are your parents from?” And it’s like, well, I could do … I think it’s quite important that people are very specific in their questions.

    Ally Kouao:

    I’ve had friends who have been even more vague about their answer to make a point out of it. So someone would be like, “Oh, where you from?”, and they’d be like, “Oh, I’m from a very specific area about where they’re living at the moment,” and they’d be like, “Oh, but where are you really from?”, and they’d be like, “Oh, I’m from Britain.” And they’d be like, “Oh, but where are you from?” They’d be like, “Oh, I’m from Europe.” Like, just making a point to show that it’s just a really silly question to ask if you just keep digging it at.

    Ally Kouao:

    Yeah, I just feel like in regards to the “Where are you really from?” question, it’s often the case that people want confirmation that the person isn’t British or isn’t from wherever the location is they are, or if their location sounds completely … their country of origin sounds completely different to where’d they’d typically think they’re from … I’m not quite sure if I formulated that correctly.

    Ally Kouao:

    But one of my colleagues, he was born in Zimbabwe, I believe. He was just saying that when he asked people where they’re from who have a Zimbabwean accent, it’s because he recognizes that accent, and that’s why he asks them where they’re from, just for confirmation of where they’re from. So like I said, it’s definitely the intent behind the question. I think it’s definitely worth clarifying with the person before asking, but I think when people do ask that question, something that they do do and should keep in mind is that it’s really important to approach the question towards the person you want to ask it to with sensitivity and clarity.

    Ally Kouao:

    If you approach the question “Where are you from?” or “Where are you really from?”, in that moment when you’re asking that question, you’re really prioritizing your curiosity over their feelings. You’re prioritizing your curiosity over how comfortable they feel or how much they belong in that moment in time, so you may receive a really guarded response. So someone giving a really vague answer like, “Oh, I’m from this really specific area,” because it’s a really silly question, honestly, I don’t really think you need to ask where people are from. Then again, I can also understand the conversation. It’s like, for example, we go to one of the Red Hat events. Well, from last year, we went to a Red Hat event called RHTE (Red Hat Tech Exchange), I met so many different people, and people are asking where you’re from because they’re curious to know which office you’re located in or where your accent is from. I can see how that can take a turn for the worst, depending on the motives of the person who is asking the question or the way in which they ask it.

    Alexis Monville:

    Yeah, I think it’s a very precious … I like the point about prioritizing curiosity over feelings. It’s a really important point. Whatever is your intent or the motivation behind the question, we need to realize that it’s not a good question, that adding “really” to it will not really help. That’s an horrible question in reality. If people want to share about where they are coming from and if they are from Scotland and their grandfather were coming from Ireland or whatever, that’s their problem. If they want to share that with you at some point, maybe they will, and that’s good. But why are you asking that? Yeah.

    Ally Kouao:

    Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. It’s such an odd question. There’s always that awkward pause after someone’s asked it, because when people ask me, in my mind I’m just like, “Are they trying to ask what I think they’re trying to ask, or are they genuinely curious on where I grew up and my accent?” Because I often get the question about where my accent’s from, because I’ve just moved from London to Wales, and somehow that’s just messed up my accent and people are just like, “Oh, where are you from?” So I think definitely it depends on the intent behind the question, but I would just say try and avoid it, like you said. You don’t have to know. If you did happen to know the person, and if you became a lot more close to the person or seemed to be chatting with them on a more regular basis, then you’d probably have that space or that comfort to be able to ask that question, or them be able to tell you themselves.

    Ally Kouao:

    I think it’s definitely an interesting question to ask upon first meeting someone. Some people just can’t really think on their feet off the bat, or it’s probably just to fill in the awkward silence when you first meet people.

    Alexis Monville:

    I did a training about hiring, improving your hiring practices. It reminds me something, because I was pushing some managers to say that maybe they have some biases in their hiring practices, and this is dangerous territory, and usually people are convinced they have absolutely no biases, and they are doing the right thing. What I was saying is that it’s not easy to do the right thing.

    Alexis Monville:

    There is a lot of biases that we have, and you need to admit that you are able to judge someone in the first 15 seconds you are seeing them. The problem is if you are not conscious of that, you will just use your intellect to confirm your first impression. This is exactly how the biases are working, so you need to be conscious of that. That’s why you need to write down all the questions you will ask in an interview beforehand. Then you are forced to go through those questions. You cannot escape that path and ask other questions that will confirm your first impression. So it’s really challenging.

    Alexis Monville:

    I told them I worked with a small system integrators in Paris a long time ago. It’s probably more than 10 years ago, and in the first gathering of the whole company in Paris, there was probably 150 people or something. There was something that was visibly different from other system integrators I worked with at that time. There was a lot more women, and a lot more people coming from various diversities that we have in France. France is at the crossroads of a lot of different countries, so of course there’s a lot of diversity present in the population, not necessarily in all the companies. But in that company, that was obvious that it was different from the others.

    Alexis Monville:

    I inquired about their hiring practices. That’s something our HR person is doing. She’s changing all the resumes, and stripping out all the information about the location where the people live, their first names, where they did their studies, and to keep only the things that we are supposed to make assumptions on. She’s rewriting all the resumes so they are all in the same format, so there’s no way to know things about that. And I said, “But you don’t judge people from where they live,” and they say, “Yeah, we also think that.” But the result is in our resume selection, we are selecting different people for the interview, and the result is when we see people, that we interview them and we hire them, people we would have probably never selected because they are coming from whatever, Saint Denis or whatever. Do you think that example is just an example, just a point in time? Do you think we have a problem in our hiring practices, and do you think there’s ways to fix that?

    Ally Kouao:

    That’s a really good question. I would just like to say off the bat that that hiring process or that process of hiring in regards to hiding people’s information, I think that sounds brilliant. It definitely strips back the identity that’s behind it, because there’s so much that people who’d probably be unconsciously biased on, such as the person’s name or where they studied or even their home address, like you said. So I think it’s really good that that recruiter definitely took time out of her day to put their main information into the resume, but present it in a similar format so there was no space for deviation. I think that’s definitely a good way to go about it.

    Ally Kouao:

    But in terms of general hiring processes, that’s definitely quite a tricky question, because different organizations can tackle hiring differently. It’s a double-edged sword. It depends on how you want to recruit different individuals. Overall, I think that’s important that there’s representation in a company, and a frequent argument that I tend to hear in response to that is, “Are you compromising on the quality of the candidates in favor of representation?” The answer to that can be, “We don’t have to compromise on anything.” I think there are very much skilled people of different ethnicities from different locations everywhere, and I think it’s just putting that extra effort into scouting them out and finding them.

    Ally Kouao:

    Something that I do tend to frequently see on LinkedIn is … I think I signed up to this girls’ page. I’m not quite sure where it is, but I think it’s a women’s empowerment page, and they tend to give empowering quotes or showing people who’ve started to rise into more senior positions, like women rising into more senior positions in companies, because you’re definitely seeing more of it today. You’re definitely seeing people in companies or industries where it used to be traditionally male-dominated. You’re seeing more women come through and excel in their fields and prove themselves.

    Ally Kouao:

    Something that I have seen quite a lot of, those pages highlighting women of color who are pushing those boundaries, reaching really cool careers or reaching a new level of success, and they thought it’s a really good idea to praise them, and I completely agree. Something that I did frequently see in the comments is people going, “Ah, we shouldn’t be pointing out their race at all. It should just be about their motivation. It should just be about their successes.”

    Ally Kouao:

    Something that I think is really important to note from these posts or posts that do celebrate women and women of color, is that sometimes this attention does need to be paid to them. For now, we do need to pay this attention so that it becomes something we do naturally. The reason why we are highlighting it is because it’s not something you see often, and when we do see it, we want to celebrate it because it’s something we should see more of, and I think we all want that shared goal of not having to think about race any more or think about the location that someone comes from or think about what their history was, in favor of getting that perfect candidate.

    Ally Kouao:

    But I feel like where we are at the moment, where people are still growing and learning and learning to overcome their unconscious bias, I think it’s really important we do make a point of celebrating those people who are reaching new levels that it’s not so common to see, and wasn’t so common to see before. Yeah, I think there are different ways to go about it.

    Ally Kouao:

    Going back to your question regarding the hiring process, I would honestly say … Just to link it to that little … I can’t even describe it. Just to link it back to what I said regarding highlighting women of color who are doing really well or people of color who are doing really well, I think it’s really important that we … Or I think it would be really beneficial if we did take that stance in hiring as well, so yeah, even though we are paying more attention to the fact that we are trying to have a more diverse or representative workforce, the end goal is that hopefully we won’t need think about this when we’re hiring. Hopefully it’s something that comes naturally to people and it’s something that … We hire them for what their talents are, and we don’t hire them because they don’t look like us or they don’t have qualifications that we’re also familiar with.

    Ally Kouao:

    So yeah, I think that’s my overall answer in terms of hiring. I think it’s important to pay extra attention, especially now, so that … If we pay attention now and don’t continuously stall, I feel like that will just help us to get to that end goal so much faster, and we won’t need to strip back the information like the woman you were talking about did. You could just present that person’s information, and they’d be treated just as equally as all the other candidates.

    Ally Kouao:

    I think that would definitely be the ultimate goal, definitely an approach that I think more organizations should take. I think Red Hat is definitely going in the right direction from even offering that sort of training to begin with in terms of right for Red Hat, and having unconscious biases, because it’s something that’s very real, and it’s something … Like the title says, it’s unconscious. People aren’t aware that they do have their biases until they realize that their whole team is not really representative, but there’s so much diversity and representation in the UK and Ireland, at least from my personal experience. Yeah, sorry for the long-winded answer, but that’s what I was getting at.

    Alexis Monville:

    Yeah, and I really appreciate all the details you shared. This is exactly the problem I think we have. I think it’s not easy to handle that problem, because we would like to do the right thing. We would like to think that we are doing the right thing, and it’s uncomfortable to realize sometimes that we are not. I had that conversation with the team, and at some point I stopped them and said, “Okay, so we are doing the right thing. That’s absolutely perfect, and we are all white, all male, in that leadership team. So that’s totally representative of the population of the world. You’re absolutely right, all of you. All of us are absolutely right.” And so even if we are not consciously doing something wrong, we are not helping. So there was a lot of things around that, the fact that the job description could push away categories of people directly because there was too many requirements or too many …

    Alexis Monville:

    That was fascinating to me, learning about those studies that are real studies. That’s not one idea of someone. It’s real studies that have been proven. It’s fascinating to me. I have a friend who is … His first name is Samir. He told me that when he was sending his resume, if he was stripping the “ir” at the end of his first name, he was called back for an appointment immediately.

    Ally Kouao:

    Oh. Interesting.

    Alexis Monville:

    But if he was leaving his first name like this, he had no appointment. He told me he tried that several times. Of course, he told me, “The problem is, when I’m going to the appointment, usually people who would have struck me from the selection in first place are not necessarily taking me there seriously.” But it’s fascinating.

    Ally Kouao:

    Yeah, I think it’s definitely more common than we think, that people are feeling the need to change their traditional names, because it doesn’t sound quite like what they think the recruiters would want. So for example, in Britain, some people would change their cultural or their traditional names to make it sound more European or more British, and I think that’s definitely a shame. I feel like unless someone really wants to do it because they really liked a name, I feel like the people who do do it because they feel like they’d have better chances of getting recruited, I think that’s definitely part of the problem. It’s just a shame that people would have their names changed, and it just makes it really awkward, because they get hired, they get recruited, and it’s like they don’t feel like they were able to put their original best self forward to begin with.

    Ally Kouao:

    Like I said before, it is very common where people do tend to alter their name or completely change it and strip back what they are originally just to appeal to recruiters. Yeah, like I said, that’s definitely a shame. I also saw a post … Just browsing the internet, I did see there was a post on … I think it was a recruiter talking about how there were some people in her company … Not her company, the company that she worked in, interviewing candidates, and she realized that they were being really tough on the candidates.

    Ally Kouao:

    She thought she’d play a little trick on them and give them their own resumes from when they first applied to their jobs, because obviously they’d been in their jobs for a long time. And they all rejected themselves, and it was so crazy, because I was just like … The fact that they said the people weren’t qualified enough, I thought this was just quite interesting, because I was like, “The fact that you’d … I understand that you were in a better position than where you were when you first began with, but everyone has that beginning of their journey. Everyone has a starting point.” And it was just so interesting to see that they wouldn’t even give themselves a chance if they were in that hiring seat.

    Ally Kouao:

    I feel that was definitely a good takeaway lesson, in regards to the fact that you might not see something that you see in yourself where you are now, but I think it’s definitely important to give everyone that chance, that starting point, where they’d be able to grow and excel, because that’s where they are now, and it definitely made me chuckle seeing that, because I was just like … It’s crazy, because if you can’t accept yourself from your starting point, how much harder it would be if you don’t see yourself in the person who you’re interviewing, or you don’t feel that they’re the right fit because they’re so different to what you have in mind? So I think that’s definitely something that hiring managers or people involved in the interview process should definitely keep in mind.

    Alexis Monville:

    It’s a very, very good one. I love that experiment. It’s really important to work on our biases and the way we handle our emotional system and our intellectual system, and we use it to confirm the other and so on. Ally, it was really great to have you on the show today.

    Ally Kouao:

    Thank you for having me.

    Alexis Monville:

    What would be the first thing you would recommend to people who want to improve?

    Ally Kouao:

    Ooh. Ooh. Ooh, that’s quite a good question. I’ve really enjoyed reading the book Girl, Woman, Other. That focuses on perspectives of different women of color, different ages, from different generations. I think it’s quite an interesting insight into how they grew up, how they lived life differently in Britain, in Europe. That definitely could not be the starting point for everyone, but if someone did want a source to have a little read of and become a little bit more of a knowledgeable version of themselves, then yeah, I think that’s definitely a good book to read.

    Ally Kouao:

    But at the end of the day, I can’t really tell you where to start. Everyone’s on their own journey, and everyone can consume material differently. But I’d say definitely just make use of the internet. It’s very much free, like I said before, and you can find so many good resources. Have conversations with your loved ones, have conversations with people who you might not speak to too often, and get to know them, because we’re all living different timelines, and it’s important to be aware of that, and be open to others. But yeah, that’s all from me.

    Alexis Monville:

    Excellent. Thank you very much, Ally. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show today.

    Ally Kouao:

    Thank you.

    Alexis Monville:

    Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to blog-blog-alexis.monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode, and to find more to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback, or just to say hello, and until next time, to find better ways of changing your team.

    The music is Funkorama by Kevin MacLeod (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0)

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • What Software Teams Can Learn from Sporting Teams

    What Software Teams Can Learn from Sporting Teams

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure of welcoming Chris Foley. Chris is a Principal Systems Design Engineer at Red Hat, and also a sports coach. Together, we explored a simple question that leads to surprisingly concrete insights: can software teams learn from sporting teams?

    A great team starts with clarity

    Chris begins with something that often gets lost in modern software organizations: role clarity.

    In sport, successful teams have:

    • clarity on what each role is supposed to do
    • awareness across the team of what each individual brings
    • responsibility that comes with that clarity

    In software, teams are becoming more cross-functional: they do not just write code, they deliver and run services. This is a positive evolution, but it increases the need for explicit agreements. When “your role is not the color on the org chart,” clarity has to be created intentionally.

    Momentum changes everything

    One of the strongest ideas Chris brings from sport is momentum.

    In sport, a goal can trigger positive momentum: confidence rises, energy rises, and the team builds on it.

    The reverse is also true: conceding a goal can trigger negative momentum. If the team cannot stop it, a second goal often follows, and the game can slip away.

    In software, the triggers are different, but the phenomenon is the same.

    Positive momentum can be triggered by:

    • a release that lands well
    • a demo where stakeholders are genuinely happy
    • a burn-down that is on track
    • a big PR merged
    • progress becoming visible and shared

    Chris makes a practical point: if momentum is positive, you can build on it. Use the goodwill to unlock something valuable, like a spike in an area the team wanted to explore.

    Negative momentum also has familiar triggers:

    • a severe production issue
    • a bug that is not contained quickly
    • pressure escalating beyond the team
    • a growing feeling of being behind, losing control

    The key is awareness. Momentum is not only a feeling. It is a pattern that grows if it is not addressed early.

    Leadership is not a role, it is a behavior

    Chris maps sports roles to software roles:

    • the player is a team member (engineer, QE, docs, etc.)
    • the captain is similar to the team lead
    • the coach or manager is closer to the engineering manager

    But his point is not about titles.

    In successful sporting teams, leadership is fostered across the board. Coaches give ownership. Captains are not the only leaders.

    In software, the parallel is clear: when team leads invite others to lead on investigations, knowledge sharing, and decisions, they are building leadership capacity, not dependency.

    Teams win games

    This line matters because it shifts the focus away from hero culture.

    Chris insists that in sport, teams win games, not individuals. In software, it is the same. Quality, delivery, learning, and progress are team outcomes.

    This is why positive reinforcement inside the team matters. Recognition should not be reserved for managers. Mature teams build a culture where team members notice contributions and say it out loud.

    How do you keep score in software?

    In sport, the score is obvious.

    In software, it is easy to fool ourselves if we do not create visible checkpoints.

    Chris points to an important evolution: more frequent delivery and more frequent feedback loops make it easier to track progress and detect misalignment earlier. In waterfall-style projects, teams could “discover the score” after months. With shorter cycles, the feedback loop becomes part of the work.

    Feedback loops exist in sport too

    A useful correction Chris brings is that sport does not only have feedback during games.

    Sport has:

    • frequent training
    • short loops
    • coaching feedback after each session
    • small challenges focused on specific improvements

    This creates a learning rhythm. A coach might say: you did this well. Now reduce that mistake from ten times to six.

    It is not grand transformation. It is focused improvement.

    Training versus performance: software can rebalance

    One of the most interesting parallels is the difference between training and performance.

    Sports teams train often and perform less often.

    Software teams perform almost all the time. Training becomes rare, generic, or disconnected.

    Chris suggests a different approach: use what happens during performance to define what to train next. Not “go learn a random technology,” but focused training based on real frictions:

    • improve charting and visibility
    • automate a painful part of the pipeline
    • remove a recurring quality issue
    • sharpen stakeholder communication
    • strengthen a weak coordination habit

    Training becomes small, intentional, and tied to value.

    Play to your strengths, not only fix weaknesses

    Chris also brings a sports habit that software teams often underuse: play to your strengths.

    Software retrospectives often drift toward what went wrong, what needs to be fixed, what was missing. That is useful, but incomplete.

    Sports teams also ask: what are we already good at? How do we win on our terms?

    For software teams, this can mean:

    • using strong technical skills to raise standards and speed
    • using strong teaching skills to onboard faster
    • using strong product sense to influence direction
    • using strong communication to make the team’s value visible

    Weaknesses matter. But strengths are where disproportionate value often comes from.

    Owning the product, the process, and the tools

    Chris ends with a theme that connects everything: ownership.

    Successful teams own:

    • the product they build
    • the processes they use
    • the tools they rely on
    • the way they improve

    And they extend ownership outward by influencing stakeholders, decisions, and direction. That requires a final capability: communicating at the right level, without hiding behind jargon.

    Because the ability to explain simply is often what makes a team easy to support, easy to trust, and easier to follow.

    Here is the transcript of the conversation:

    Alexis:

    Hey Chris, can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

    Chris:

    Hi, Alexis. Thanks for having me. Yes, of course. So my name is Chris Foley, principal engineer at Red Hat in software for about approximately 23 years now, I was with Erickson initially out of college, worked under 3G. I have a management system, developing for about five or six years, moved into telecoms research after us for about six years and worked on kind of FP7, so Framework Seven European Research Projects. Then went back to industry and went into the financial domain and into the Airlie lifecycle software life cycle around gathering requirements, kind of done some business system analyst role there, and then went back to telecoms with a company called Oracle and worked as a senior engineer team lead in distributed antenna systems. So basically that’s networks and then to Red Hat and was involved with the mobile product in Red Hat, and fulfilling kind of engineering improvements role inside Red Hat in the child services department.

    Alexis:

    Very interesting and diverse background, Chris. We are here today because we had a chat about sporting teams and software teams, and I’m really deep into what makes a team a team. What makes a team, a group of people that will really increase their impact and satisfaction? What’s make a team a great team? You told me there’s probably things we can learn from sporting teams about that. And I’m curious about what it is and how it works for you.

    Chris:

    So maybe a little background on my sporting life. So I started playing sports right from a very early age of nearly four or five, was heavily involved in the Gaelic games here in Ireland, hurling and football played soccer. A lot of my forte is predominantly team sports, even though I played individual sports. So I feel the role as a player as a senior player on the group, as a captain, on to coach for juvenile and adults, and then even to manage juvenile and adult teams. So that’s a little bit flavor of my sporting background and I continued to be involved as a coach. My playing career is over now, but I’ve been looking up to be involved with successful teams. But also have took many of these things on sports teams. So as you know, sometimes you learn more from your defeats than your victories.

    Chris:

    There’re many aspects I think that makes a good team. A lot of the best teams have a lot of clarity in their role, in what they’re trying to do. I think that clarity of role is something that in a group that’s successful. There’s an awareness across the group. That’s an awareness individually of what your role is. And in turn, I think there’s an awareness across the group of what each individual brings to the group. That’s something that’s very evident in success for sporting teams. If we looked across at the software team and looked at that same kind of artifact currently in software, now we are actually creating very cross-functional multi-purpose teams, which is a very good thing. So they don’t just develop software. Now they actually deliver software, they develop, they write the docs, they test the architects. They have all of the components.

    Chris:

    We are trying to share that responsibility, which is very positive, but I think ensuring that we keep clarity within the group is also, we shouldn’t forget that because with clarity of where our role becomes, there’s a responsibility and there’s an ownership. And once you have that within the group, I think that makes it very strong. I think one aspect is clarity of your role and responsibilities is a fundamental piece that with a successful sporting team, they’re very clear and evident and in turn with software, especially now as we transition across to the multi-purpose cross-functional teams that we have, so we don’t just write the code and throw it over the fence, the testing team that doesn’t happen anymore. So we’re very intertwined and ensuring we keep clarity is key. That’s one aspect, I would say.

    Alexis:

    It’s a very important one. And as you said, that as we evolve to more cross-functional teams, we don’t have the traditional roles of division by functions. So your role is not the color of your chart. That’s probably something more septal. So we need to clarify the roles, make sure that the expectations are clear. We can have a real team working. What else do you think are things that are connecting what happens in sporting teams and software teams?

    Chris:

    So there’s one piece that I think that is very evident on the sporting side, but maybe yeah, I think it’s happening on the software side, but maybe people that does not as, it’s not as clear and evident. So the whole concept of momentum in sport is a very big thing. So what do I mean by momentum? Like if you look at a sporting game, one team score the goal. Once that happens, what you’ll see is that team that scores, their confidence increases, as they play the game. Even their aggression levels, all of them go upwards what’s happened is momentum has been triggered the team that are starting to harness that confidence and positivity and that momentum. And then what you’ll often see is that they’ll actually score a second goal. So they are actually build on it and they used that to their benefit.

    Chris:

    So that’s an example of positive momentum. You must also consider there’s negative moment. And on the negative side, it’s the team that’s actually conceived that goal. So they’ve taken a hit or a blow, conceded a goal. It’s their reaction to that. It will define them if that builds, that negative momentum builds and they concede that second, then potentially the game is over. So it’s how they react to negative momentum and how the team that scored, who reacts to positive. And the other thing there is to know what triggers that. In this example, the goal is very simple trigger. Now, what does that look like on the software side?

    Alexis:

    Yeah. I’m already curious how we can apply that, how we can benefit or how we can realize what are the triggers, how to build on the positive momentum or the opposite. How to make sure that we are not engaged in a downward spiral.

    Chris:

    Yes, the potential triggers, they’re there in every day software kind of live sector, right? So like if you do a release after a sprint, that’s a positive impact on the team. They have achieved. And if you do a sprint demo and it does go as well, and your product owner or your stakeholders are giving you a big thumbs up and they’re delighted with the work, that is a trigger positive momentum. If your manage a big PR, it even could put it on to that level. If you look at your burn-down chart for the team and it’s on track, or maybe it’s ahead of your schedule delivery days, all of that are potential positive triggers for the group. How do you actually build on that then?

    Chris:

    You’ve done your sprint demo went really well. And your team lead maybe there was an area that they wanted to investigate for the last couple of weeks but didn’t get an opportunity. You talk to your manager and say, “Look, this went really well. First, could we, could we do a spike into this specific area?” And your manager says, “Of course, yeah.” Your harness and the momentum at that point, the goodwill that’s around us and the team got this opportunity maybe to do a spike in an area that they’d love to investigate. So that’s a potential parallel missing the positivity and momentum.

    Chris:

    On the other side or negativity, so severity one bulb comes in on yourself for like, if you don’t get on top of that quickly, if you don’t stand the tide there potentially, that goes on for hours and maybe some days to negativity builds around the team that there’s severity one bulb in there. So really getting the group to put their shoulder to the wheel there and try and stop it in its tracks is very key, because of the rolling stone and it gets bigger and bigger. In software, it’s having the awareness of these things to happen and being able to pick up on that and either harness it or address it as quickly as possible.

    Alexis:

    Can you give me an example of one thing that really is building negativity and how you choose to address it? How you raised the awareness and the team to address it.

    Chris:

    That big bug coming in, right? So it’s not like we all look bugs in software. It happens. But if there’s not some resolution to that reasonably quickly, then the manager hears about it, the product owner hears, or most of the stakeholders, it just gets bigger. And have no, it’s not the team’s fault, but it’s the team’s responsibility to try and address that. Try and put some resolution in place such that can assess the underlying problem, if that goes on over time and it’s not addressed that increases the whole negativity increases around it. And that’s the same as conceding the score and maybe conceding the second score and another one. And then once it picks up that, as I said negative momentum, it can be very hard to stop. It’s the team lead or the manager or the engineers the group, and the team awareness. Let’s try and put a resolution in place as quickly as possible.

    Alexis:

    You mentioned in your background, in your sporting background, there were roles, like player, captain, coach, or manager, how does that relate to the roles in the software team? It’s probably very different, but maybe there are some similarities.

    Chris:

    Yeah. So I think that the player is your team member, right? So on the software side could be your software engineer, your QE, your docs person could be any of them team member. And I think the captain maps fairly clearly to the team lead. And then the coach manager side is kind of the engineering manager on the outside in a one sense or what I would say, I know from the sports side, we would have a term like teams win games, right? So it’s not really the management it’s the group, it’s the players and captain and in software, it’s that software team like it’s the engineers. They do the work, they release the software, they test the software, they ensure it’s of high quality. So I think that’s why the focus on the team is so strong, in sporting terms.

    Chris:

    And I think it’s heading that way as well on the software side. And the other thing is just to call out the captain concept there. In the sports side, yes there is a captain boss, successful sporting teams encourage leadership across the board. So they foster leadership. And how do they do that? They give ownership of, to a young player coming in and say, “You take the corners for the soccer team.” So they give them that ownership. So they foster leadership. It’s not just the captain leads. It’s everybody, if at all possible. And I think in the software side, it’s the team lead, or tech lead for the group, saying to an engineer, “Could you investigate this area and come back and talk to the group?” You’re fostering leadership there in the sense that you’re given the opportunity to investigate a new area.

    Chris:

    And then you’re asking them to come back and articulate the group. So you’re doing knowledge sharing as well. So I think a very clear overlap between what’s happening on the sporting side and on what’s happening on the software side. But I think again, really good team. It’s not about which hat you wear, are you a team member or your team captain? It’s about contributing to the goal of the team and what’s right for the group. And I think on the outside the manager, they are really like, they’re just facilitators. They’re ensuring that there’s no blockers in the way of the team. They have what they need to do their job and do it well. And that’s what you’ll find again, in the sporting side, the manager or coach really facilitates the team, once the team start to, once they really start to mature and become strong, they will drive a lot of it themselves.

    Alexis:

    You said, teams win games. I love it. But I feel that for a soccer team, it’s fairly easy to know when you win or when you lose, it’s fairly easy to identify your progress. The score is really clear for everybody. At least the results will be already clear for everybody. And you can measure the progress during the game. What happens for software team? How do you keep the score and how to make sure that we all agree what it means, what winning means?

    Chris:

    I think software is changing a lot. At least when I started working in software a good while ago, when I was that’s nearly more than 20 years ago, we were very much in that waterfall model. We started and we drawn a big plan as to what the project would achieve. And then we may be developed for months, months on end. Maybe even a year and then we’d go and try and test it all. And maybe at the end we find, “Oh, maybe this is not where we want it to be.” It was very difficult I think, to keep the score when the methodology was like that. Now I think it’s improving. I think we’re starting to deliver more frequently. I think that has helped certain teams now are starting to move towards more and more agile approach.

    Chris:

    They attempt to deliver maybe quarterly in a year or even some of them down to every sprint, which would be every two, three weeks. You will get checkpoints more frequently there. You can track them whether the team is, let’s say, winning or producing what the stakeholders are looking for with regard to, if you were in the waterfall approach, you might hit that issue until maybe six months or maybe 12 months on. So I think keeping the score on that was easier and software is in a sense, a young science towards other sciences. So I think it’s really made massive strides over the last decade, I would say. So that has helped a lot keeping the score now because there’re checkpoints, which are customer, or your stakeholders very frequently. So that’s a big help.

    Alexis:

    There’s one aspect that I don’t find exactly in the same way when I was thinking about the parallel between sporting teams and software teams. When we deliver more frequently in a software team, we have the opportunity to get feedback from our users and to know if what we are working on is the right thing. That feedback loop is interesting. In sporting teams, I’m not sure where is the feedback loop. Are the public or the fans the user of the game? Or how does it, how would you make the parallel between the two?

    Chris:

    The feedback loop on the sporting side actually happens very frequently and I would even leave the fans out of it to a degree. Yes, there’s feedback from the fans. Of course, if you’re successful or not. The feedback you’d want in the sporting world. Like if they play on say the weekend, when they train Tuesday, Thursday. After every training session, and I speak from experience here because I’m currently coaching. At the end of every training session, we would take 10 minutes talk to the players and say, “You done this well. I was impressed with…” You’re giving them very positive feedback there. Very frequently. You’re at least giving them Tuesday, Thursday feedback. On the negative side there if you want to, there was an issue often I would add in a challenge for them.

    Chris:

    Like if they can see the 10-3s I would say, “Can we reduce that? Can we get that down to six or under?” So sporting side, the feedback loop is very frequent actually. And when you’re in that environment, you’ll see that. It’s good on the software side that we get feedback from our stakeholders may be every three weeks. Maybe we could even do more within the team, within the group. What you’ll see the benefits of the feedback on with, from sporting side, you’ll see the player, reacting, the team reacting, reducing that number of threes. So maybe I think there’s a learning there in software that within the team itself, that’s okay. Maybe you don’t do it on your daily standup, but maybe your facilitation in another way in your say, three weeks sprint there’s feedback and saying this done, this was really good. That positivity is so important to the group. And I think we could harness that.

    Alexis:

    You introduced a lot of interesting concepts there. First of all yes, of course the sporting team are not performing every day. Even if they perform every weekend or every week, they will train more often than they perform. So that was the first thing that is an interesting learning probably for all teams. So let’s come back to that in a minute, but I noticed that when you speak about feedback after the training sessions, you nearly only spoke about positive reinforcement. And do you see that as the best way to provide feedback and do you see that happening in the software world?

    Chris:

    Early in my sporting career, if you went back, I think sports has changed to be honest, all you think that it was more negative feedback when I was younger in my career. I think it has changed massively. I’m not sure what exactly influenced that change, but it’s quite clear that reinforcing the positives, there’s more value. You’re dealing with human beings here. If you keep praising them, you don’t get anything back. If you try and highlight the benefits in what they’re good at and trow in the challenge, then I think that it’s to have that balance that you highlight the positives and also notice the improvements. That’s so important for any of the leading, either leading players, captain, coach noticing improvements and calling them out, and then adding in your challenge to bring them to the next level. We would always talk in the sports world about having smaller wins. It’s not about going out to win the championship. It’s about maybe improving a skill or being able to execute a skill more frequently. Positive reinforcement there brings value to the whole group. So I would say, definitely think that’s very important.

    Alexis:

    And if we look at what the software team is doing is the role of providing that positive reinforcement, providing that feedback that, “Oh, you done that really well.” Is it something that is the sole responsibility of the coach or the manager, or is it something that the team members the players could do themselves?

    Chris:

    Yeah, I think this is what the mature team that are successful and performing really well. You will see that it’s not just a manager. You have this shared awareness among the group. As I said, it doesn’t matter what hat you’re wearing in the group. You can say, “Alexis, that’s a really good job there, that’s very beneficial to the group what you’ve done.” So I think absolutely the very good team that’s performing well have a shared responsibility, not just for the work they do, but for being aware of the benefits others bring to the group and sharing that and calling that out. The responsibility lies with everybody. And it might just be that maybe you created some pipeline to test the software or something. And if I got a lot of benefit over that, just as a team member. Calling that out is really good, just that positivity within the group is massive I think.

    Alexis:

    Let’s come back to the train and perform part. I feel that the train and perform balance for sporting teams, they are performing from time to time and training a lot. And I feel that for software teams, they are performing all the time and not training at all. Do you have a different experience of that? And then how can we introduce more balance?

    Chris:

    When I originally started to kind of think through this whole thing, the angle was can software teams learn from sporting teams? I think in this scenario, I think the learning maybe go some way or the other way. And the example I gave here is that in sporting world, you could train for two weeks and maybe your game is coming in three weeks’ time. Sometimes you would go and play a challenge game. We played a game and you’d often hear the coacher or mentor saying after, “Hey guys, this has worked for your training session.” What the methods that’s common true there is that there’s more value to be got by playing rather than training. So I think the sporting world has some way some learnings there. The question then is have the software world, are they like they’re probably 95% performing while 5% training.

    Chris:

    One thing I would say is the learning that you could take from sport here is once the sporting team plays, and I know I’ve done this myself as a coach, you will see things in the game that you’ll say to yourself, actually, we need to improve somewhat there. Or I might see that player is very strong in certain skill or certain area or certain position. So my reaction would be the week after the training, I would organize the training such that I might try and improve maybe weakness that I saw, or I might say that, “Oh, this player’s really good in this position.” So I would restructure the training to see what that work again. So the training is very focused on the previous game. Now, how could software do that? Like I think the training that we do in software is, “Go do a course on NodeJS or Java or OpenShift.

    Chris:

    So it’s probably generic, but maybe we could focus our training better in smaller pieces to say that maybe the charts that we produce from the data that we gather in the system, maybe they could be better. Something very focused and small. Maybe there was a comment in a sprint review, maybe pulling the team together and focus in on how could we improve that the charting? Such that we get more value from the data we gather? So I think that there’re learnings both ways there that training on the software side could be a lot more focused for that team where as I said, I think there’re learnings on the sporting side too, that they need to play more and train less.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, it’s interesting. So we can learn from a formal training sessions and we can learn from the game we play. So what that means in the software world, even if the balance between training and performing is different we should intentionally learn from when we are performing. That’s what you say, in a way?

    Chris:

    Yes, exactly. Yeah. That’s where you learn more. And that’s where the comment that you’ll get in this. As I said, in that sporting analogy of the challenge game, the code saying this has worked five training sessions. And what they’re really saying, is the learnings that we’ve got here are so important that we wouldn’t maybe have seen in the training environment. So I think the software side, because they play so frequently, there’s continual learnings there and there’s checkpoints like our sprint review, et cetera, demos to stakeholders, there’s all the learnings there. And not even on the stakeholder side, even within the team dynamic that maybe some of the pipelines maybe not as automated as we would like. Smaller tweaks there could bring a big improvement and more automation could give us time to do other things. So there’s lots of opportunity to pieces out that with a small bit of focus training could reap our rewards.

    Alexis:

    So it’s interesting, you mentioned two different kinds of improvement, there’s improvement we can make on the product itself, on the results of what we are working on. An improvement we can make on our wealth working, on our tuning. So it’s even three aspects of it. Being intentional of seizing the opportunities to improve is something really important. How do you get to that mindset of having all the team that is really interested in working on those things? Interested in learning on improving?

    Chris:

    Like, I think the key is identifying clear value. We’re not doing something just for the sake of, “Oh, look, we’re trying to improve this.” It’s identifying clear areas where we can extract the value. So if we invest time, there’s value to be gone. If team members see that, then they’re a lot more inclined or a lot more motivated to put that effort in for improvement. That trying to identify value is of the product value that’s clear and the team are not the only people need to do that. Your product owner stakeholders, et cetera. So clear value is on the product side, clear value on the tooling, clear value in our process.

    Chris:

    So we don’t introduce process just for the sake of it. If we introduce some process that we get some value back, then the team will invest in general. But don’t just do things just because we’re seen to be trying to improve. Identifying the value, getting the team in that mindset. If you think there’s value there, let’s discuss it. Let’s have the discussion to see. So I think that’s what you’re trying to get their mindset thinking that way is to say where’s the value to be out here.

    Alexis:

    So in reality, they own improving the value on all the different aspects. So they own the process. They own the tooling. They own the product as a result. They can really work on the value on improving the value because they own those benefits too.

    Chris:

    Yes. I know at the start I mentioned ownership and responsibility. Successful teams feel responsible for the group or for what they’re trying to achieve or in the software world for the product they’re trying to build, for the process that they go through that helps them build that product or helps and release that software. That sense of ownership is absolutely key. And if you don’t have that, if you’re trying to impose teams on the team and they don’t feel that they’re responsible and own, then it’ll be different. But if they take up the mantle and seize the ownership, then again, I go back and say on the sports side, you’ll hear that the best teams are what our player driven. So the team drive them what that is, is responsibility and ownership. And they’re taking the lead. It’s the same with software. If you have that taking the lead on the product, helping steer the direction with the stakeholders, ensuring the process facilitates them well. If you have that in place, that team would be successful.

    Alexis:

    When clearly the team is not in short of some aspects and that’s outside of the team that maybe decisions are made or whatever. And you mentioned the stakeholders and working with the stakeholders to do it. So it means, yes you can earn your future in a way that you will, of course, work within your team to do something, but you will also work outside of your team to influence the decisions that are made outside of the team.

    Chris:

    Yes. I think it’s massive in the software side, because you do have the engineers working at the coal phase. So they understand the products or the subsystem really well. So I would envisage them as key contributors or key stakeholders to the direction of that subsystem or product. Obviously, they need to work with the more business stakeholders, with the architects so it’s a bigger group. But they have a big say. And I think another aspect here comes to the fore is the team need to be able to communicate that at the right level. So sometimes you’ll find engineers will talk technical. So it’s another skill set of a very good team that they can abstract that value kind of away from the technical details, if necessary, and to pitch it to the other stakeholders, to say, “Here’s an avenue or here’s a direction that could be worth considering,” Such that the stakeholders can grasp that.

    Chris:

    That it’s not entangled in technical details, that they can see the value. So that’s another part the team can, should be able to play that they communicate and articulate at the correct level, such that their view is taken into consideration at the direction of the product.

    Alexis:

    This is really an important one. I remember working with several teams and there was teams I realized in my personal reflection that I didn’t really want to work with them. I didn’t really want to talk with them. And there was also teams that I was really happy to work with them, to engage with them, to try to listen to what they were doing to try to help them. And I was thinking why it’s happening. So I was thinking maybe it’s the people, maybe there are some seeing that. And I realized, no, it was not that. There was teams when I was discussing with them, I was unable to understand what they were discussing. Everything sounded so complicated that I was unable to understand what they were trying to achieve. So I felt excluded and I was not able to contribute to help them. And there were teams, I had that impression that when they were explaining something, I was really smart.

    Alexis:

    I was able to understand everything. And I realized that it was not the technology. They were working on the same product that was just pieces of the same product. So it’s not the complexity of the technology. It was the ability to explain to outsiders what they were trying to achieve and to put it in simple words enough. So I could understand where I could play a part. And that was really incredible. And that was just a few people that were able to do that, who will care about doing that in a way. So I bet they understood that if they want to reach to external help, that was already good way to do it.

    Alexis:

    It took me some time to realize what was going on there at the beginning. I was looking ready for personal relationship. When you have a good fit with someone. And I realized it was not that it was exactly that ability to communicate at the right level. They were in a way, probably communicating with me at a more easy level. They were, their technology for them is just for me. So I would be able to help them. That was an interesting realization at some point.

    Chris:

    I think it’s very important for the software team to have that skill set. It may not be all the members of the team have that. They definitely need one, two members that can understand the business schools and be able to meet in the middle to say, “Technically, we can do this, and I know your business ask is this.” And to kind of talk in that medium, in the middle of such that we have full engagement with the business side of the house. The technical side is portrayed in an understandable way. And often I think, because I played the role as a business systems analyst and product owner, I feel the role is more play them. But I think that’s absolutely key that if the communication’s lost there, because they talk different languages. If you go down and sit in your daily stand up with the engineering team, or if you sit in maybe product roadmap discussions with the business unit, they could be talking about the same product, but are very different. Even terminology, language, everything. So being able to bridge the gap between both is I can really big scale for the team itself.

    Alexis:

    Yeah. You mentioned that you worked in the Telco world. And my first encounter with some people in Telco. I think after the five, the five first minute there was, there were so many acronyms they mentioned that I was totally lost. And I said that “Okay, I have a problem that I’m totally foreign to your world. I am not able to even think I will be able to engage with you.” And one of them said, “Oh yeah, that’s not a problem. In reality, it’s really simple. Let me draw a simple picture to you so you will understand the basic concept of all that.” And he drew a simple, he made a simple drawing about where you have an antenna or how it’s called. And then you realize that you are able to understand, you can see your mobile phone is there, that’s your internet at home is there. And that’s how it works. And then that’s how it goes back in the network. And that’s all those things.

    Alexis:

    And then he put all the acronym on it and I said, “Oh yeah, okay. I understand how it works.” And now when there was an acronym mentioned, I was able to connect that with the big picture he drew on the white board. And that was so much easier. And he did that in five minutes. And I asked him about that. And he said, “You are not the first one that is trying to come into our world. So I’m really good now at doing the drawing because I did it probably hundreds of times.” That’s absolutely not a problem. And I totally understand that you need it. Yeah. We need those kinds of people that really care about being inclusive of other people in teams. That was really an amazing experience for me too, to have that opportunity.

    Chris:

    Teams that don’t want to say controlled or destiny, or at least to kind of bring their team and their product in the right direction. We actually realize that they need to be able to do this. They need to be able to communicate and articulate at the right level with other stakeholders. So you’ll get the very good teams need and become aware of that very quickly. And then speak the language that allows that to happen. That their voice now is heard and understood. For another aspect there, I think that’s worth calling out is in the sporting world there’s a term like play to your strengths. Sometimes maybe in the software world. Sometimes we focus a little bit on where we hear a weak there. Like if you do your retro after your sprint or after your release, you’ll say like, you do look and say, look, this went well. But it often drifts towards, this didn’t go that well, this needs an improvement, which is perfectly fine.

    Chris:

    What you would find in the sporting world is they will, they’re constantly saying “We’re good at this. We have speed in our attack. Let’s try and play that game. So let’s try and use the strengths we have.” That’s maybe another learning that software could take is that understand the strengths of the team really harness them by all means improve weaknesses. A lot of the time, the strengths of the group, if somebody is really good. Maybe developer, Java developer, no, Java developer, should you have them kind of maybe architecting, maybe not. That their strength is in development. And normally what you’ll see is that their strength is there because they enjoy use, I think software could definitely look at that side somewhat more that really harness your strengths and even build on them.

    Chris:

    If you’re good at something, why not, you can get better. So I think what you’ll see is sport do that a lot. Sport and teams, they would even use the term like, they want to play the game on their own rules. And what they’re really saying there is, “we want to play a real physical game, or we want to play a really fast game.” Because that’s what they’re good at. Once a problem arises in a sporting team like that. One of our defenders is struggling because their opposition are too physical. What will happen is the coach will go and find one of their physical player to bring them across, to kind of address the issue, playing to your strengths, making them all of them and building on them is something maybe that software can incorporate maybe more.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, this is a very good one. And you think that we can really play off strengths and overcome or weaknesses playing our strands.

    Chris:

    I think there’s more to be got. There’s more value to be extracted. Those are strengths. Don’t get me wrong. You should always try and address your weaknesses by all means. But I think sometimes we don’t have that balance that the weaknesses get more attention. And we try and improve that, which is all well and good. But maybe there’s a different solution. Maybe we have other strengths in the team that we could solve that wish for the group as a whole to try and understand that. Do we have the strengths in this group to address whatever problems there, or to enhance some things? So I think that keeping that in mind is important and there’s more value to be extracted from your strengths than maybe we are doing currently.

    Alexis:

    It’s not an individual realization. It’s a realization as a team. So you are several strengths in the team and maybe you are missing some. And so you will maybe try to find that outside of the team, external support, or in your next hiring session, you will focus on specific strengths that you are looking at, that you miss in the team. So it’s not just looking at the individual and hoping that you will have perfect player that have all the strengths possible in the world. That’s looking at as a result, how the team is composed and what do you have in the team? What kind of strengths do you have already?

    Chris:

    Yes, exactly. And that’s the awareness of the group. The leaders in the group, at least the senior members should have a really good feel for the skill sets. And it’s not just the technical skill sets. One other thing we have noticed, in the software side actually, sometimes a team with a member who has a kind of teaching acumen or a knowledge sharing skill, some team members might be very kind of focused on getting their job done, where others might have a great skill to share knowledge. That’s a great skill set in the team, because if you bring in somebody in a new member having that kind of teacher/coach-like skill in your group, you can pair them up. So bringing somebody up to speed very quickly. So there’s lots of skills you can harness, but the awareness that they’re there is the first step.

    Alexis:

    Thank you very much, Chris, for sharing all that today. Maybe one additional last word?

    Chris:

    Yeah, I think it’s kind of a cross-pollination of ideas from different domains can often be very rewarding. And I think, I suppose I should maybe do the reverse and say what sports can learn from software. The team is the fundamental piece and the fundamental building block. And I do think software has absolutely realized that and are investing in that. And it’s great to see, and I think that’s a harness thing that positivity and momentum is beneficial for everybody. And if you get that team functioning well, everything else falls out of that. I think investment in the team culture team dynamics awareness is so fundamental for all enterprises, not just software. People are really now at this time, fully aware of the impact of good, strong, healthy, functional teams. So it’s great that we’re even having this conversation I think Alexis, and I appreciate the time for us to have this chat.

    Alexis:

    Thank you very much, Chris. I learned a lot today. I really enjoyed your parallel between sporting teams and software teams and yes, you’re right. Probably all teams. I really love that level of awareness is there. And I hope it will reach more people in the world. Thank you very much, Chris.

    Chris:

    Thank you.

    Alexis:

    Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to blog-blog-alexis.monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode, and to find more help to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback, or just to say hello. And until next time, to find better ways of changing your team.

    The music is Funkorama by Kevin MacLeod (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0)

    The picture is by Danylo Suprun.

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • What a Coding Dojo taught me about agile

    What a Coding Dojo taught me about agile

    In their article, What is agile?, Jen Krieger, Daniel Oh, and Matt Takane discuss what we at Red Hat consider the most important sentence of the Agile Manifesto:

    “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.”

    I like this sentence because it helps to understand why we could apply “agile” outside of software development. We could replace “developing software” in that sentence with something like “cooking,” and it would still give us a good idea of the mindset of people who engage in “agile cooking”.

    Of course, we often associate “agile” with specific practices. Let’s take the example of two agile practices that were used together during a Coding Dojo event. A Coding Dojo is a great way of uncovering better ways of developing… I’ll stop there; you know the rest of the sentence by now. A Coding Dojo is a great way to get better at something by practicing with others in a safe and controlled environment. The practices I uncovered that day were test-driven development and pair programming:

    • Test-driven development, or TDD, is a process in which a developer starts by writing an automated test for a function, then writes the code that will make the test pass.
    • Pair programming is when two coders work together using one computer.

    The Coding Dojo experience

    Imagine yourself in a room with 20 coders, one laptop, and one big screen. Two seats are near the computer for the first pair of programmers, and there are enough seats for the other programmer pairs who will observe before taking their turn at the keyboard.

    The kata we used that day was the Bowling Game. The goal of the Bowling Game, as explained on the Coding Dojo website, is to “create a program, which, given a valid sequence of rolls for one line of American Ten-Pin Bowling, produces the total score for the game.”

    Each pair of programmers has a five-minute timebox to advance in the resolution of the challenge, using TDD and taking steps that are as small as possible. At the end of the timebox, another pair will follow.These interactions help them express their best in the code they produce.The first coder starts by writing the first test. The test fails to red as there is no code yet (test tools associate green with a passing test and red with a failing test). The second coder writes the smallest possible amount of code to make the test pass green, and he or she then improve the tests. The test goes back to red, and we switch back to the first programmer, who then writes the smallest possible amount of code to make the test pass. And so on. Refactoring is done along the way.

    The interaction between the two coders is the kind of magic we all love to see. That’s because contributors are not submitting a patch hoping for a fast review; they have the review in real time. And because they are progressing in small steps, explaining what they are doing, it is easy for everyone to stay connected, whether you are in the audience or the second coder in the pair.

    Writing the test first forces an early understanding of what is required. Focusing on the smallest amount of code possible to make the test pass also helps to keep the design as simple as possible. Refactoring along the way ensures that we keep only the code we need.

    Here are the key differences between the Coding Dojo experience and the typical development process:

    • Developers work in pairs instead of alone to code features and fix bugs
    • Testing is done before development instead of after code is developed
    • Code review is done in real time, with the pair, instead of waiting for another developer to review and merge

    Looking at a larger amount of code makes it more difficult to understand. The process is not only slower but leads to less beneficial interactions between the coder and the reviewer.

    Why do we consider pair programming and TDD agile practices? Because they are designed to foster strong interactions between the individual members of the team. These interactions help them express their best in the code they produce.

    This brings us to the second sentence of the Agile Manifesto:

    “Through this work, we have come to value: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”

    You can, of course, have processes and tools. But those processes and tools should foster the expression of individuals and their interactions. The latter has more value than the former.

    So the next time you are engaged in a conversation about tools or processes, ask yourself (and others): Are we bringing a tool or a process that will grow individuals and interactions?

    Answering yes to that question shows you the agile way.

    The article was first published by opensource.com.

  • Another book discussion club

    Another book discussion club

    I believe I already told you a lot about the benefit of participating or facilitating a book discussion club.

    Last week, I received in a tweet another proof of that. I was amazed by the quality of the visualization the people from the book discussion club at Conserto came up with.

    Sebastien tweeted the visualization below after their discussion around my first book Changing Your Team From The Inside. You can bet that I know the structure and the content of the book fairly well. And, when I looked at it, I was struck by the quality of it!

    In his tweet, Sebastien said: [the book] “offers a real path to initiate change for people, teams, and organization.”

    In the replies, he added: “Very inspiring, lots of tools to draw. Can also be used when forming a new team.”

    I am very grateful for those kinds of strokes. Please, keep them coming 🙂

  • Agile and Open Innovation: Building the Bridge Between Tech and Business

    Agile and Open Innovation: Building the Bridge Between Tech and Business

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure of welcoming Mary Provinciatto, author and engagement lead at Red Hat Open Innovation Labs.

    Mary started her career as a software developer at 17. A few years in, she made a decision that shaped everything that followed: she wanted to be closer to people, mentoring and coaching teams, and creating a bridge between technology and business.

    Because for her, one frustration kept coming back: building things without clarity on why and for whom.

    You cannot force practices, even when you know the theory

    Mary’s book Sprint a Sprint tells the story of an agile team transformation through both mistakes and progress.

    One of her most important lessons is simple and practical: you cannot just walk in and tell a team what to do.

    Even if you know the theory.

    Instead, Mary describes a journey where the team learns together through principles and values, and adapts practices to fit their context. That shift changes everything: it moves a team away from “one person tells everyone what to do” toward “we think together.”

    Psychological safety is built through intention, not slogans

    Mary comes back several times to the idea of a safe environment.

    Not as a buzzword, but as something observable.

    In her experience, psychological safety shows up when people can:

    • ask questions without fear of looking stupid
    • admit they do not know something
    • talk about mistakes without shame
    • address conflicts instead of avoiding them

    One practice Mary used consistently was safety checks, especially at the beginning. Over time, the safety checks made progress visible: at first, people avoided difficult topics. Later, they became able to talk about anything.

    Team building that actually changes the team

    Mary shares a story that illustrates what she means by team building.

    A distributed team struggled with punctuality in the daily standup. The team changed the time, but one person kept arriving late. Frustration grew.

    Instead of forcing another rule, Mary facilitated an activity where people shared their routines before, during, and after work. The team discovered the late teammate was dealing with heavy traffic while taking his wife and kids where they needed to be.

    No one was trying to “solve the standup problem.”

    And yet the problem got solved because the team gained context, empathy, and then adjusted their standup schedule in a way that worked.

    This is a useful reminder: some coordination problems are not solved by tighter enforcement. They are solved by better understanding.

    What is an Engagement Lead at Red Hat Open Innovation Labs?

    Mary explains that the Engagement Lead role emerged inside the Open Innovation Labs.

    The Labs run immersive customer engagements called residencies, typically 4 or 12 weeks, pairing Red Hat specialists with customer teams to achieve real business outcomes while building long-term capability.

    An Engagement Lead focuses on:

    • outcomes over outputs
    • helping teams understand why they are doing what they are doing
    • coaching practices and feedback loops so the customer can continue after the residency ends

    Mary highlights something important: this approach often looks hard at first. People doubt it will work. Then short feedback loops and continuous improvement prove what is possible.

    Transparency as an engine for learning

    Mary describes how the Labs improve their approach through transparency and repetition:

    • bi-weekly calls to share learnings
    • weekly reports (including what is working and what is not)
    • showcases at the end of each iteration to demo increments and share learning

    A showcase is more than a demo. It is a moment where teams share what they built and what they learned about product, process, and collaboration.

    One surprising benefit of virtual residencies is that people around the world can attend showcases and learn across regions.

    Writing a book as an agile practice

    Mary also shares what she learned while writing Sprint a Sprint.

    Her biggest lesson: apply agile principles to your own life.

    For her, that meant embracing MVP thinking and time-boxing. She and her co-author Paulo realized they were spending too much energy on title and cover. They time-boxed the decision, shipped an early version, and used feedback to iterate.

    Mary quotes a line attributed to Reid Hoffman that captures the spirit:
    If you are not embarrassed by the first version, you launched too late.

    A practical resource: the Open Practice Library

    Mary encourages listeners to use and contribute to the Open Practice Library, a collection of practices created, tested, and shared by practitioners.

    You can explore it here:
    https://openpracticelibrary.com

    It is an open repository. You can submit practices, learn from others, and build your own toolbox for outcomes, team foundations, and continuous improvement.

    References

    Red Hat Open Innovation Labs (Engagement Lead role, residencies, showcases)

    Sprint a Sprint (Mary Provinciatto, Paulo Caroli)

    Open Practice Library: https://openpracticelibrary.com

    Here is the transcript of the episode:

    Alexis:

    Hey Mary, can you tell us a bit more about you and your background?

    Mary:

    Yeah, sure. So hello everyone, I’m Mary Provinciatto. I’m from Brazil, but I’m currently living in Berlin, Germany. And a little bit about my background, I started my career as a software developer when I was 17. And that was what I did during five years of college, but after a while I realized I really liked being closer to people, mentor, and coach them, facilitate practices and help creating like a bridge between technology and business. Because it was very frustrating for me as a software developer, when I couldn’t understand why I was doing things and for whom I was building things. I wanted to change that, and I wanted to help creating that bridge.

    Mary:

    I know that a lot of things are different now. But when I started back in 2007, Agile wasn’t such a big thing. And most of the software development projects I was part of they were waterfall, and this was something that was very frustrating as well. So being like a Scrum Master at the beginning, and this was how I saw I could create a bigger positive impact on those projects. After I realized that I went through several different roles like Scrum Master, project manager, account manager, and now I’m an engagement lead. So besides the roles that I had until now, I studied computer science, and I have two MBAs, project management and marketing, because I wanted to understand more about the business side.

    Alexis:

    This is really impressive Mary. Can you tell us a little bit more about when you say mentoring and coaching, what are you doing exactly?

    Mary:

    This is pretty much the story I tell in my book, Sprinter Sprint. I realized when I was working with that team, that I couldn’t just force the other theory that I knew. I couldn’t tell them exactly what they should do, or we should… Let’s use compound now, let’s use this practices. If I did that they wouldn’t understand why are… Sometimes they could be resistant. We went through a journey to discover those things together. Even though I had that theory, I knew those things that the concepts, I couldn’t just tell them that’s what they had to do. I had to help them understand why to do that. And so we’ve worked with the principles and values to help them understand why they were doing those practices they could also prevent, and maybe do a little like changes on how they were applying those things to better considered the scenario and their own context.

    Mary:

    At the beginning it was hard for me and it was hard for the team as well, because we were failing a lot. We were having a lot of problems. I was patient and I let them learn from the experience, and I was giving them a little bit of what I experienced so far so they could understand, start applying those concepts by their choice instead of having someone else telling them what to do. And this was important because at the end we were working as a team, and not having just one person telling what everybody should do. This was important to identify scenarios that not even I knew what to do. We had a lot of people thinking together instead of just one.

    Alexis:

    Makes a lot of sense for me when I look at the first sentence of the Agile Manifesto. We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. And what you just said is, instead of trying to tell people what to do, we need to embark on a journey and discover together what we should do that will already suit our needs. I think it’s really powerful, it’s probably a little bit more scary than I think someone that is telling you, “Okay, I know what to do, do it and everything will be fine.” How people react to the idea that you are the expert, you are supposed to know what to do but you don’t want to tell them, you want all the team to work together to find a way.

    Mary:

    Sometimes we think that only by working and having a product thing like team, things will just flow and it will magically work because we are working with the long lead product team. But this is not true most of the time, because people are complex and it’s not only about the product, it’s not only about the practices and frameworks and methods that we use, but we have to look at people as individuals. And sometimes this will demand that we have difficult conversations as a team, sometimes with individuals. And one thing that helped us to go through this and let people start trusting each other, and ask each other what to do without being afraid that that was a stupid question, being afraid that they couldn’t say that they don’t know something was creating this environment that people felt safe.

    Mary:

    So since the beginning we were always doing a lot of team building activities. We had like our own budget to go out together every month at least, but we were doing more than that, we were having lunch together very often. We were building distrust because it’s important that people can create empathy, and they can understand why other people are doing things. So one of the examples that I always do when I talk about why individuals and interactions is more important is that, we were discussing about our daily standup, because we already changed the time we were doing it. We were doing it… I don’t remember the exact time, but let’s say it was around 9:00 AM, and people were always late. So we changed it but started to do it at 10:00 AM.

    Mary:

    And there was this person that he continued to be always late, and the team members… The other team members they were very mad. They were complaining about it all the time. And they were like, “Oh, what’s the point of changing it if he is going to be late all the time, he is not being careful with our time. And we shouldn’t care if he is part of the data standard or not.” And instead of just force them to change the time again, or even talk to the person to make sure he was going to attend at that time, we had a team building activity where we were discussing the different roles each people have before the work, during work and after work. We could understand a little bit more about the routine of each other.

    Mary:

    And it was funny because we weren’t like trying to solve this problem, but the team directive helped us to solve the daily stand up problem because, we were able to find out that that person was spending a lot of time before arriving at work to own traffic because he was taking his wife to work, his kids to school. And the traffic was very, very bad, and he was a spending hours. He couldn’t predict when he would arrive at work. And when the team listened to that they were like, “Oh, now we understand why you’re never on time.” And they decided to move this stand up in the afternoon and it worked. So, this is how team building activities can help the team creative party and work better with each other.

    Alexis:

    Okay. I was a little bit worried when you said team building activities, because I’m always a little bit uncomfortable with team building activities because sometimes I can get the different aspect of it, but I don’t really see the result being a team is built. I went to one activities where we are throwing axes to targets and drinking beers. Okay, that’s cool. We had fun. Indian, I’m not sure the team was built. So what you’re describing is something much more intentional about building a team that we add people to get to know each other better. Do you have other examples of team building activities that you think are already working well?

    Mary:

    Hmm, I say that would depend on the context, and I always try to identify what is important and that scenario. For this team I noticed that we didn’t know anything about each other, because we were distributed. We had part of the team in one city and the other part in another city. So even though we were having lunch together sometimes one half of the team, we didn’t know about the life of the people. So we didn’t know if they had families or anything like that. I wanted to do something that would allow people to know a little bit more about each other. And of course, sometimes we have a barbecue, or we go out to drink together.

    Mary:

    And this can also be helpful, but it is something that we have to do often to make sure people are talking about their lives. If they’re just going there to play something together but they’re not having conversations, it can be harder and it will take more time too so people can connect and create empathy. I usually try to tailor the activity based on what I want to achieve. I can try to think about other activities now and maybe I can mention them later.

    Alexis:

    Tell me a bit more about the book. Why did you wrote that book?

    Mary:

    I always wanted to write a book, but I wanted it to be very practical. I wanted it to be something people can read and have ideas about how to apply the concepts. We usually see people talking about how something works, but I wanted to expand their learning, also considering what could go wrong while trying to put something in place. If you read the book you will see that we tell all the issues that we had with so, like everything that went wrong and how we dealt with the situations. And working with this team from the book it was a perfect scenario to do this, because like I said before, we had all the theory. We knew what to do considering the theory, but how could we apply that?

    Mary:

    How could we go on a journey that we would allow people to understand that beyond just theory. So that’s why I wrote this book. If you never worked with Scrum, Kanban, or any of the other frameworks methods or practices that we mentioned in the book, we have like the first session is, we explain all the concepts in a very simple and straightforward way. That’s the first part of the book. And the second part is the main session, section where we tell the story of the team, and we tell everything that happened since day one since we started to work together and since after the MVP, after we put the MVP in production as well. And the third section, the last section of the book, is where we have a lot of templates that we used, so people can download them online, or you can see them on the book. We have templates for user stories, how to write user stories for a definition of ready Kansas MVP, and also others.

    Alexis:

    The team that you are referring to in the book it’s a real team? It’s really something that happened? Or is it something that you pulled from your experience, and you inventing that team setup for the book?

    Mary:

    No, it is a real team, I worked with them in 2018. I don’t mention their names and the company, because I didn’t want to identify them. But it was a real team.

    Alexis:

    But when it’s a real team, you’re forced to speak about the things that went wrong. Is it something that you were comfortable with to say, okay, we tried that and it didn’t work?

    Mary:

    That’s why we didn’t expose their names, because I wasn’t really sure they would feel comfortable about having everything that we did that went wrong, and being told the entire that are in the book. So I prefer to avoid that. To be honest, I think the team was very open to it, because we were sharing everything internally at the company. And we had the mindset, we had the mentality of continuous improvement. We were talking about our mistakes. At the beginning of course it wasn’t like that, but after we created that safe space, a safe environment, we were doing it all the time. Every week we were exposing our mistakes so we could learn from them. And this was something very important.

    Alexis:

    I really like that. I understand that trust is something important. You mentioned several time safe in a safe space. How do you know that the team reach a point where they are comfortable enough, they are safe to speak about their mistakes for example? All those things.

    Mary:

    We were always doing safety checks, and I also tell that in the book. At the beginning, if you look at the safety checks that we had, you will see that the safety wasn’t very present there, people were usually saying that they didn’t feel comfortable to talk about difficult things. They were comfortable to talk about work, but if it was something complicated or a conflict they would avoid it. At the beginning we could identify this kind of behavior with the safety tech checks. But after a while we were doing it all the time, and we realized that they were open to talk about anything. So, this is how we noticed that the safety was improving by doing safety checks at the beginning of team building activities, or retrospectives, or other practices that we had to do.

    Alexis:

    Definitely something that needs to be implemented in a lot of teams. Just to get a sense of where we are now. There is no judgment being that, that’s just understanding where we are. You mentioned you have different roles that you took in different teams. You’ve said Scrum Master, I think people heard that before I know what it is. But you also said engagement lead, can you tell me a little bit more about engagement lead?

    Mary:

    Before I talk about that, let me tell you a little bit about the open innovation labs, because the engagement lead brow was created by Red Hat, by the open innovation labs. At least that was the first time I saw it when I joined Red Hat. And open innovation labs exists to accelerate the delivery of our customers innovative ideas. So we want to empower the customer so they can deliver success stories. And to do that we work together in a very immersive way. We pair Red Hat specialists with people from the customer, and we achieve real business outcomes. While we’re doing that, we also make sure people are learning and developing capabilities so they can continue working this way, this new way of work, the Agile, Lean DevOps. And they can also achieve even more outcomes after we are gone, after the engagement.

    Mary:

    And we call this engagement residency. As an engagement lead, I am making sure we are applying this way of working and we are coaching the customer so they can understand why to do that. And we are very outcomes driven. So, as an engagement lead, I try to facilitate this process, I ask questions, I help people understand what are the outcomes instead of just trying to think about the outputs that they should deliver at the end of the engagement. I make sure that people understand why they’re there, and I help them, I facilitate a process where they will be able to develop this new capabilities.

    Alexis:

    How long is a residency?

    Mary:

    It can be four weeks or 12 weeks, that’s the range.

    Alexis:

    Okay. And that means over the course of four to 12 weeks in the residency working with you, people will be able to adopt a new way of working after that. And you’ve seen that happening?

    Mary:

    Yeah, several times. And usually at the beginning they tell us at least some of them our way, I don’t see how this is going to happen, but we believe in continuous improvement. We are applying it, since day one we are having a lot of feedback loops to help us learn not only about the process that we are taking and using, but also about technology, about the product that we are building, about our users, about several things. We are always learning in a very short feedback loop, and this is how people can achieve those business outcomes so fast, and also learn a lot of things and develop new capabilities.

    Alexis:

    Impressive. You mentioned before that you were in Germany, I assume that you did residencies in Germany, maybe in other countries in the world. Do you see some cultural difference in how the people adopt that mindset of continuously improve not only the outcomes, but also their way of working?

    Mary:

    Yes, I do. Sometimes I work with teams that they are like very new to Agile and Lean and DevOps, and I… And like for me in this scenario, I think it is easier to help them understand the values and the principles behind it, because they are being exposed to it for the first time. But sometimes depending on the country and the culture, they went through this already and they worked with other companies, or at their previous job they had a lot of issues with Scrum or another framework. And they are very resistant. They’re like, “Oh, I don’t believe in Agile, I don’t think this is a good thing.”

    Mary:

    Usually it is harder when this happens but we try to take a step back, and let them know that it’s not about the framework, it’s not about the method, we could change that, we can give it another name, it doesn’t matter. It is about the principles and the values. When we get to that point it doesn’t matter where in the world we’re working, people are always able to understand. And since we are also focused on business outcomes, we change the conversation to help them to facilitate this process where they will achieve what they’re looking for.

    Alexis:

    Okay. When you say it does not matter where in the world we are working, when people start to really understand and engage with principles and values. Where in the world have you tried that?

    Mary:

    I’ve worked with the team in Indonesia. I also worked with several teams in Brazil, Chile, Mexico. And to be honest since I got here like two months ago, I didn’t have opportunity to run a residency here yet but it will happen soon.

    Alexis:

    Excellent. How many engagement leads do we have in the world?

    Mary:

    I don’t know how to answer that question. Because the team is growing all the time, and I don’t know how many engagement leads we have now. But we have several engagement leads in North America. The team in Latin now is growing fast. I was the first engagement lead there and now we have a very strong team with several engagement leads. Also in the media we have a lot of engagement leads as well. And in the APAC, I couldn’t tell the exact amount, but we are a strong team and we are covering all the regions now.

    Alexis:

    There’s engagement teams all over the world, and you are all using the same approach. Do you improve that approach after each residency? How does that work for you to use your feedback loop improvement approach?

    Mary:

    Yes, of course, we drink our own champagne. That’s how we call it. We have bi weekly calls where we talk about the things that we are learning, and we try to adapt the approach based on the learnings. And we share. We have like weekly reports when someone is running a residency, when an engagement lead is running a residency, he or she is always sharing internally and also with the customer the learnings by sending a weekly report, and telling everything, and sharing also videos, pictures. We could also learn from our experience and from the others as well. It’s awesome because I am always like… Even though I’m not delivering a residency in North America, I can learn from the experience of an engagement lead there and see what is working and what is not working, and apply that here in Germany as well.

    Alexis:

    So you achieved a level of transparency that is really important because, that means that all the people that are working on the same thing can share what they are doing. And I assume that they share what is going well, and also what is not necessarily working well for them, right?

    Mary:

    Yes. And also besides the weekly report and the bi weekly call that we have. There are also the showcases where we invited the customer, and since we are doing the virtual residency now people can attend the showcase virtually. The situation with COVID helped us to attend different showcases around the world, and being closer to teams even though we are in a very different region.

    Alexis:

    Let’s spend some time on that. Can you tell us what is a showcase, and who to go after that on? You really said the pandemic helped us. What is a showcase first?

    Mary:

    Okay. The showcase is a practice that we use at the end of a sprint or a iteration depending on how the team is working. And doing the showcase the team is going to showcase the product increment that they built during the sprint. And besides showing them the product increment, they usually talk about their learnings as well about the process, about automation and other kinds of things that they did during this sprint. And before the pandemic, people were doing showcases in person. So sometimes we wouldn’t like have a camera filming yet so but we were doing it in the room, in a meeting room. And now because of the virtual residency we are doing it online, so people can attend even though they aren’t there.

    Alexis:

    And so you get to a rhythm with the customer and the team involved, that they are okay to showcase their increment of work at the end of the sprint, and they are also ready to showcase their learnings and share that openly with the wider community than only their team?

    Mary:

    Yes.

    Alexis:

    This is really good. In a sense that going to virtual residency, that’s why you said the pandemic elders because I guess everybody was more comfortable to have residencies in person?

    Mary:

    Yes, of course. It helped us to… Like in this case of being able to attend several showcases, but it was a big challenge for us, it was as well another different aspects.

    Alexis:

    At the beginning I guess if I understood well, the residency were all in person. When did you switch to virtual tool?

    Mary:

    When the pandemic started and we couldn’t be together anymore, we had to pivot and find a way of working the same immersive way, the same way we were doing in residency but in a virtual environment. And it was a big challenge, we put a working group together from different regions to create this new product, that is the virtual residency. And we had to adapt to create templates that we could use on Miro, and see how we could facilitate those practices using this remote environment. And how we could make sure the team were working together, we were doing like team building activities even though we weren’t together anymore, we weren’t in the same room. We had several conversations about it, and we are now running several virtual residences. And we did finish some of them as well, and we are improving this new approach. We had success in all of them so far.

    Alexis:

    Thank you very much for telling us more about the open innovation labs and engagement lead role. I think it’s really impressive the way you pivot to via two. And the way you are able to not only use yourself those improvement feedback loops, but to teach that to customers that are not necessarily seeing that as a really incredible positive things at the beginning. But let’s go back to book writing. You told us a little bit more about why you did it. What did you learn in the process of writing that book?

    Mary:

    Okay. That’s a question that I’m going to answer, and then I want to hear your answer as well because I know you’re an author. And I’m always interested learning and knowing more about what people are learning from this process, right? My favorite thing about sharing something is that I get to learn, and it wasn’t different with the book writing. I learned a lot in the process. And one of the biggest lessons for me was to apply what I was doing with product teams in my own life. The principles and values they don’t work only with software development. Once you truly understand what they mean you can finally live by them, and actually we did apply them while writing the book as well.

    Mary:

    I wrote a blog post about how people can apply Agile practices and principles while writing a book, and I tell with a lot of examples how I applied this in this process. But the most important thing for me was this MVP concept, because I was also out, I was always talking about this with product teams. When I was writing the book it was hard for me to apply it, because I wanted it to be perfect. I remember that Paolo, the co-author, Paolo and I we were struggling a lot to come up with a good title and with a good cover. And at some point we noticed that we were putting a lot of energy on it, but we weren’t spending time on what was going to bring more value to writing the book.

    Mary:

    He decided that we should time-box it, and we did. We like “Oh, in 20 minutes we’re going to think about the title and create a cove and that’s it. This is going to be the first title in the first cover, and we can change it later but we are not going to spend more time on it. And that’s what we did. And I remember the Reid Hoffman sentence he says that, “If we you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you will launch it too late.” And I was very embarrassed with the first version of the book because the cover was so ugly, the title was terrible, it was so big that every time I had to talk about the book, I was mentioned a different title because I was confused about the wording. And I was saying a different thing all the time.

    Mary:

    This was the first version and we publish it only by the way. We put it there so people could read and give us feedback. And I was so embarrassed of the first version, but I learned how to apply this to my whole life, into the writing process. And this helped me to relate and to have more empathy when I was having this conversation with product owners or with product teams. And after a while after receiving all the feedback, we were able to come up with a better title, a better cover. And it was fantastic because if we try to do that upfront at the beginning, we would never be able to have this final version of the book that I really like.

    Alexis:

    I really like it. I remember that you said you will answer but I shouldn’t swear too. Oh, it’s odd, I prefer to ask questions. For the first book I think what I really liked was, people were asking me questions and my intent was to find a way to answer those questions in telling a story, in telling what I’ve learned in the process. I think I fell into the perfection trap really, really badly. And I tried for several years to write it. And I changed the angle, I changed everything. The title, the story, I restart from the beginning. And at some point I have said okay, that’s enough. Let’s have a first version out, Leanpub, and let’s see what people would think about it. I learned a lot in the process because yes, as you said, sharing is learning.

    Alexis:

    As soon as you try to explain what you’ve learned, you learn more. You understand better. You connect the dots. There was a lot of things that were, I knew intuitively how to do things. Or I was able to see something, everything. Oh, yeah, let’s do that. Or I was ready to ask good questions, but I didn’t really know why. And though, writing was helping me to already understand and consolidate what I knew. It helped me a lot to be better at what I’m doing. It’s a good thing. You don’t necessarily need to write a book, but at least if you write your journal or if you write two blog posts that will help you to learn. That’s the first thing.

    Alexis:

    And the second thing is, definitely I launched too late. That was a little bit overwhelming for people to give me… To provide me feedback. Because then you have a finished product, where to start. Where to start giving you feedback. You can have really constructive and interesting feedback from all the authors, because they’ve went through that so they know how to give you feedback and they know how to help. You can have also good interesting feedback from book clubs. That’s probably the two sources that gave me a really interesting feedback. And then I worked on the version two with two friends, John Poelstra and Michael Doyle. We worked on it, we already definitely improved it. We worked in an iterative fashion so, and we had our weekly call that was really amazing.

    Alexis:

    We add version two out roughly in the time we said we will have to, that was good. Yep, I launched too late and that was a mistake. I was not able to connect enough with people earlier so they could give me feedback. For the second book I tried to do something different, so the first book was changing your team from the inside. For the second I worked with Michael Doyle, I’m a software engineer and I’m in charge. We wanted really to tell a story and to have a real business fable like the goal, or like the Phoenix project or like the title, no radical focus or there’s a lot of books that our business favorites are. The five dysfunctions of a team or things like that. To help people understand through the story to me really identify themselves to some of the characters in the story, so they can know what to do.

    Alexis:

    By points of view is always whatever your role, you can always have an impact to change things. In that story of the second book we worked on that. I think working with the quarter was really helping, because it pushes you to work in an iterative way, and to have regular check points, and not to spend too much time on things you don’t know. And to try to check that. And so we checked our assumptions with reviewers, we ask people to give us feedback on really pretty minor if they’re shown off. Even just the introduction or the first chapter. And it worked much better, because then we were working not only on our own assumptions, but on the feedback of the default reviewers. And it was interesting because, we were force to accept that there were a thing that we will not make a choice.

    Alexis:

    There was reviewers that were saying, “Oh, yeah, I think you should start with the story. I don’t care about that small paragraph that you put at the beginning, that is telling me why I should care about reading that chapter.” And there was also people saying, “Oh, yeah, that’s really great that you have that small paragraph that is telling why we should care about the chapter. I think it set context really clearly for the story.” And so you have opposite feedback from the reviewers, and you’re looking at it say, “Okay, what can we do now?” We cannot take into account all of them, but at least we understand why some people like that, and why some people don’t like that. I think the learning thought was, you need really to release often and early, and you need to have the group of people that are diverse enough that they will give you really that different feedback. So sorry, that was a long guns fire. I was not really not ready to answer a question now. What do you think?

    Mary:

    That’s awesome. I love their experience, and it is very similar to some of the things that I learned as well while I was writing this book.

    Alexis:

    I checked a while ago and the book is in Portuguese, right?

    Mary:

    mm-hmm (affirmative).

    Alexis:

    Have you planned to have the book in all the languages?

    Mary:

    Yes. Paulo Carolee and I, we are translating the book to English now. Time is an issue, and the process is lower than we wanted because I moved, relocated from Brazil to Germany, and I spent a lot of time dealing with this relocation. So the process is slower than we wanted, but we are working on it and we want to publish the English version early next year.

    Alexis:

    Excellent. Now delivered in Portuguese is not good enough for me to read the book entirely in Portuguese, I can read blurbs of it but not the whole book I think.

    Mary:

    We are also planning to publish a version in Spanish, but I don’t know when this is going to happen because we are prioritizing the English version now.

    Alexis:

    Okay, that’s really good. What else do you want to share with the audience today?

    Mary:

    I think I already mentioned this during the whole conversation, but as you can see, for me it’s really important to continue… The continuous improvement it is very important to me, and I’m very glad that I get to do this at work every day. Like as part of the open innovation labs team as an engagement lead, working for Red Hat I get to do this every day and I love this. I love that I am able to understand why I’m doing things that I know the outcomes of my work, and that I have this clarity about it. I wanted to share this experience with people because I’ve been the other side, I know how frustrating it can be when you don’t know why you’re doing things. Or when you don’t understand it, when you don’t know to more building it for.

    Mary:

    I understand that feeling and I want to share with people that they can maybe use the open practice library, that’s something that we use a lot as the open innovation labs. And we put there a lot of different practices that people can use to understand their business outcomes that they want to achieve. Or also practices to set the foundation to work as a high performing team. There are different practices there. I use a lot of them. And there are a few practices that I have to put there that I created. But if you’re really focusing on continuous improvement, and trying different things and learning from your mistakes, then you’re always getting better. And this is like the big message I want to send with the book, and with pretty much everything I do.

    Alexis:

    I love it, and I assume that open practice library mean that we can contribute to it?

    Mary:

    Yes.

    Alexis:

    If you add practices you can contribute there?

    Mary:

    Yes, it is an open… Sorry, open source with repository, so you can also submit your practices there.

    Alexis:

    Really cool. I know the opportunity to learn from sharing. Thank you very much Mary for being on the podcast today.

    Mary:

    Yeah. I want to thank you for inviting me to record this podcast, and to give me this space to talk a little bit about myself, to talk about the book, and to share some of the things that I learned in this journey so far. So, I hope you all enjoyed and thank you again.

    Alexis:

    Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to blog-blog-alexis.monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode, and to find more tips to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback, or just to say hello. And until next time to find better ways of changing your team.

    The music is Funkorama by Kevin MacLeod (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0)

    The header picture is from Riccardo Annandale.

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • Radical Focus: OKRs, Cadence, and the “Seduction of the Task”

    Radical Focus: OKRs, Cadence, and the “Seduction of the Task”

    OKRs are often presented as a goal-setting tool.

    Christina Wodtke’s perspective is sharper: OKRs are a way to create focus, alignment, and learning — as long as you avoid a common trap: setting goals and forgetting them.

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, I had the pleasure of welcoming Christina Wodtke, author of Radical Focus and The Team That Manages Itself, lecturer at Stanford, and long-time builder of teams and products in companies such as Yahoo!, Zynga, and LinkedIn.

    OKRs in one sentence

    Christina describes the objective as a qualitative goal:

    A mission for three months.

    Then key results answer a simple question:

    How would we know we actually fulfilled that mission?

    The key shift is moving from tasks to outcomes.

    If a key result reads like “install a new CRM”, Christina pushes the conversation further:

    What would be different in the world if that CRM were installed?

    That is where the key result belongs: outcomes that help you evaluate impact, explore alternatives, and avoid mistaking activity for progress.

    Christina has a phrase I plan to reuse a thousand times:

    Avoid the seduction of the task.

    The real power of OKRs is cadence

    One of the strongest points in the conversation is that OKRs are not “set and forget”.

    Christina insists that what makes OKRs work is cadence:

    • weekly check-ins to ask what is moving you closer to the goal
    • regular celebration of progress
    • a retrospective to learn what slows you down and what speeds you up

    This cadence creates organizational learning, and learning is what keeps teams competitive.

    Why a fable?

    Radical Focus is written as a fable, and Christina explains why.

    Stories teach better than facts alone. They help people recognize themselves in real mistakes and real tensions. They also increase retention and comprehension because human beings learned through storytelling long before we learned through writing.

    A surprising side effect of fiction is that readers often learn things the author didn’t explicitly intend to teach, because stories create layers of meaning.

    OKRs are not only for startups, but cascading doesn’t scale

    Christina is currently working on an updated edition of Radical Focus. One major reason is that many people using OKRs are not startups.

    In larger organizations, cascading becomes a problem. In some companies, it can take weeks, which defeats the purpose.

    Christina’s alternative is alignment:

    • the company sets the strategic direction
    • teams decide how they can contribute based on their role and context

    She also makes an important point: OKRs don’t work well in command-and-control cultures. If OKRs are used to squeeze productivity, tied to compensation, or imposed as “make it or else”, they become an anti-OKR and invite sandbagging or cheating.

    Her framing is very simple:

    If you are hiring A players, why not let them be A players?

    When OKRs are useful and when KPIs are better

    Christina offers a practical lens using the BCG portfolio model:

    • question marks are a great space for exploratory OKRs
    • stars benefit from OKRs because growth and learning still matter
    • cash cows often don’t need OKRs and can move to KPIs
    • dogs also fit better with KPIs and clear thresholds for when to stop

    A subtle but important idea emerges here:

    Sometimes the humane choice is to reach a high level of performance and then stay there. Not everything needs endless growth.

    Individual OKRs usually backfire

    Christina is very direct on individual OKRs: she has rarely seen them end well.

    The two big issues:

    • it is hard to keep them truly separate from compensation and pressure
    • the cognitive load becomes too high when you stack company, department, team, and individual OKRs

    Exceptions exist:

    • a “business unit of one” role might experiment with them carefully
    • personal OKRs set by individuals can work well, especially with an accountability group

    For performance management, Christina suggests separating what is often muddled together:

    • fulfilling the role you were hired for
    • contribution to shared goals
    • growth of skills and knowledge
    • contribution to the culture (mentoring, hiring, collaboration)

    OKRs are one tent pole, teams are the rest

    Christina frames high performing teams through three areas:

    • goals
    • roles
    • norms

    Goals are where OKRs help.

    Roles and norms are what make the team capable of delivering without constant management. When norms support feedback, conflict becomes workable instead of destructive. Psychological safety becomes something the team practices weekly, not something you hope for.

    This connects to Christina’s other book, The Team That Manages Itself, and to a view of leadership that feels closer to “first among equals” than command and control.

    Bonus: drawing, learning, and pareidolia

    We also detour into one of Christina’s other passions: drawing.

    Her point is practical and liberating: you don’t need to draw well. Humans are pattern-matching creatures. Even rough drawings can communicate clearly.

    She mentions pareidolia, our tendency to see meaning and faces in simple shapes. It is a permission slip to start drawing, and to start sharing ideas visually without waiting to be “good”.

    She ends with a line that sticks:

    Doodling is a joy.

    Listen to the episode here or on your favorite podcast platform:

    If you are hiring A-players, why don’t let them be A-players?

    References:

    Here is the transcript:

    Alexis:

    Hey Christina, can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

    Christina:

    I definitely took the scenic route to get where I am today. So, I actually went to art school and changed from painting to photography because all the painting professors were abstract expressionists, and I wanted to work realistically. That’s when I first discovered computers. There were Macs there, and I started becoming interested in… This was before Photoshop, I was working on manipulating digital imagery.

    Christina:

    Then after I graduated, I moved to San Francisco thinking I was going to work in computers, but ended up going back to painting and basically painted and waited tables for several years. One day, a friend of my current boyfriend said, “Hey, we’re building a Yahoo killer. Would you like to help?” I said, “Sure.” I just fell in love with the web. I was reviewing 50 websites a week, and just the amazingness of it.

    Christina:

    Not to tell the background story in too long, but once I started falling in love with the web, I started learning how to code, became a programmer, then switched over to an information architect because I was very interested in why websites are so terrible, basically. Became an interaction designer, then became… So, I was starting to move up, and I was like, “Okay, maybe if I’m a manager, I can make better websites. I can make things work better on the web.” I’ve been an entrepreneur a couple of times, starting a couple of different companies. I started a nonprofit. My question is always why aren’t things better? Why do we launch things that we’re not happy with? Why is it so hard to work with other people? I’ve worked at Zynga and Myspace and LinkedIn and obviously Yahoo! I’ve worked as a consultant with people like the New York Times.

    Christina:

    When you go into this new thing, if only I could be in charge, I could do things better than everybody else. What I’ve really learned is that you need great teams, everything happens. So if you don’t know how to work with other people, if you don’t know how to connect to people, you really can’t get anything significant done. Of course, there’s single people who will build a cool game here or there or a cool website there. But if you really want to make a difference in the world, you have to figure out, “How can I work with other people?”

    Christina:

    That question has driven a lot of my work with OKRs and with high-performing teams, trying to figure out how do we make everything better for people? How do we make work better for people who work? How do we make the websites, the applications, the software that we interact with so much these days, how do we make it more humane? I’m now a lecturer at Stanford, teaching HCI, human computer interaction, still asking the same question I did way back in 1998. How do we make stuff suck less for the human beings that are affected by it?

    Alexis:

    I think that’s a great mission. I hope that there will be a lot of people that will follow your course. Christina, you’re also the author of a book that I already love and I recommended that book to a lot of people. The book is Radical Focus. I need to move a Post-it on the book to read the subtitle. It’s Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results. I left the book on my desk when I was traveling abroad, when I was in the US at that time. When I come back, I said, “No, that’s weird. I thought there was a book somewhere.”

    Alexis:

    I said, “Okay.” I forgot about it. A few days later, the book came back on my desk and with the Post-it notes, and it was mentioned, “Alexis, [french Language 00:05:17].” Of course, I’m French. People will probably recognize my accent. The book enjoyed traveling to India and back, and is looking forward to attract new friends. I love Wodtke’s approach. That was a great background. Jeff.” I was thinking, “Yeah, that’s cool.” Now, I have the proof point that the book is really cool and really great and really important. First of all, I’ve said objectives and key results, or OKRs. How would you explain OKRs?

    Christina:

    Well, thank you for that incredibly kind story. That just makes my day. So, OKRs, I always joke that I was writing a book about an acronym, and the only way I could make it interesting was to tell a story because I love OKRs. I think they can be really transformative to a person or a company. I’ve seen it over and over again. A lot of folks really focus on the OKR part, the objective and key results.

    Christina:

    So the objective is qualitative. It’s an inspirational goal. Sometimes I talk about it saying, “It’s a mission for three months.” Every company has a five-year mission or a mission statement. If you could make a mission statement for just a quarter, what would it be? It has to inspire people. Then you have the key results, which answer the question, how would we know, how would we know if we’d actually fulfilled this mission that we’re setting for ourselves over this three months? What would change in the world? What numbers would move? You have to avoid the seduction of the task, right? It’s very tempting to put down things you’ll do. If you do that, you might not get the results you want.

    Christina:

    So when I work with clients, I often say, “Okay, if you build this” … Let’s say somebody wrote for a key result, they wrote, “Install a new CRM.” I’m like, “Okay. So, what do you think would happen if you install this new CRM?” They’d say, “Oh, well, we would get better returns from our existing customers.” I’m like, “Well, how much more?” Have them guess at that, and I’m like, “There’s your key result.” Our current customers return back to us 20% more often. Then you can say, “Well, is the CRM really the best way to do it, or are there other things we could try?”

    Christina:

    So, by setting this qualitative and quantitative goal, you can unite the company. If you think about it, if you talk to the Biz Dev folks or maybe sales, they’re all about the numbers. We want to move these numbers. If you talk to design or customer service or other folks, they maybe care more about making a difference in the world, making a better experience for people, creating a better community.

    Christina:

    So, the OKR format really does unite these different points of view, so that everybody gets pointed in the same direction. By setting the objective and key results as the outcomes, I know in the lean community and other product manager communities, we talk a lot about outcomes over output. Output is just doing stuff and hoping something happened. Outcome is like, “We want to move these numbers. We want to make a difference in the world. Therefore, we’re going to think through all the different ways we can do it. We’ll guess how likely we think it will work. We’ll start running experiments to get smarter.” It’s just a better way to work if impact is your goal. If impact isn’t your goal, well, I’m not sure why you’re still in business, but this is a really desired thing.

    Christina:

    So, the thing to know about OKRs is that they’re not like a smart goal. Just setting and forgetting is dangerous. That’s the biggest danger you have. So, some people will spend tons of time word crafting, word crafting, getting just the right numbers, looking up everything. Then they’ll set that OKR, and then they’ll forget about it within a couple of weeks because the world is full of shiny objects. There’s always somebody yelling at you. There’s always an emergency. There’s always something on fire, literally, for me right now, unfortunately, since I’m in California. So, how do you make sure you still are doing the most important strategic things, despite the chaos of everyday life?

    Christina:

    The thing that makes OKRs great is that cadence. It’s all about the cadence. It’s that weekly… Looking at your goals and saying, “What are we doing to get closer to those goals?” On Fridays celebrating, “Look, we’re getting closer to our goals.” Then the retrospective at the end to learn what slows us down and what speeds us up. So, the cadence of the OKRs also create amazing organizational learning. That organizational learning is what keeps you competitive in the market.

    Alexis:

    I love it.

    Christina:

    [crosstalk 00:10:13]

    Alexis:

    The fact that we are aiming for an impact, it’s something really important. You can see that as an individual, as a team, as a company and as a society. You said avoiding the seduction of the task. I think I will reuse that 1000 time now. That’s really interesting. I would like to ask you, the book is a fable. What was the driver for you to use a fable?

    Christina:

    I’m a big fan of business fables and case studies, to be honest. I mean, HBR, the Harvard Business Review, used to open every magazine with a case study. I’d always be really excited to read it, to hear the stories of people struggling with the same questions I had. Then of course, Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team is a wonderful book, the goal. The Phoenix Project is another good one.

    Christina:

    So, I’m actually fond of this little, tiny, weird sub genre. I love fiction. I love stories. When I was a nerdy kid growing up, I read Lord of the Rings in the seventh grade. So, I found out recently that Reid Hoffman reads Lord of the Rings every year, which I think is wild. He was, of course, the CEO and founder of LinkedIn. He was one of the founders of PayPal. Now, he’s a VC dude. Stories are more important to us than we think they are.

    Christina:

    So, I thought if I could just show people this mistake that so many people make, which is set and forget, if I can show a small company that’s easily recognizable, and I don’t know how well you know the Silicon Valley, if you read it closely, you can probably guess where a lot of people said, “Oh, I know the Starbucks where they meet, the VC. I know that Starbucks.” So I really wanted to put a lot of places into it that would be recognizable.

    Christina:

    Through that journey that you go along with Hannah and Jack, you actually can see why they make the mistakes they make and how they fix it and how they get to where they are. I think a story is just a really great way to do it. What I didn’t know is that some people… So, when you write straight non-fiction, which is what my first book was, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web, you learn exactly what people tell you to learn. But when you write fiction, you put in a world and you put in trouble and you put in challenges.

    Christina:

    I had an email recently from a reader who said, “I am so grateful to the part where Hannah fires that jerk.” The programmer, who’s messing with the code. He says, “Because I had to fire someone who was like that, and I didn’t know how to handle it.” When he saw how Hannah handled it, it really helped him. So, I think there’s a richness in fiction and ability to put in layers of meaning that you might not be able to do with nonfiction. Then the second half of course is where I just lay it out really simply and cleanly for people who want the cheat sheet of how to do it.

    Alexis:

    Excellent. This is really funny because I was thinking about business fable that I love. On my notes, I wrote The Goal, the Five Dysfunctions of a Team, The Phoenix Project. I had one more. I will give it to you because if you didn’t read that one, I think it’s a good one. It’s The Gold Mine by Michael Balle, a book about someone we will discover. It’s a manufacturing book. So, the setting is different. It’s trade industry. But I think it’s really a good one. I love fable.

    Alexis:

    It’s interesting that you said your first book was not a fable and your second one is a fable. When I wrote my first book, Changing Your Team From the Inside, I tried to be really serious about change. For the second one, I tried to learn from my mistakes in the first one. It’s a combination of a fable with experiments that people can try. So, I would like to interview readers to understand what they learn. That’s not a book about learning how to fire jerks, but that’s really interesting that someone can pick that. That’s a good one. That shows that the story is real. I wanted to know the end of the story, I was reading it. I was not able to stop because I want to know what happens next.

    Christina:

    Well, that’s the other thing is like, we learn better when we’re enjoying learning. So, I teach at Stanford. That means I spend quite a bit of time digging into learning theory. Stories are actually a better way to learn because of how our brains are set up to learn. I’ve seen that people say, if all of human history was a clock, right, a 24-hour clock, we’ve only started writing things down at 11:00 PM, which means that for thousands and thousands of years, the only way we could pass on knowledge, the way that we made sure people knew, donate those berries, they’ll make you sick, or stay out of that cave. There’s a big, fluffy thing with claws. Don’t go the, was storytelling. That’s how we learned. So, our brains are literally evolved to learn from stories.

    Christina:

    Using a fable is just taking advantage of how we’re hard wired to learn. It has a downside, too, that’s why if you have the anti-vaxxers, and they’re telling stories about this one kid who apparently became autistic, that’s going to be more powerful than a ton of facts. What I found over time is that if you can take facts and you wrap them in story, that people enjoy learning more, and they have higher comprehension and they have higher retention. So storytelling, it’s just better. It’s better for you. It’s better for me. It’s better for everyone.

    Alexis:

    In the book. The story’s about a startup. Do you think OKRs are only for startup, or do you see them being useful in other kind of environment?

    Christina:

    That’s such a good question. I told you, I’m writing 2.0 of Radical Focus. The number one reason I’m doing it is because so many people are not startups, and they’re trying to use it. Some of the techniques that were designed for startups don’t scale very well to larger companies. So, I realized I wrote it, what, five years ago? It seems like forever. Since then, I’ve had a lot of people come to me, big companies, small companies, struggling to figure out how to make certain things work with OKRs, working with them, trying different things. I’ve managed to come up with several techniques for larger companies.

    Christina:

    One of the more obvious examples would be the problem of cascading. So, if you’re in a little startup, then you have one, maybe two layers of management, cascading is not a big deal. You figure out your company, OKR, and then you figure out the team OKRs, and you’d go to town, you’re done. When you have multiple layers of hierarchy, you can’t possibly cascade. I’ve heard stories of large companies where it would take them a month to cascade. At that point, you’ve lost a third of your quarter to be able to execute. That’s ridiculous. At which point you want to move away from cascading and much more towards alignment, where the company sets the goal and then you trust the people underneath you to say, “What can we do as an organization or a group to help the company meet its goal?” If you can’t meet this quarter’s company’s goals, what is the appropriate thing to set, considering your function, your role within an organization? That was a big one where it just doesn’t work at all.

    Christina:

    I’ve been talking a lot to Marty Cagan. He was really kind and contributing to the book. He and I have both come to the same conclusion, which is if you’re an organization that is really all about command and control, OKRs are probably not going to be for you. We see a lot of people trying to use OKRs just to squeeze a little more productivity out of people. That’s not what they’re for. More times, it ends up with cheating. So, if you think about the Volkswagen scandal or the Wells Fargo scandal, those weren’t OKRs per se, but they were ridiculously difficult numerical goals that were handed from the top down, that were tied to people’s livelihood. You don’t get your bonus. You might lose your job if you can’t fulfill these goals that can’t be fulfilled, at which point people turned to cheating because they didn’t really have a lot of choices.

    Christina:

    So, in these really nasty companies, setting really ridiculous goals from the top down and saying, “Make it or else,” that’s like an anti-OKR. If an OKR could have a dark twin, an evil twin version of itself, it would be that. Where OKRs are much better at is saying, “Here’s what we want to see, figure out what you can do about it. We empower you.” Marty’s next book is going to be called Empowered. I’m really excited by it because I think that’s a message that more people need to hear, work is much more satisfying, much more pleasurable when somebody says, “Hey, here’s this ridiculous thing. I trust you to see what you can do with it. If you don’t make it, well, I’m going to believe that you tried your best.” A little more faith, a little more trust. If you’re hiring A players, why not let them be A players, right?

    Alexis:

    Absolutely. So that’s neither a top-down system, neither a totally bottom-up system. It’s something that is both a top-down and bottom-up, and people will figure out how they can contribute to achieve those higher-levels objectives. There’s the kind of reconciliation in between?

    Christina:

    Yes, exactly. When your company says, “This is our most important strategic initiative, this is the thing that we’re going to move into the European market, or we’re going to move out of B2B to B2C,” whatever strategic goal the company has, then everybody can ask themselves, “What does that mean for us? How can we contribute?” I will go even farther. I think that there’s always a possibility that there’s some groups that don’t actually need OKRs. The legal team, are they really constantly striving to be better? Or is there a level where they’re like, “Yeah, we’re good. We’re solid.” Or maybe the finance department, maybe they might do one OKR one quarter because they feel like they’re not being responsive enough or people are complaining about them. But once you’ve gotten good, there’s no higher level to take it.

    Christina:

    I don’t know what it’s like in France as much. But I do know in America, we seem to think the sky’s the limit, that things can always grow endlessly, and everything can be better. I think that can be very grueling on people. I think it can be disheartening on people. So, getting yourself to a really high level of performance and then staying there, moving away from OKRs and maybe just to KPIs. So you’re measuring, so you know if something’s changing or if things are getting worse, sometimes there are groups who go into a steady state, and that’s okay. That should be actually quite okay.

    Christina:

    Businesses need to be a little more humane. OKRs are really good at strategy because that’s the space where we’re asking, “What’s possible? What could we do here? When is the market actually saturated? What is the answer to these questions that we or a company are asking?” So I don’t think that every group, and maybe not even every company should have OKRs.

    Alexis:

    So, if there’s no behavioral change anymore that is needed, you don’t need OKRs. That’s an interesting perspective.

    Christina:

    Yeah. It’s a little different. But I think it’s a little saner, perhaps. The other thing that I’ve been working with, with companies is thinking about the relationship of strategy and OKRs. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the old Boston Consulting Group, 2×2, where they talked about how the dogs-

    Alexis:

    Yeah.

    Christina:

    Yes, exactly. So, if you think about it, if you have this complete unknown space, that’s the potential. You don’t know what’s really there. It’s a question mark. You have high hopes, but you don’t know. That’s a great place to do exploratory OKRs or hypothesis OKRs, where you say… instead of saying to go back and to moving into a new market, maybe your objective is have a product that resonates with Mexico. Then we say, “Okay. How are we going define resonate? Is it going to be a NPS? Is it going to be units moved? Is it going to be star ratings on Amazon or whatnot?” You come up with your OKRs, but you’ll notice that it just says, “Have a product.” It’s very open and very loose. At which point, then people can just run tons of experiments until they find the thing.

    Christina:

    So that’s a place where you can start finding your product market fit and use the OKRs to know when to stop. I know a lot of startups and innovation groups. The question is, how long do we keep up this thing? When do we say, “Okay, let’s cut our losses. Let’s get out?” So, the OKRs then create this cadence that allows you at the end of the quarter to say, “Do we want to keep working on this? Have we learned anything new? Is it time to pivot, or is it time to shut it down?” So, that’s good.

    Christina:

    With stars where you don’t know where the top is. You’ve got this really successful product. That’s going crazy. That’s a great place for OKRs because I don’t care if we keep pushing, pushing. Let it grow bigger, let it get better. But then when you get to the cash cows, which are a market that you’ve put a really strong product into, it’s not really growing anymore. Maybe you’ve been trying a bunch of things with OKRs and you can’t move the needle. You’re like, “Okay, let’s just move to KPIs. Let’s leave a handful of solid people. Let’s make as much money as we can as long as the going is good.” They don’t need OKRs, and dogs don’t. Maybe there was something that was working really, really well. Now everybody’s moved on. Maybe it’s a fax machine. There’s no growth in that market. There’s a little bit of money to be made still, but it’s going down. That’s another place where you have the KPIs. When it goes into the red, when it costs more money to keep it alive than it does that you’re making off of it, then you can put it to bed.

    Christina:

    So, you really want to be thinking about your entire product portfolio when you’re a larger company because you want to think where is growth possible and where am I just extracting value? It’s the old explore-exploit question.

    Alexis:

    OKRs for companies, for teams that wants to grow, what is your perspective on using OKRs for team members, for individuals, for people themselves?

    Christina:

    I got to tell you, for five years, I’ve seen people try it, and it just never ends well. There’s a couple of exceptions. So, let’s start with why it doesn’t end. When a upper manager is giving people an OKR, it’s really hard to say your compensation isn’t going to be tied to this OKR. That’s one of the things that if you do tie compensation to the OKR, that’s where we get into the situation of either you end up sandbagging the OKRs, you set them so low, you could easily make them, or you get into a situation where you’re being asked to do something ridiculous. Because your livelihood is on the line, your ability to feed your family is on the line, you are going to cheat. So, individual OKRs usually are terrible.

    Christina:

    The other reason is if you think about an individual within an organization, they’ve got the company OKR to think of. So that’s probably, if you have one objective and three key results, that’s four items you have to hold in your head. What’s really nice about OKR is whenever you’re trying to decide, “Where do I spend my time,” you can just say, “Oh, well, this quarter, the company is trying to do this. So I should really put the bulk of my work week towards that.” So, you’ve got the four things at the company level. Let’s say, you’ve got four things at the department level, and then you’ve got four things at the team level. Then you’ve got your four items. That’s too much stuff to hold in our brain. Our working memory just can’t hold that much stuff.

    Christina:

    There’s a reason I called my book Radical Focus, and I didn’t call it a guide to OKRs. It’s because it’s really, really important to say this is the single most important thing. Just for the sanity of it, just to simplify matters. I don’t think you should have individual OKRs. What are the exceptions? Exceptions are, if you have an individual that’s also basically a business unit of one, let’s say, you’ve hired a growth hacker, you can probably just set the rates, set the salary and say, “Here’s your goals. Let’s see what we can do.” But again, you can’t tie any compensation to it. It’s more a way of saying, “Okay, what’s possible here?” Again, I don’t super love that one. It’s slightly better. I have seen that one work.

    Christina:

    The other thing I have seen work really well is when individual human beings decide to set personal OKRs. This quarter, I’m going to work on taking care of my back because I’m spending so much time on screens because we’re all working from home. I’m finally going to get ergonomic. Letting individual people set their own OKRs, that they then either hold themselves accountable, or they are a part of an accountability group, that seems to work just fine. But I think the manager, individual relationship, when I tell people this, they’re like, “Well, how do I do performance management?” I’m like, “Oh my god. Okay. I can’t believe you don’t know how to do performance management, but sure. Let’s talk about that.”

    Christina:

    When you think about performance management, you want to think, “Okay, I hired you for a role. How well are you fulfilling that role?” There’s just a bunch of stuff you have to do as a manager. You’re a manager of a engineering team. You’re still going to have to give people feedback and manage projects and stuff like that. So, you’ve got fulfilling the role. You have contributions towards the OKRs. That’s a way of thinking of it.

    Christina:

    What amazing thing happened? Maybe, we were trying to go to the moon, and we didn’t make it to the moon, but we’ve now got Tang, and we’ve got Velcro, and that’s awesome, too. So let’s celebrate those contributions. Then you want to think about knowledge and skill growth, and have your people commit to some personal professional growth. You want to be growing your people. That’s something I personally believe in. It’s not necessary for everyone, but I think if you’re helping people become the kind of people they want to be, the kind of person that will benefit the company, let people study negotiation strategies or let them explore a new framework for engineering. Did you make time to grow? Did I, as your manager, allow you to make time to grow? That’s sometimes a good piece of the puzzle. Some of the companies I’ve worked with have added a fourth piece, which is, “Are you fulfilling the culture that we want to have? Are you helping hire? Are you mentoring other people? Are you pair programming? Whatever.

    Christina:

    One of the things about performance reviews that makes them hard is, again, the set and forget. We write up a job description. Maybe we steal it off the web, and then, we forget about it. So, when it’s time to do performance review, you’re actually asking yourself, “Do I feel good about this guy? Does he seem like he’s doing good stuff for us?” Sure. Okay. That’s fine. It’s one of the reasons I wrote the team that manages itself, it was really a followup to Radical Focus because OKRs aren’t everything. There’s part of the puzzle.

    Christina:

    So, yay, you’ve got OKRs, but you also have to figure out how do you make sure the roles on the team are really clear. Are you writing the job descriptions? Are you managing people? Are you supporting them? Then, are you creating a culture of high performance? Are you dealing with culture clashes? I mean, here I am talking to you. You have a French background. I have an Iowa background. Our teams look like that now, they’re European, they’re Asian. So, we really have to think about how are all these different cultures coming together to work effectively. So, OKRs are just one of, I think, the three tent poles of a high-performing team.

    Alexis:

    That conversation about personal goals was bringing us nicely to your second book, your third book, I think. The team that managed itself. Goals are not everything. The way to achieve goals is to have a real interesting, important team, and having people that are able to work as a team. When you said a team that managed itself, does that mean that there’s no managers needed anymore?

    Christina:

    I think that, yes, actually. I do think that it’s good to have a leader of some sort, a tiebreaker, somebody who can have time to manage up. It’s a real thing. But I think if you have a highly, a very healthy team, they manage themselves. They really do. When I was doing a ton of research, I already had my own personal experiences working in tech for, gosh, I don’t know how long, since ’95, before I switched over to academia, about five, six years ago. I realized that the people who really accomplish things through high-performing teams had some similar characteristics. Then I did a literature review, looking at books like The Fearless Organization, which is a wonderful book about psychological safety, the wisdom of teams. I think that’s one of the best books on teams.

    Christina:

    I’ve written a bunch of academic papers and just did a synthesis of all that, and came up with these three key areas, which are goals, roles, and norms. So goals, OKRs, that’s great. Do you have clearly defined roles that people have, that they’re accountable for? Are they growing in it? We’re really talking about hiring, firing and feedback here, especially that last one feedback. People tend to be conflict averse. They’re not always very good at giving the kind of feedback that they need to. Then the last one is norms. How do we interact with each other? As I was saying earlier, we have all these different cultures working together in a company, but I would argue even different companies have different cultures.

    Christina:

    So, when I worked at Yahoo!, the number one thing in the employee surveys were always, I love my teammates. We all love each other. It’s such a wonderful place to work. But it was very passive aggressive. There was no overt conflict. So, if you wanted to get something done, you had to go have a personal conversation with everybody. When I went to Zynga, I was in shock because they weren’t passive, aggressive, they were aggressive, aggressive. It was like another… A general manager would come up to you and say, “I’m going to take your game away from you. Or we’re going to crush you in these numbers.” It’s a real challenging. This is such a different culture.

    Christina:

    I’ve been in companies where all meetings start 10 minutes late, and I’ve been in cultures where every meeting starts on time. So taking the time to say, as a team, “Who are we? How are we going to interact with each other? How are we going to disagree? How are we going to make decisions?” That commitment to doing that followed up with a retrospective every week, remember cadence is everything, allows you to reduce the conflict and increase the output. Also, it helps keep people from quitting because if you’re working in a wonderful team, where you really feel listened to and you feel supported and you have the psychological safety, you’re not going to gamble that on another company.

    Christina:

    So, there’s so many reasons to set up a good, healthy culture. Yeah, OKRs are not a silver bullet. They don’t do everything. They’re really a great way to set goals and make goals, but without a healthy team, without the right people in it, you can’t accomplish it. They’re not standalone. They’re not a one-stop fix.

    Alexis:

    Do you feel that the people in the team, when they are clear on their norms, they know how to communicate out, to deal with conflict, how the acceptable behavior is defined? They know what their roles, and they know what is the roles of others. Do you feel it’s enough for them to be able then to manage themselves?

    Christina:

    Oh, yes. I think that’s the heart and the beating heart of a high-performing team is that they don’t need to be managed. If you think about it, like ask yourself, “What does a manager do?” Well, do they make sure everybody’s doing their job? Do you really need that if you’re hiring A players? Again, if you’re very careful about your hire, you’re hiring the right people that are really smart and strong. They’re motivated to do great work. They want to be at your company because they’re excited by it. It doesn’t matter if you’re making mechanical keyboards or a social network. People are excited to do that kind of work. There’s a lot of studies that show that people want meaning from their work. It makes them happy. So, you’ve got this team that knows what their roles are.

    Christina:

    Then being able to have a conversation around feedback is really critical. So, you think of managers doing what else. They’re hiring? Well, the team can get together as a group and say, “Here’s what we think we need from the new role.” Then, you headed off to HR to find people or do it yourself. It doesn’t matter. If you think about what a manager does in weekly check-ins, well, if you’re doing retrospectives weekly, and you’re talking about what’s working and what’s not working, if you have a healthy enough relationship, where I can come up to you and say, “Alexis, you were interrupting me in that meeting, and it doesn’t make me feel comfortable enough to be able to share new ideas. I just wanted to point this out to you because it’s making it hard for me to work with you.”

    Christina:

    If you have that level of psychological safety, where people can bring up conflicts like that, and actually work through them very quickly, that works really well. At which point then the manager becomes really… I’ve heard it called first among equals. I’ve heard it called service leadership. I like to just think of it as moving from being a manager to being a leader, instead of managing people. You’re really there to remind people, “Don’t forget, this is the goal we’re heading towards. Let me make sure that other parts of the company know what we’re trying to accomplish. Let me spend some time with the CEO or the general manager, and make sure that our group is doing what the company needs to do.” But it’s a very, very different role than the command and control, and “I’m going to boss you around.”

    Christina:

    If you can do that, just imagine how much head space is freed up for that leader. Now, instead of dashing around trying to solve, “Oh, I don’t know, I didn’t get the mock-ups from the designer,” all these little fusses and fights. If you’re freed up from that, you can spend time doing things like strategy and competitive analysis, and looking into new markets. It’s such a waste of our time to try to dash from person to person, just trying to Band-Aid an unhealthy team. Instead, you want to move your team into a strong, healthy team so that you can spend time on much more meaningful activities.

    Alexis:

    Oh, yeah. I totally agree with that. This is impressive how you’re summing up that very nicely.

    Christina:

    Well, I’ve talked a little bit about the second edition. While I’m coming back to it, I’ve talked a little bit about how I’m bringing in strategy and such. The team that manages itself is actually my fourth book, believe it or not. So, I don’t know if you know this, but I had started writing the team that manages itself. Then, I have a developmental editor that I love working with, Cathy Yardley. She got breast cancer, needed to go to treatment. Thanks to our fabulous American health care system, had to take a full-time job for a while to pay for her treatment. I’m so glad that she got better. I think we live in a time of miracles, medically, but the miracles have a price in America.

    Christina:

    So, I put aside the team that managed itself, and I wrote a book that I felt didn’t need a traditional development editor. I did do peer reviews because I’m a big fan of working lean with my books. It’s called Pencil Me In. It’s all about the importance of drawing your ideas. So, the first half of the book teaches you how to draw. The second half teaches you what to draw, things like personas and various different kinds of models and org charts and wireframes and all the things that people like to do. A lot of really great folks contributed the drawings they do. I have some wonderful sketches from game designers, Alex Osterwalder, who wrote the Business Model Generation book. He also gave me an essay and some of his drawings. You know he’s very, very visual. All his books are very visual.

    Christina:

    It was just a fun thing to do that was different than the fables. It was a bit of a… It was a labor of love. I’ve never been so happy while writing a book. Then when Cathy got better, we dove back into the team that managed itself. I always like to point it out because I’m very fond of it. I feel grateful to folks like Teresa Torres, who are now using it in her product management trainings as well because I think that none of us have to become great artists, but a little bit of facility with drawing. Just enough, so you’re not afraid to get up on the whiteboard and share what you’re thinking about. It makes all the difference in the world.

    Alexis:

    Now I have another book on my reading list. I’m really thankful for that. I love reading. Yeah, drawing is always the thing that… I love to draw things, to explain things on whiteboard or wherever. People are always saying, “Oh, yeah. Your drawings are so nice. How do you do it?” I’m always thinking, “No, my drawings are really crappy,” but that’s not the problem. I’m just doing it. That’s just the difference between not doing it and doing it. So, if there’s a book that can help people feel more comfortable just to start, just to try, that would be nice. If I can give them some tips, I will be happy to help more people to today how to draw things. So that’s a good recommendation. I love it.

    Christina:

    I agree completely. What’s funny is nobody expects you to sit down in front of a piano, having never played and be able to put out some show pawn, right? Everybody’s like, “Oh, I can’t draw. It’s so embarrassing.” You have to learn, you have to practice. You have to teach your hand how to obey your brain. It’s not a lot of learning. It’s much easier than piano, I would argue. But you can at least get to chopsticks and do a lot. I think human beings are really interesting.

    Christina:

    I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this, it’s called a pareidolia. But it’s our ability to see faces and other patterns and everything. So, if you ever looked at the front of a car and said, “Oh, it looks like that Volkswagen is smiling,” or if you looked at an outlet in the wall and you say, “It looks like a little face,” that’s humans. So, you can actually draw really, really badly. Human beings can figure out what it means. We’re pattern matching creatures.

    Christina:

    So, I always try to encourage people to make crappy pictures. I’m like, “Please just make a crappy picture because there are times when a picture is just going to be more effective.” When you’re trying to talk about a user funnel, you’re going to want to draw a terrible upside down triangle to show the funnel. Just a little bit of facility can take you so far. It’s fun. Dang. I like to do in the evening, I just sit and get myself a glass of wine. Maybe the TV is on, I’m watching a little Trevor Noah. I’ll just make circles and make triangles and make goofy-looking little people just, again, to train my hand to obey my mind. It’s so relaxing.

    Christina:

    I feel like in this high-stress time with all the wackiness in the world, anything that can help you chillax is absolutely required. When you don’t have any pressure on your drawing, it’s just doodling, and doodling is a joy. So, you can do it for work or you can just do it for the pure happiness of letting yourself relax a little bit. I think that matters.

    Alexis:

    That gives us another really good reason to try it. Doodling is a joy. I know that’s a really good way to end our discussion, I think. Christina, I want to thank you for your time and all your advices. Thank you for sharing all your experience and knowledge in your books. Thank you for being in the Le Podcast today.

    Christina:

    Oh, it’s such a pleasure to talk to you, a joy. Thank you.

    Alexis:

    Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to blog-blog-alexis.monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode, and to find more and to increase your impact and satisfaction at work. Drop a comment or an email with your feedback, or just to say hello. Until next time, to find better ways of changing your team.

    The music is Funkorama by Kevin MacLeod (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0)

    Picture by CoWomen

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One

  • Chief of Staff Academy

    Chief of Staff Academy

    A few weeks back, I attended McChrystal Group Chief of Staff Virtual Academy. I was looking to stretch my thinking to further grow in the role. Since then, I keep a copy of the Chief of Staff four quadrants on my desk to remind me where the focus should be depending on the topic, and who I am talking to.

    Source: One Mission: How Leaders Build Team of Teams by Chris Fussell

    The quadrants come from Chris Fussell’s book One Mission: How Leaders Build Team of Teams. A follow-up to the book he co-wrote with General Stanley McCrystal, Team of Teams, relating their experience transforming the U.S. military’s Special Forces into a sum of cohesive small agile teams crossing the silos.

    “No plan of operations extends with any degree of certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy force.”

    Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of the Prussian General Staff, 1857

    It took sometimes for military organizations to move from a detailed plan approach to a mission approach. Ironically, within enterprises, people who have never been in the military, justify their big detailed plans driven from the top using military vocabulary. Maybe, they could benefit from reading those books?

    Being sarcastic will not help if in your Chief of Staff role you aim at becoming a true thought partner to your principal.

    And this is exactly where the quadrants and the training help. Becoming a true thought partner is only the third step.

    The Virtual Academy is organized in three sessions, each of them covering a step:

    1. Bridging the Organization
    2. Optimizing Decision Making
    3. Becoming a Thought Partner

    What I liked about the training was the combination of knowledge sharing from Chris Fussell and others from McCrystall Group, with interactive learning sessions in small groups of Chiefs.

    We discussed how our focus, our impact on the organization, our role in the information flow, and the way we communicate have to be adjusted depending on the step we are currently in.

    It was highly valuable to me as I was changing role at that time from a global Engineering focused organization, to an EMEA Sales and Services focused organization. I assume it would be as valuable if you are taking on a new role, or to push yourself to grow in your current role.

    Happy to discuss it further if you are interested.

    If you are or were in a Chief of Staff role, I am interested in knowing the three questions you would ask to replace you!

  • Three Questions to Replace You

    Three Questions to Replace You

    The Chief of Staff role is multi-faceted and highly dependant on the company, the principal, and the context in which people operate. I collected a few thoughts and links about the role in the Tech Industry a while back.

    Maxine Litre wrote an article for the Chief of Staff Network on How to Find the Right Fit in the Interview Process. The article made me think of the questions I would ask if I had to replace myself in my current role.

    Interview questions reveal the essential characteristics of a role. So I wondered what I could learn about the Chief of Staff role from the questions others would ask.

    This is what motivates me to ask you: What are the three questions you would ask a potential candidate who would replace you in your current role? (Use the form linked, drop me a message on LinkedIn, or an email).

    I will compile the answers in an article (and of course credit each of you).

    When? Why wait? The sooner, the better!

  • Crossed-interviews with Appreciative Inquiry

    Crossed-interviews with Appreciative Inquiry

    In a previous post, I described a great approach to get people to get to know each other a little bit more thanks to a fantastic one-on-one format. Try it, you will see yourself, it is really fantastic!

    Another approach to get people to know each other is to use Appreciative Inquiry.

    I used nearly the same three questions in different contexts: during the Wednesday breakfast for new employees in a fast-growing company, and also as an ice-breaker for meetings where people don’t know
    each other.

    The mechanics are simple and highly effective. You ask people
    to form pairs. Their goal is to interview each other, asking three
    questions:

    • Tell a story that you consider being a success,
    • Without being humble, describe the talents and skills you used to make it a success,
    • Describe your three concrete wishes for the future of the company.

    You give them a limited time, like 15 minutes, to do the two interviews. You probably need to remind them that the time is ticking and be flexible with the timing. As you walk around in the room, people ask you clarification questions, such as “Is it limited to professional life?” (The answer is: “No, of course, you can share non-professional experiences.“)

    People usually enjoy that session and ask for more time to interview others in the room. You don’t need to give them that time. Just mention that they will have breaks, lunch, and dinner or, in short, other opportunities when they can interview each other.

    If you are ready to invest a little bit more time, you can add value to the exercise by asking each pair to present briefly the talents and wishes of each other. It is really powerful when each writes talents and wishes on sticky notes (one per sticky note) so at the end of the presentation, you have one sheet of flip-chart representing the talents of the group and another with all the wishes of the group.

    By starting the conversation there the room is full of energy, confidence, and optimism, and you are ready to have a productive meeting.

    After one meeting I facilitated, I received a thank you note from one of the participants explaining that he enjoyed the meeting and the activities because “it created the kind of positive energy that gets things done.”

    We are back to the mindset conversation I cover in the first chapter of Changing Your Team From The Inside. Shifting our mindset is essential to be able to interact effectively with others. Helping them to shift their mindset is key to effective collaboration.

    Try it and let me know how it goes! I will use it again next week, in a distributed setting this time as we cannot be face to face.

    Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels

  • It is not Customer-First, it is Customer-Centered

    It is not Customer-First, it is Customer-Centered

    Who wouldn’t dream of being in a People First company? A lot made it a philosophy like Vineet Nayar, the celebrated CEO of HCL Technologies, recounting in his book Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down.

    Being a People-First company is adopting the posture of a servant leader, as described by Robert K. Greenleaf in his book Servant Leadership.

    If you want staff to give excellent service to customers, then as a leader, you need to give excellent service to the staff.

    Alan Mulally, the former CEO of Boeing and Ford, turned over those two American icon companies by having People First in the first place of his principles.

    When the company is successful, there could be a problem with that approach. What really matters to the employee? What is really an excellent service?

    Patty McCord, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix, explains in her book Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, that most companies have it all wrong when it comes to recruiting, motivating, and creating great teams. The question is not about the perks or the bonus plans, the question is more about high performance and profitability.

    What happens with success is that companies tend to become self-centered. It is all about them, and everything else revolves around them. They become arrogant and complacent.

    This is why a Copernican revolution is needed to shift from a self-centered approach to a customer-centered approach as Steve Denning brilliantly explains in his book The Age of Agile: How Smart Companies Are Transforming the Way Work Gets Done.

    It is not about being Customer-First in place of being People-First. It is about changing the perspective and restoring the position of the customer at the center of the preoccupation of all the people in the company.

    It is not Customer-First, It is Customer-Centered.

    Photo by Jongsun Lee

  • The 10 rules of Alan Mulally

    The 10 rules of Alan Mulally

    American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company by Bryce G. Hoffman is an amazing book. The New York Times said about it:

    A compelling narrative that reads more like a thriller than a business book.

    I could not have said it better! I posted a while back a quote from the book which gives an idea of the toxic starting point:

    Ford’s executives no longer spent their days plotting one another’s demise or defending their turf. Instead, they spent their time working together to ensure the company’s continued success. They offered one another help and sought help when they needed it themselves

    In his first days with the company, Mulally designed a plan and stick to it for the next years. He also defined ten rules and called the attention of all his executives to the rules. The rules where displayed on the wall of their main meeting room:

    • People first
    • Everyone is included
    • Compelling vision
    • Clear performance goals
    • One plan
    • Facts and data
    • Propose a plan, “find-a-way” attitude
    • Respect, listen, help, and appreciate each other
    • Have fun… enjoy the journey and each other

    I strongly believe that a lot of those rules could be applied in a lot of companies.

  • Human-Centric Agility Coaching: The Expert Paradox and the Ideology Paradox

    Human-Centric Agility Coaching: The Expert Paradox and the Ideology Paradox

    When I first saw Geof Ellingham’s work on Human-Centric Agility Coaching, I was skeptical.

    Why do we need yet another model?
    And why “human-centric” when the Agile Manifesto already states that we value people and interactions over processes and tools?

    In this episode of Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership, Geof Ellingham — business agility champion, leadership coach, and psychotherapeutic counselor — joins me to explore these questions in depth.

    His answer to the “human-centric” question is both simple and uncomfortable:

    We haven’t really lived up to that value.

    Why “human-centric” matters

    Geof describes how much of the agile world still centers on:

    • processes and tools
    • speed, cost, and business outcomes
    • “doing agile” rather than improving how people work together

    His interest, and his outcome as a coach, is different: improving what happens within the group of people doing the work. Internal communication, collaboration, and the team’s ability to be at its best.

    A model that came from research, not ambition

    The Human-Centric Agility Coaching model did not start as “let’s create another framework”.

    It emerged from research Geof conducted while completing a Master’s in coaching. His goal was to understand what happens moment by moment inside agile coaches as they work.

    Not what coaches should do.
    What is actually going on internally.

    From deep interviews with coaches, two paradoxes consistently surfaced.

    Paradox 1: the expert paradox

    Agile coaches are hired as experts. Clients expect answers, solutions, and certainty.

    And yet coaching, especially professional coaching, rests on a different stance:

    • clients are whole
    • they have the capacity to solve their problems
    • the coach is there to walk alongside, not take control

    Geof describes the tension viscerally: the pull to step in as an expert when you see an opportunity for improvement, and the pull to step back to protect ownership and learning.

    We explore how existing coaching models don’t always capture how embodied and difficult that shift can be.

    Paradox 2: the ideology paradox

    The second paradox is more systemic.

    Ideology can be a shortcut to change. It can rally people, create momentum, and align language and behavior. “Agile” can become a shared identity.

    But if ideology takes root too strongly, it can freeze an organization into a new rigidity:

    • a new set of rules
    • a new orthodoxy
    • a new “agile machine”

    And that directly contradicts one of the deepest intentions of agility: staying adaptive.

    Meeting people where they are, without doing harm

    Geof also introduces the idea of developmental “columns” in his model. Without turning it into a diagnostic tool, the model offers a way for coaches to reflect on:

    • how clients see their organization
    • what kind of language will resonate
    • and what the next reachable step might be

    A key part of our conversation is the risk of harm:

    • models can easily become boxes
    • boxes become judgments
    • judgments become contempt

    We explore the tension between using a model privately as reflective practice and sharing it openly with clients, and why transparency matters.

    Using teams’ language instead of imposing a model

    One practical takeaway from Geof is that even if you use a model internally, working with teams is often more effective when you start from their own metaphors.

    Instead of explaining stages, you can ask:

    • “When you think about your team, it’s like what?”
    • “When you say that, what do you mean?”

    This helps people understand each other’s models of the world without forcing a framework onto them.

    An invitation to iterate

    Geof closes with an important stance: the model is not finished.

    It is shared under Creative Commons and meant to evolve through collaboration. He explicitly invites people to treat it with skepticism, curiosity, and a willingness to iterate.

    If you want to connect with Geof, LinkedIn is the easiest channel. You can also email him at geof.ellingham@gmail.com.

    A final thought

    This episode is a reminder that agility is not a set of ceremonies or a process upgrade.

    It is about people.
    And the work of coaching is not just about change in the organization — it is also about the internal stance and responsibility of the coach.

    Here is the transcript of the episode:

    Alexis:

    Geof, can you tell us a little bit more about you and your background?

    Geof:

    I can. I’ve had a very varied background. So I started life after school as a programmer, then went off to do a music degree, I became an elementary school teacher for five years. And then went back into IT again and started working for one of the big five consultancies, spent time as a consultant, had children and decided to move into a more flexible role where I could be closer to home. So I worked as a head of IT within local government for about 10 years. And then, I guess about five, seven years ago, I started training as a coach, initially as a professional coach.

    Geof:

    But I trained in agile way back in the 1990s. In my work in local government, I’ve been starting to really bring those agile practices back in, because we’re starting to deliver digital services and so on and so I started to bring the two things together. So I started off separately as someone involved in agile and someone who was a coach and bringing them together as an agile coach is something I’ve only been doing for the last five years or so. Then most recently, I got really interested in what drives people to be the way that they are, the people that they are, and I did some more training.

    Geof:

    I’m now practicing as a psychotherapeutic counselor, so that I’m kind of interested in the full spectrum of human experience, and especially internal experience and how that plays out when people are in a group setting or an organizational setting. So that’s a that’s a long story. But it’s… There are lots of different bits to my story and I tried to bring them all together in the work that I do now.

    Alexis:

    Wow, this is really impressive. I think about all what you said. My mind was stuck with being an elementary school teacher. Because I was thinking, “Oh, that’s some time I feel that I should have those skills to be able to capture the attention of a few people in the room that are not necessarily highly motivated to engage in the conversation.”

    Geof:

    Yeah, they weren’t chosen to be there.

    Alexis:

    Yeah.

    Geof:

    I love teaching. As I said, I did that for five years as a full time teacher and then three years as a part time teacher, after that, I was a music specialist and my degree was in music. So I did these big shows with kids, I took these big whole school singing assemblies, all that kind of stuff and it was very intense. And I just decided that there was no way I was going to be able to keep that intensity up for another 40 years. So either I had to leave behind this career that I really loved, and do something different, or I could watch myself fade over the years as that intensity dropped. I just decided I’d go out while I still loved it. But I do still look back on those years very fondly and I’ve enjoyed going in and doing work with my kids when they were a little younger in their schools and stuff like that.

    Geof:

    But being able to being able to hold the attention of people who have not chosen to be with you is a challenge.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, absolutely. I’m really surprised and the first time when you shared with me, your article about Human-Centric Agility Coaching, I was really surprised about the Human-Centric part. I felt that agile was already something that was putting people first in a way, the Agile Manifesto start with the idea of individuals and interactions that are valued more than processes and tools. So I saw that people were already first, can you tell us a little bit more about the model and maybe the why behind the model?

    Geof:

    So that said, there may be two parts to that question. So I’ll answer it twice, if that’s okay, more generally, why Human-Centric? Why am I interested in this, when, as you say, “It’s already the first line in the Agile Manifesto values.” And I think the reason is that we haven’t really lived up to that value. I spend a lot of time at conferences and so on and it seems to me that processes and tools remain the driving force for a lot of the economy of the agile community certainly and a lot of the focus that we have on our agile initiatives is on business outcomes or speed or cost.

    Geof:

    And it seems to me that the focus of agility, in terms of what I’m interested in, I’m interested in what’s going on within the group of people who are engaged in the work, improving their internal communication, the ability for that group of people to achieve more than they could as separate individuals. So my outcome when I’m working with teams is all about the team’s ability to be its best. And I’m not sure that that’s… I know, lots and lots of agile coaches absolutely adhere to that principle. But I think as a community, we haven’t really managed to live up to that. So I see myself as one of the many people out there trying to just come back to that, that basic value, this is what we’re trying to achieve, we’re trying to achieve a situation where with a combination of principles and values and some practices we’ve built up over time, we can create added value in all senses, happiness, outcomes for people on planet, we can be better when we work together in teams in these ways, and I keep it as broad as possible. So that’s the first answer.

    Geof:

    The second answer is about the model itself. So the model itself does not come out of me wanting to do something, me wanting to create a model, the model comes out of a piece of research. So my intention was to get into the heads of agile coaches and find out what’s really going on when agile coaches are working. We’ve got some great literature around agile coaching, like Lyssa Adkins book, most of it is about kind of what should happen, what do we think coaches ought to do? And we haven’t really got much that looks into what actually happens moment by moment, what’s the internal experience in an agile coach, what’s really going on? And I was really interested in that internal experience, because I know that for me, as an agile coach, there’s a huge amount of internal conversation that’s going on when I’m working with a team. And I know that my internal conversation will be different to other agile coaches and we learn by understanding, our own models of the world. So I set about doing a piece of research as part of a Master’s I was doing in coaching.

    Geof:

    And my question was just sitting down with coaches for 90 minutes in depth interview and no structure. It was just tell me what is going on for you when you’re working with the team. And the model came out of that research through some paradoxes that emerged there that I guess we’ll talk about. So the model was a consequence of the research rather than something I intended to produce.

    Alexis:

    Really, really valuable. I was absolutely not aware of that and I really love it. I was thinking why do we want to produce another model, yet we have a model? The perspective that you bring in, what is happening when you interview agile coaches, about what is going on when they work, I think that’s a really interesting angle and you mentioned two paradoxes.

    Geof:

    Yeah.

    Alexis:

    Those paradoxes really resonated with me. Can you tell us more about those two?

    Geof:

    Yeah, sure. So there are two, in the research they did, there are actually some other tensions. But I decided that these were the two that came through most strongly for all of the coaches that I interviewed. So the first I’ve called the expert paradox. An expert paradox is, it’s there in the name of the role agile coach, because our clients hire us to be agile experts.

    Geof:

    To understand this particular approach to solving problems of organizations and end users, and so on. So, our clients hire us as experts in agile. But we’re coaches and those of us that have done training as professional coaches will have this strong idea in us that as a coach, we’re bringing a lens, a mirror, a set of tools to help people frame their problems, but we’re not bringing solutions, that we come to our clients as whole human beings who possess everything they need to solve their problems and all we’re doing is walking with them along the way. So when you put those two things together, you get a paradox, how can I be at the same time, someone who stands back from my own expertise and walks with my client, and believes in my client’s ability to solve their own problems, and at the same time, bring expertise around how to approach problems, how to make this agile stuff work better.

    Geof:

    For all of the coaches that I interviewed, this was a really powerful paradox that they felt themselves pulled, almost viscerally in both directions. So when they spotted an opportunity to improve process, that expert really comes to the fore and wants to step in. But there’s a part of them that recognizes that the more they can step back and allow their clients to be whole and complete and in control of their own destiny, the better their overall outcomes.

    Geof:

    I didn’t think that our existing coaching models really helped us with that tension. Because if you take for example, the Lyssa Adkins as your coach institute model, which is, you may know it’s a kind of it’s a cross drawn on the ground with some segments. And the idea is that you can walk across this model and take up a different stance. So sometimes you’ll be in a coaching stance, sometimes you’ll be in a teaching stance. And that for me doesn’t capture the kind of embodied challenge of moving between those two poles, that they’re so different inhabiting the expert, inhabiting the coach, is so different, that we need to understand more about what we need as agile coaches to enable us to do that for our clients. So that’s the first of the two paradoxes.

    Geof:

    So the second is, I’ve called the ideology paradox. And this, again, came out from my interviews, this strong tension and it also comes from a piece of academic research into based at Pivotal Labs in the States. The idea here is that agile as an ideology, as a cult, as a kind of magnificence, we are the truth in a way, and we know the answer to how to make the world a better place that I certainly know that I hold within myself, I try to hold it lightly. But I know that it’s there, I know that there’s a sense of, this is something really important and valuable we’re bringing to the world, that this ideology has plays in different ways. So when we’re trying to transform an organization, we’re trying to take an organization on this journey of change towards agility, we are taking an existing culture, an existing model of the world, and we’re looking to change that model, or uproot, in some ways destroy that cultural model and replace it with something new, these new values, these new ideas, and there’s a shortcut to doing that, which is to use ideology.

    Geof:

    Ideology has always been used as an instrument of change. Because if you can get people believing in this new way, as something that, where we can bring in group thing, we can get this, everybody walking the same walk, talking the same language using the same terminology and we’re all in this together, agile is our way that actually that does help to make that transformation easier. The tension, the problem is that if we use ideology as a way of transforming, then we were still left with an ideology. And if our root value is to continue to be flexible, and continue to iterate on what’s good and to continue to adapt, inspect and adapt at every level of the organization.

    Geof:

    An ideology is just something else that freezes us and we end up trapped in ways of doing things that are just as hard to get away from the culture that we started with. So ideology is something that pulls us it’s something that’s attractive, believing that agile is somehow special, is a really attractive proposition and our clients find it attractive. But allowing that ideology to take root can freeze an organization in a state that makes you have to continue to be adaptive.

    Alexis:

    I really love those two paradoxes, I have said that they really resonated with me. I can empathize totally with that idea of you’re coming in an organization, you are the expert, you are asked to really every time improve. I remember one time, I was working with a really small startup. And they were, not a lot, but they knew that there was a lot of traction for what they were providing and so they needed to grow really fast. The people in charge, there were three of them that were managing the company at the beginning. They were telling me, “Okay, Alexis or we will do the thing.” I remember the CTO telling me, “Okay, we will hire a manager for that, manager for that, manager for that, manager for that and then they will hire their teams and so on.”

    Alexis:

    I said, “I don’t think that can work. Because you still need to deliver a lot of things. So instead of hiring those managers that will then hire their team and so on, probably we should focus on the people that will already do the work.” And the question was, “But how they will be organized?” And I said, “we will adopt an agile way of working. So your goal is to have small teams that will be able to deliver end to end value to your customers.”

    Alexis:

    And he was asking me but, “What is the target organization? At the end, how will we be organized? How the company will be organized?” I was trying to stay on my stance again, “We will have smaller teams, and they will be organized to deliver value end to end.” And we’re thinking, “Oh, but I understand what you say. But can you draw me the organization in the end?” I said, “No, I can’t because I don’t know, we will design the organization along the way. There is no model, there is no end game. We need to agree on those principles and we will design the organization along the way.” And he was still trying to ask me that, “I’m pretty sure you know but you don’t want to tell me.” I tell him, “I don’t know.”

    Alexis:

    That was really hard for him to discuss with the expert. And at the same time that the expert is studying that. I don’t know, I don’t know the results. I know we can do it, I know we’ll do it along the way, but I don’t know the end game and the results.

    Geof:

    Yeah, exactly.

    Alexis:

    It was really a hard time. If you explain that, that was my expert, thought of… destroyer that I was feeling that was okay. I need to old on that line. Because if I don’t, then I will design everything by myself and it will be totally wrong for the people in the company.

    Geof:

    Yeah. So you’ve led me beautifully into the model and I wonder whether this is a time to kind of bring the model out of the box and start talking about it a little bit. Because I think that particular encounter that you had really is one of the things I was trying to address in the model.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, please.

    Geof:

    So the model is organized into columns and the columns are based on work by a whole sequence of academic and practical research is going back to Piaget, who was working in child development 150 years ago. And the terminology I’ve used comes from a guy called Bill Joiner, who writes about leadership agility. But the basic principle idea is that as children, we go through stages of development, and they’re pretty well understood now. Children start off as babies not being able to differentiate themselves from their parents and from the world. And then they learn that they’re separate and you go through these very explicit concrete stages of development. The idea that was put forward by this, all of this chain of researchers, and people will be familiar with things like Laloux and Reinventing Organizations and Spiral Dynamics, there’s a whole bunch of stuff out here. They’re all based on the same principle, which is, “As adults, we also go through these stages of development.”

    Geof:

    We start off and in turn, in terms of the first column in my model, we start off with what Bill Joiner calls expert, and an expert, it’s all about our skill, our ability to perform a task really well. And we see the world in quite mechanistic ways. So I’ve… The title of the column in the model is machine. So we kind of see the world as a machine and our idea is that if we can just put the things together in a way that we understand it’s kind of all logical, it all fits together and I understand what my purpose is in this machine. I’m really expert at it. When I become a manager, I can tell other people how to be expert. I can teach other people

    Geof:

    It’s very mechanistic view of the world and many people. So Bill Joiner reckons that something like 35% of people in management roles are still locked into this kind of expert role and the accounts that you had was with someone who had that view of the world, they want to see their organization as a machine, that’s the way that they conceive of how things work. So I’ve got a machine at the moment, it works like this, you’re going to come in, and you’re going to help me build a new machine that works differently. So show me what it looks like, what’s the blueprint, I want to be able to see it then I’ll understand.

    Geof:

    And if people are in that column, that’s where you have to meet them. So the challenge that many coaches come across is they’re looking to move people into a different way of thinking, and the person they’re talking to just doesn’t yet have the language or the model of how the world works enables them to participate in that conversation. So we have to move people across the columns. So the columns in my model go, start with this machine, the next column is family. So this is what Bill Joiner calls achiever and this is where we start to understand that the groups of people in organizations have these kind of, these complicated power structures going on and these different in groups and out groups and ways of communicating and that people have all kinds of little daily struggles and conflicts that are some sometimes part of the business of the business.

    Geof:

    Sometimes they’re to do with people’s personal lives, and it all comes together in a big mess. And that organizations aren’t like machines that actually the groups of people within organizations act much more like families where power is contingent, the idea that families have a head of the household and anyone listening who has a family knows that that’s not how power works in organizations. Power is slippery and difficult, and it’s all over the place. And a family doesn’t work like a machine and things are always changing, people are always finding different roles.

    Geof:

    So the reality is whatever structure you have written down on paper, that’s not really what’s happening in your organization, stuff is moving around. So that’s the next step is to recognize that and to stop being so focused on what people are doing, and start being focused on what people are achieving. So we stopped being interested in the process, and telling people what to do, because that’s what experts do, is they say do it like this, and it’ll work, we start stepping back and saying, “Okay, this is what I want to happen.” And you lot organize yourself and make it happen.

    Geof:

    So people who are in that second column are able to step back a little bit, if the person that you’ve been speaking to, within that green family kind of column, they would have been able to meet you more easily and be a bit more flexible and say, Okay, I get it, it’s going to be a little bit complicated, it’s going to emerge, and stuff will happen. So that’s the second column. The third column is living system. So this is what Bill Joiner calls catalyst. And at this point, people are able to move a step further and start seeing that their organization isn’t a little bubble, separate from the rest of the world, but the actually is part of a much bigger set of systems.

    Geof:

    So this is the living system column, we start to see that those power structures that I talked about at family that are kind of flexible and fluid, that actually there are systems at play here. But the team itself is a system, each individual person is a system of thoughts and desires, that groups of systems the different teams interact with each other in systemic ways. And that you can follow, you can understand what’s happening when you start to look at those interactions and start in a systemic way and you can start to see the organization as part of a wider world.

    Geof:

    People who are able to meet you at that in that column and build your records. There’s only 5% or so of managers who are in that column, people are able to meet you in that column will get agility in a completely different way to the expert, because they will immediately understand that what we’re doing here is working with a system and helping the team to see its own systemic processes to be able to understand what’s happening between you and me and this person over here and to be able to inspect and adapt not just the work that we’re doing but but who we are as a group of people. So they’ll meet you in a different place.

    Geof:

    Then my fourth column is called wonderland. The idea that almost it’s kind of post agile, really, this is where we’re stepping back from the idea of ideology completely and saying, “All right, we are now about being curious about everything, about getting out of any silos that we might be in being open to experience, we might start really allowing different value systems to compete within the same organization in the same team, where we’re able to deal with things like conflict in a completely different way, we’re able to take the scratchiness and challenge the world and just get interested in and use that as a source of information.”

    Geof:

    So those are the kind of four columns and one of the first reasons that I wanted this model was as a way of helping us to understand as agile coaches, where we are meeting our clients. So first question is, where am I? So as an agile coach, where do I recognize myself in these columns? And it might be that in some parts of what I do, I’m in one column in some parts of what I do, I’m in another. None of this is black and white. This isn’t about putting people in boxes. But it’s about understanding, what’s my capacity for taking that curious route. There’s a concept called transcended include, which is that every time we move through the levels, we still have all of the capabilities we had in the previous level.

    Geof:

    So as I move through to living system, and I’m getting to the point where I’m past the kind of this is how agile should work. I’m getting really interested in systems and I’m using systems thinking, and I’m working with teams and that way, I can still step into expert, I can still go back into that first column and inhabit that. But I can do it from a different stance. So I take my curiosity and I’ll step in deliberately, intentionally into that expert teacher role. And I’ll share that with the team I’m working with now say, “Okay, I think that there’s something I know about that that might be able to help you here. Do I have your permission to put a different hat on and to step in?” And I can do that in a way that that allows me to still be me, I don’t have to be a different person. But I can just step into that different role and then I can step back again, or what I’m interested in helping coaches to do with this model is to find the learning edge of their clients and meet them there.

    Geof:

    So if you understand that your client is sitting in that first expert column, they’re going to be focused on process and machine. So we have to meet them there, we have to show them something that they can get a handle on. But in doing so we want to pull them into this next stage into family, we’re not going to get them into systems thinking straightaway, we’re going to have to take them through and just help them to understand what’s going on within their teams that they might be interested in, isn’t just about their role definitions and how they handoff works one another. It’s about the quality of the communication and relationships between people in those teams and that’s where we need to focus on next energy.

    Geof:

    So that’s really where the model comes from. It’s taking those paradoxes and recognizing that both of those paradoxes exist because of the need to move between these columns as an agile coach in a way that professional coaches don’t have to, if you’re a professional coach, you typically operate within one column with one client, I’m either here to… I’m here as a skills coach, I’m going to teach you how to do something, I’m here as a transformational coach, I’m going to sit back and work with you and you’re going to tell your story and we’re going to create a new narrative for you however we’re working. With agile coaches, we’re constantly having to move around these different columns. If as an agile coach, we are still ourselves, but they’re very much on the left hand side of that model, we just need to recognize our own limitations in what happens when we meet a client who’s further to the right.

    Alexis:

    This is exactly that kind of difficult realization. I was looking at, where my client is not necessarily where I am now and I think a that’s an important thing to realize that if you are in the system, you are in a complex system, you are part of it, whatever you want, you are still there. That’s really an interesting first thought on that. The thing that I’m struggling a little bit with is considering the client, considering a team or as being in one column. How do you deal with teams that the individuals in the team, the people in the team are not in the same column? How do you deal with that situation?

    Geof:

    So the individuals within teams are rarely in the same column, certainly in my experience. Again, for me, what’s helpful about the model is understanding, so where’s the center of gravity of the team? What does that mean for the people who are outliers? So if the center of gravity of the team is in that family column, then you’re probably going to have some experts there who are struggling with the fact that, what they want to do is just do their job. So my job is to sit here and write this code, or my job is to whatever and their understanding of their role is they have something to do in which they have expertise. And yet around them, this team is, is having completely different conversations about trying to collaborate on this and do this, be adaptive in this way, and it just doesn’t make sense.

    Geof:

    So what we’re going to have to work out is how do we manage that potential discrepancy? Are we going to do some work with the team to help them to get into each other’s models of the world. So some of the work that I’m doing at the moment is with Caitlin Walker, systemic modeling. She’s a British woman who has worked for years with groups and started her work with teenagers who were disenfranchised, disillusioned about school and she realized that when you have a group that’s really heterogeneous, lots of really different kind of things going on in that group and there’s conflict, that giving people the language to understand each other’s model of the world is really important. So if I have a group that’s like that, then I might bring in some of that systemic modeling language, to help the people in the teams to get into when you say this, this is what I’m making up about what you mean, now you tell me what you really mean and I’ll try to understand what your model of the world is and then I’m going to share that with you.

    Geof:

    This is my model of the world, when I say this, this is what I mean, and really giving people the language to understand that we have different models of the world and if I’m going to challenge my own model, my biggest challenge to my model is that despite the fact that I said earlier, I don’t like putting people in boxes, I think it’s difficult to use a model like this without putting people in boxes. So if there’s a way of evolving this model in the future, to be less boxy, that’s what I would want to do next. Because as you say, “People don’t inhabit these boxes, teams certainly don’t. But I do think that there is value in understanding, I think these four columns give you a way of understanding where abouts people are in relation to each other and therefore, where the potential tensions might lie, and how you can think about, do you just have to just allow those tensions? Do you find a way of bringing people into the same space? Do you just help people to understand what’s going on for each other? So you have some choices to make.

    Geof:

    I think the model helps with just understanding where people are and what choices you might have, what levers you might be able to pull.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, and those columns are even more like scales and that’s how you are somewhere on the scale.

    Geof:

    Yeah.

    Alexis:

    I assume that if you are making assumptions about other people, you will probably move yourself on the scale to try to fit what they want or what they need. I can observe that in my team when some people are really hierarchical in their mindset. So they assume things about the boss, that the boss should do certain things. And they expect the boss will do that. But unfortunately for them, the boss is not in the same hierarchical view of the world. So they frustrated about the lack of things that the boss should do. It’s an interesting situation to be in. So I’m trying to meet them somewhere in the middle and it’s an interesting situation to be in, try to say, “Okay, that’s your expectation about the world and you need to realize that the older people expect you to do things.” That’s that’s an interesting tension.

    Geof:

    Yeah, for sure.

    Alexis:

    So, if we see that as scales, we can move along those scales to adjust to where the people are. Explaining the model can help them see that the others are not necessarily seeing the world the same way?

    Geof:

    Yes.

    Alexis:

    Okay, and you’re really using the model this way with your customers, with the teams you are working with?

    Geof:

    Yeah, so one of the one of the challenges is, so at the moment, the model is still very much in its kind of early iterations. It’s in its current form for quite a while, but COVID has kind of interrupted a lot of things. So I’ve been using it. I haven’t been using it explicitly with clients, so I haven’t been sharing it and I have mixed feelings about sharing it. And the reason I have mixed feelings is comes back to this question about putting people in boxes and about the idea of assessing people. So at the moment, I’m using it as a way of, as part of my reflective practice. So I will, if I’m working with a team, I will use the model as a way of thinking about, “Okay, so here are my key individuals whereabouts do I think they are? Where would I meet them? What does this help? What does this tell me?” So I use it as part of my reflective practice, but I’m not sharing the model explicitly.

    Geof:

    Now, there’s a part of my coaching practice that says, if I’m using a model, to think about my clients, then generally speaking, I want to be open and share that model with my clients. Because, there’s danger of doing violence to clients by modeling them without them knowing that’s what I’m doing. So there’s a bit of a tension there. So at the moment, I’m using the model in my reflective practice, but I’m not explicitly using it with teams, and I’m not sure that in its current form, I would advocate using it in that kind of transparent way with teams. I might use some of the language and certainly, I might use some of that some of the underlying language about our views of the world, how do we think that organizations work? But I would probably do it in a more of that systemic modeling way that way of getting people to use their own language about how do they see the world?

    Geof:

    So if I think that what’s going on in a team is that some people are locked into the machine expert column, and some people are kind of happily living in the family, and maybe even getting into living systems, what I might do is invite people to talk about, “Okay, so when you’re coming into the organization, and you’re in your team, and you’re working with your team, that’s like what?” And see what people come up with and see what metaphors might arise from people and see, it might be that somebody says, “Well, I kind of see the team a bit like, it’s a bit like a watch, there’s this really intricate little cog, that’s me, I’m over here, and then there’s this big hand over here that goes round.”

    Geof:

    So you might start to hear the metaphors coming out, you might find that machine metaphor come out. And somebody else might say, “No, it’s more like, I feel more like we’re, we’re kind of like pebbles in the ocean,” or whatever it is that comes out. So I think I would, at this point, I would use the model as a way of doing reflective practice. But in my work with teams, I’m more likely to use their own language, and test my reflective thoughts against what comes up in the team’s own words.

    Alexis:

    Excellent, I thank you for sharing that. I remember when I read the Laloux book about organization, that’s Preventing Organization, I think, I was really excited about trying to explain to different stages of organization. I was ready already to explain that to everybody.

    Geof:

    Yeah.

    Alexis:

    And I realized that the first time I started to explain the different levels, I was definitely in an oriental organization really no machine organization. And they were thinking, “Okay, it will not end well,” because I’m trying to explain something that will not really resonate with them and basically, I will tell them, “You are not good. That’s not how you should be, that will not work.” And I was thinking, “Okay, now I need to escape that conversation. This was exactly not the thing to do.

    Geof:

    Yeah, exactly. And to build on that, not only when we’re doing that, not only if we expose the model, we risk doing harm, but actually if we keep the model to ourselves, but we’ve already made that determination, there’s a risk of harm because there’s a risk that we’re holding that organization in contempt because of the hierarchical view that we have about what a good organization looks like. I think that the one of the things that models can do if we use them well is to recognize some of those internal biases and the contempt that we might be holding, and use the model as a way of providing a warning that Okay, so if I think this organization is a machine orange, what does that mean about the way I’m going to think about the people in this organization and what care do I need to take to ensure that I’m seeing every human being in this organization as a fully competent human being?

    Alexis:

    Yep. This is a very good point. Our expectations or our biases, and when we start elaborating organization or even worse people, we are blocking our thinking and we are not able to interact with them in an efficient way in a really human way. We are seeing them as problems instead of seeing them as human beings that are fully responsible of who they are, how they are interacting with the world?

    Geof:

    Yeah, exactly.

    Alexis:

    I was surprised in organization that are more mechanistic more machines, the people in those organizations, some of them are, let’s say, comfortable with their position and their role. And some of them are suffering in those position and would like to change things. How to come in support of those people, all of them is an interesting challenge.

    Geof:

    Yeah, absolutely. Because, as I said earlier, one way that organizations do that, is this use of ideology and to some extent the way that we use frameworks, I think falls into this, You see people, almost subverting some of the ideas of agility by saying to someone who’s comfortable in that orange expert column, are actually you can still be like that in this new world. I’m just giving you a new process, I’m just giving you a new machine, it’s okay. And there’s a danger in doing that and there’s comfort in doing that. So there’s a real tension in the way that we approach those people who are very comfortable with the world the way that is. Yeah, I think that’s a really good point.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, I remember to using Scrum. Yeah, as you said, as an ideology that will enable you to start a transformation, to start to change. With some teams after the first or two or three iterations, they were starting to reconsider the framework itself, they will start to reconsider that they could change things, how they were doing things, because that was not necessarily the best way for them. Which was really interesting and I’ve seen teams using exactly the scrum by the book for months. And you say, “Okay, there’s something broken there.” The probability that it’s still the best way of doing things for you is really low. So instead of using the framework as a starting point, you are stuck with that framework now. That’s your new way of working, that is not necessarily the best way.

    Geof:

    Yeah, your new machine.

    Alexis:

    Yeah, exactly. When we send order, and when we see the columns and the tables, and it can feel a little bit like the metrology model that some people are selling and it’s really scary. But when we listen to you explaining the model, it changed everything and now, I’m totally with you on calling it a Human-Centric approach. Because I understand that it’s really what it is, based on what you say, it’s really fascinating. Is there other things that you would like to share today?

    Geof:

    I think the thing that I would like to share is that this model is very much a first iteration. And I touched on this earlier, this is not how it ends up. This is a first attempt at taking what I learned from this research and putting it onto paper in a way that I think certainly helps me to think about where things set, I know that my personal bias is to work in a bubble for longer than is helpful. So really, what I want to do at this point is invite people to kind of join a conversation with me, if people think there’s value in this model, then to get into a conversation about, “Okay, what next? How do we try out some of these ideas in practice? How do we get some feedback on what happens when we use them? And what might the next version of this model or next iteration look like?” It’s published under Creative Commons, that’s my intention, it’s not mine, my intention is that if there’s value in it, then I’d like the world to do something with it.

    Geof:

    So I think that’s the thing I would say is don’t treat it as a fixed artifact. Don’t treat it as something that I think is finished, treat it with some skepticism come at it with curiosity and intend to iterate and collaborate. And anyone who would like to collaborate with me on it, please do get in touch because I’m going to be putting together a group of people who are interested and we’ll collectively see what happens next.

    Alexis:

    Very cool. I love it. And to contact you, they can contact you through LinkedIn?

    Geof:

    LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. My email address is geof.ellingham@gmail.com and Geof is G-E-O-F, slightest strange spelling, but LinkedIn is probably the easiest place to find me.

    Alexis:

    Perfect. I will put that in reference and I will of course put the article in reference of that recording.

    Geof:

    Right.

    Alexis:

    Thank you, Geof for joining the podcast today. That was really amazing to have you. I’ve learned a lot and I bet the people who listen, we’ll learn a lot too. I’m eager to continue to discuss with you after that. Thank you very much.

    Geof:

    You’re very welcome. I’ve really enjoyed having the conversation. Just to add that every time I have a conversation about the model, I learn new stuff about what might happen next. So these conversations are just so valuable.

    Alexis:

    Thank you for listening to this episode of Le Podcast. Go to Alexis.monville.com for the references mentioned in the episode and for more help to increase your impact and satisfaction, drop a comment or an email with your feedback or just to say hello, and until next time to find better ways of changing your team.

    The music is Funkorama by Kevin MacLeod (Creative Commons CC BY 4.0)

    Picture by Dylan Gillis.

    Le Podcast – Season Two

    Le Podcast – Season One