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Episode Transcript
Lisa: So tell me a little bit about how you came to found Agile CIO and about the work that you’re doing at the moment.
Jurriaan: Yeah, so about six years ago I was working as an IT manager and I left the company I worked for. From then on, I’ve been doing several interim assignments and started to focus on agile transformations. I specifically focused on the C-level because there are many, many companies that work on a team level or an individual level, but not so many that focus on teams of teams or whole enterprise transformations. I decided to focus on that and specifically trying to translate what agile means for the C-level suite.
Lisa: You write a lot about how agile isn’t just a framework that happens in the IT department. So what does that mean and what does it mean for an organization to be truly agile then, across the whole organization as you say?
Jurriaan: Yeah, so what I encountered very often is a group of people in the IT department starting to adopt agile practices like Scrum or Kanban. This works out very well in the beginning. People start with a lot of enthusiasm and you see some good results. But after a while, the velocity of the teams is impacted by the rest of the organization, which still is working in the old way. They’re getting slowed down, they’re getting bogged down by some bureaucracy or maybe even some micromanagement going on.
The challenge is – and that’s actually the first challenge that you face – to figure out if your organization is ready to continue to change those kind of things. Because if you start with agile, you quickly expose some problems in your organization and you need more of a systemic view, look at the whole system to understand what you need to do to actually truly become agile.
Even if you’re very good at doing Scrum, you can still build the wrong product, or you can still spend many, many months trying to design a product before you start doing Scrum. You could kind of “water-scrum-fall” sometimes, and that’s not what you want. You want some agile teams to be in close contact with the customer, designing what to do.
Very often it’s seen as a silver bullet, and organizations don’t follow through, and then sometimes they get disappointed with the results. They give me a call and I try to help them understand that they need to look at their whole organization. It’s just a starting point – you start doing agile in the IT department.
Lisa: What do you do with the C-suite then in terms of helping them embrace an agile way of being? And what are some of the pitfalls that you find leaders struggle with when becoming an agile team or leading in an agile way?
Jurriaan: Yeah, so it starts a lot of the times with awareness and understanding of what it actually is. Fortunately, it’s become a buzzword, and everything nowadays is agile, which means that actually nothing is agile. So there’s lots of confusion around what it is, what it can bring, what it needs. So starting on learning to understand, make sure they are on the right level of knowledge, and then kind of demystify it a bit.
Of course, the next step is to get them into contact with their teams and with the people that are actually doing the agile stuff, that are struggling. I see it very, very often that the C-suite is not really connected or in touch with a large part of the workforce. A lot of the work I do is actually try to bring out the tensions in organizations that people feel, and making the right levels aware of them, and trying to coach them to actually take action to change it.
Sometimes the leaders themselves are part of the problem, are part of the impediments. Because if you’ve been leaving and becoming a senior manager or even a C-level manager in a lot of corporations, it means that you’ve been very successful at getting results, at actually delivering stuff by being the expert or being in control of everything. And in the agile world, there’s a whole different expectation from leaders, or a different set of behaviors that is effective.
So this is also a personal shift, an individual transformation of behavior. Also making the C-suite aware of what might happen and coaching them and giving them feedback at the right time when they’re trying to do unproductive interventions is something I do a lot.
Lisa: So it seems like a certain amount of self-awareness in terms of leadership is really important. Can you say something about your own journey in terms of personal development? And I know that you have done a lot of your own research and visiting some of the companies that are operating in new ways to learn about agile and how to work differently.
Jurriaan: Yeah, absolutely. My journey – as an IT manager in the past, I also thought I should be the smartest guy in the room, trying to give orders and to be in control of everything. Over the course of the years, I’ve also learned to let go and to trust teams, and my work has been shifting to creating environments that teams can flourish in.
This is something I learned from my research where I did a tour through Silicon Valley, but also went to Sweden to visit Spotify, spending time with these companies, sitting in meetings as a fly on the wall. This really helped me understand their culture and how leadership is changed in such organizations.
One of the articles that’s still most read that I wrote is “You will not become agile by implementing Scrum.” It addresses kind of the similarities but also the differences between these organizations and explains the traits of a fully agile operating model. And leadership is definitely a big part of that.
Lisa: And you were telling me about Spotify when we met and how you were surprised about the fact that they had managers. Can you say a little bit about what their approach to management is?
Jurriaan: A common misunderstanding is that if you have a large amount of self-organizing teams, which Spotify has – they have now grown into about a hundred different teams that work on tech, product, and design – that you now don’t need any managers to help those teams.
Very often when I do public speaking, I ask this question about how many managers do you expect there to be. But in fact, they have a large amount of managers because they decided to have a 1-to-5 ratio, so maximum of 5 people report into one manager. In a lot of companies, it’s one to twenty or maybe one to fifty.
The reason they’re doing it is because they see their engineers as top athletes. As a trainer and a coach, you’re only able to coach about five top athletes at the same time at a very high level. This is how they approach it. Their managers are coaching and helping people instead of telling people what to do. It’s a big shift and they focus a lot on personal development and personal growth, increasing autonomy at the engineer level. That’s a lot of what they do.
Lisa: And can you give an example of a team or either a leadership team or a company that you’ve worked with and how you were able to help them embrace agile ways or new ways of working?
Jurriaan: So the last year I worked with a CIO’s management team of a financial services company in Holland. Their IT department was adopting agile in a lot of places and they wanted to be more agile themselves, which actually meant that we started looking at the way they make decisions and the way they steer the organization.
One of the first things I did was opening up their management team meeting. In the past, if you would want to be on their agenda, you had to send in a request about a week before with formal documents and a big set of slides, and then the secretary would decide if there was time for you on the management agenda. But of course, this creates a large barrier and a large distance between the teams and the management team.
What I wanted to do is to make that much, much more accessible. So at the moment, what you can do is, at the start of the meeting, if you show up with a post-it with the subject on it and you show up yourself, you are the first item on the agenda. Just make it as simple as possible. So that was the first step.
The second step was to open up their management and status reports. In the past, everything would happen behind closed doors. They would get the update, they would make a decision, and this information was only available to them. But these days, their management meetings are more like an open Town Hall kind of session where the biggest and most important initiatives just present their status and their sprint results to the whole group, including the management team.
Now everyone is aware of what’s going on. This means that a lot of teams now have a lot more context of what’s going on, and the decisions that managers make are now much more transparent. Also, the decision-making is sped up enormously. So it was a nice way of implementing agile actually in how managers run the organization.
Lisa: It sort of reminds me of the book “Team of Teams” and how General Stanley McChrystal talks about decentralization and radical transparency being two really useful ways of teams kind of facing the times that we live in, with uncertainty and kind of increasing pace of change are kind of new norms.
Jurriaan: Absolutely. It’s something I saw across most of the organizations I visited. If you want to have an organization built on autonomous teams making decisions themselves every day, it’s extremely important that they have the context and information to make the decisions as if they are the CEO of the company.
It’s kind of logical, but you still don’t see it a lot. A lot of times, C-level is not really communicating a lot with the rest of the organization. Maybe through newsletters on the intranet, but not often a two-way conversation where everyone can ask questions and everyone hears all the answers. That’s not happening a lot.
But at Spotify and at Google, these town hall meetings are weekly. At Google, after the TGIF (“Thank God It’s Friday”) meeting, which everyone across the world can also look at through video broadcasting, everyone can ask questions. I think it’s a very, very, very important characteristic of a responsive organization.
Lisa: I saw that you had a presentation that you did online, and one of the slides had a provocative question on it which said, “Do we still need managers?” What’s your answer to that question?
Jurriaan: I think multiple answers to that question. If you look at Spotify and Airbnb and the likes, there’s still a lot of managers, and they don’t actually operate as managers in the traditional sense. But like I said before, they do coaching, they provide context for the teams, they make sure the system is there so the work can actually happen, instead of them getting all the results. It’s a mechanism, it’s a way of working, it’s very effective to them.
But at the same time, I’m currently working with an IT company of about 250 people in Holland which has no managers at all, and that’s also working very well for them. It’s a clearly self-organized company where there is nobody that holds the role of manager. But they do the advice process, for example, and they do consent decision-making, and everybody’s responsible for their own work. It’s also a way of operating that I see more and more companies adopting.
So do we still need managers? Maybe at the moment it’s still very, very useful. Maybe in the future it will start becoming less useful. But again, I think in the end, you will not have formal hierarchy, but there will always be kind of informal hierarchy. Just like with any group of people, you get influenced by your ability, by your seniority, by your talent. And leadership just emerges on all different levels as a meritocracy, instead of having a kind of fixed people on the ladder which are there for sometimes the wrong reasons.
Lisa: Right, so it’s distributed leadership and a form of meritocracy.
Jurriaan: Exactly.
Lisa: So in terms of that self-managing organization that you’re working with, and also from other companies that you’ve experienced where there are no managers, what do you think is essential for teams to be successful? Because it’s kind of a new landscape of working really. I mean some organizations have been working in this way for many years obviously, but it seems to be that more and more organizations nowadays are starting to adopt managerless ways of working, but it’s challenging.
Jurriaan: It’s challenging because it’s very hard to transform into such a model. But indeed, like you say, with this company, they’ve been operating like that from the beginning more or less. As they started growing, they did have some challenges in the middle. There’s always the temptation to install rules at a certain point in time, and they decided not to and create kind of self-correcting systems.
I think there are some factors there that are very important. I think it’s very leader dependent. There are some examples where you have a good self-organizing culture, but then the leader changes and the system breaks. In the end, the leaders are holding space, and if they are not fully, fully convinced that this is the best way to operate, then it will not happen. And they will actually be the limiting factor often of the self-organizing maturity of the system.
Lisa: I think it’s a really interesting point that comes up a lot in my conversations with people about self-management – this idea that there is a leader who holds the space for that way of working, and when they leave, it so often collapses. Do you think it’s possible to create a self-managing system that is kind of anti-fragile or resilient enough that it will survive even once its leader or the source kind of moves on?
Jurriaan: I think it is possible, but I think the challenge – and then we also need to reinvent, I think, ownership and shareholding of companies. In this case, the company I’m talking about is owned by three of the leaders that founded the company and are still there. While they are in charge (or actually they are formally in charge by law), then they will still be able to hold space.
But I’m sure that this culture could certainly survive without them if they would not be replaced. But of course, a commercial company always has shareholders and has, by law, a board that decides. But there are some companies that are hacking the system as well. They’re trying to rethink legal contracts and different constructs.
For example, the self-organizing consultancy company in Sweden called Crisp are a very good example of this. They appoint some formal persons as their board, but they don’t operate without a CEO. They made this very explicit in all their legal documents.
Lisa: And what inspires you most in terms of the future of work? What is your dream for how organizations will look in the future?
Jurriaan: I think there’s a big opportunity and a big expectation as well, especially if you look at the current younger generation that’s growing up. They tend to be more willing or they expect to be in an organization where there’s no manager telling them how to do their job. So I think it’s growing, and it’s a big opportunity because I also believe that there are many examples of organizations where, when you unlock self-management or do that very well, the results are much better. An organization becomes more resilient to and adaptable to change.
That’s actually why I decided to also become a network member at the Ready, because I have this growing frustration with agile in the sense that agile is so often misunderstood or misused. I want to make an impact in the sense that more and more companies should try to look at their whole system, change a lot of other things than just agile practices that are often applied to IT. So I think there’s a huge opportunity, and hopefully we’ll see more and more examples.
Lisa: I know the Ready has an OS Canvas that they’ve put together that I really liked, and they shared on Medium. Where can organizations start if they’re trying to sort of upgrade their operating system? How do you begin something like that?
Jurriaan: I think it starts by being aware of what the current situation is. That’s what I’ve done with some of the assignments with the Ready – start with trying to diagnose where you are and where you want to be. It’s of course very simple. And then decide where it hurts most and start to start doing experiments around that.
I don’t believe that you should transform or change or try to change the whole system at once. You need to do it also in a responsive, inspect-and-adapt, incremental way. But yeah, so start with whatever tensions are felt most by the people and start improving on that. I think that is a good way of starting a movement.
Lisa: You talk about sensing the tensions that people are experiencing most. And something I’m always interested in is kind of two dimensions of reinventing organizations. One is structures and processes and reinventing those, and things like Holacracy I guess come under that category. And the other is kind of really looking at or reimagining ways of being and ways of leading, and our mindset and our whole kind of paradigm of how work should be. What are your thoughts on those two dimensions and where do you see your work fitting in in terms of the second one I mentioned, in terms of ways of being and leading and seeing work?
Jurriaan: I think I like to look at the whole system. So there are all pieces of a puzzle, and I don’t really see that one is more important than the other, apart from having the right leader in place or the right leadership vision in place to enable all this.
Interesting chat I had recently about integrative decision-making where people need to bring their objections and their proposals to a meeting. These are kind of processes or structures that you can use to actually make sure people are not – people for a second, so that people are behaving in a way where they leave their emotions out.
You see both paths at the same time. You want to enable people to be whole, to be a whole person, to be able to have any kinds of emotions and not have to hold back. But at the same time, we’re also trying to figure out how to do group decision-making without our monkey brains kicking in. So it’s kind of an interesting paradox there.
I believe you should look at the whole operating system, the whole canvas of an organization to get good results. In the end, everybody is fully responsible for their own lives, so why should people not hold responsibility for how they organize their work? It’s kind of a very artificial system that we’ve been putting in work that now needs to change, I think.
Lisa: I think you touched on a point that I’ve been exploring myself recently in terms of how the very things that make us human both make it difficult for us to relate to each other and work in self-organizing teams – in terms of kind of perceiving things as threats or struggling to be honest with one another and finding it scary to kind of give each other honest feedback, for example. Or make decisions together without our kind of monkey brain, as you say, taking over.
And yet it also seems to be that being more human and embracing things like vulnerability and wholeness, as you say, and making it safe to show those things and to show up in that way is also the kind of solution. And I suppose it plays into the agile mindset as well of kind of retrospective almost, and just continually having dialogue about what’s working, what isn’t working, what’s getting in the way, and kind of owning and taking responsibility, as you say, for our state or our emotional responses to things or ways of thinking about things.
Jurriaan: Absolutely. I think if you’re asked to – I see this a lot when I work with organizations that have just started doing agile, where people were not working in teams ever, or not really. They are in a team, but they’re not really collaborating as a team or focusing as a team. And now they are, and you see all sorts of personality challenges popping up, or maybe indeed a lot of group behaviors that are maybe dysfunctional, or a lot of those kind of things going on.
So there’s a big role for coaches there, for agile coaches or whatever you call it, to coach both teams and individuals to become better at working in a group. It’s a skill that needs to be learned and developed. And it requires self-management on an individual level as well to be effective in a team.
Lisa: What books would you recommend to listeners in terms of agile or in terms of reinventing work?
Jurriaan: I think it’s good if you’re starting to look at agile and you want to understand how other companies operate. “How Google Works” is a nice book where you get an insight in the engineering culture of Google and what enables them to be fast and agile. That’s not really a book about agile, but it’s a good way of understanding how such a company operates.
Of course, you have “Reinventing Organizations” which I definitely recommend to read to get a sense of what’s going on in the future and also understand where we are now.
And finally, if you’re interested in change management – what I often see is transformations with a very static end state and the big plan and milestone planning towards that, which is kind of applying old change management to a new paradigm, which is, I think, wrong and often fails.
A good book to try to get out of that pitfall is “Lean Change Management” by Jason Little. It’s a very simple framework, but I think very insightful. And it talks about how you can actually approach change management as if you’re doing Lean Startup, as if you’re trying to figure out what changes and what experiments the current culture is responsive to. It’s a good framework to use for changing systems and cultures, I think.
Lisa: If you could offer one piece of advice or words of wisdom to people who are interested in developing a more responsive organization or finding new ways of working, what would that be?
Jurriaan: It feels really like simple work, but it’s actually one of the hardest kinds of change to change a system. It’s important to realize that any change or creating something within a system which is different automatically provokes a response of the immune system of the organization that would probably try to get rid of this abnormal state. If you’re aware of that and if you have the courage to continue, even if that happens, and continue to speak up with the idea that you’re actually trying to pursue something that’s better, that is very important.
Try to be courageous. Not get disappointed – you will get disappointed and it will cause a lot of pain, but that’s part of the journey. So that’s what I would like to say about that. It’s not easy, but it’s rewarding.
I believe a lot can improve. And this courage to speak up and to also say no to leaders and to push back is actually a kind of behavior that is extremely important. I see very often teams struggling with impediments or challenges, and they complain about it, but they don’t do a lot about it because they think they can’t do anything about it because they’re not in leadership.
But actually I believe if you just start changing it by doing it differently and by not giving up and making leaders or your leaders aware of what is actually the benefit of getting rid of maybe old procedures or old governance or old ways of approaching things… It requires courage and persistence, but if you are able to get rid of it, it’s very rewarding.
Lisa: I think that’s a nice point. I think courage and persistence. Is there anything else that you were dying to share with the world or anything else that you want to add?
Jurriaan: Let me think. Well, it’s kind of a question I want to put out there, which is “What comes after agile?” And I think part of the answer lies in the responsive work that we’re doing. But if anybody would like to speak up about their vision of after agile and what it actually would take for people to get rid of the buzzwords and to start understanding the reality of what it is, I’d be very interested to hear about that. It’s something I am struggling with, I’m writing about. It’s kind of a mission to get rid of the stigma or the confusion around agile and that people understand what it actually is and what kind of powerful tool it is, and get the systemic perspective in there as well.
Lisa: Thank you.
