I am thrilled to introduce Erika Lens from Kinetic Change and Martin West from JANERS, the creators of the upcoming Agility 4Q workshop. This innovative gathering aims to bring together experienced agile practitioners to reflect on the collective journey of agile and explore new directions in the face of recent challenges. Erika and Martin recognize that the agile community is at a critical juncture, with many questioning the relevance and effectiveness of traditional agile methods.
Agility 4Q provides a unique opportunity for participants to engage in deep reflection, collaborate on defining the future of adaptive software development, and leverage an AI-informed facilitation platform called JANERS. Let's welcome Erika and Martin and dive into their insights on the current state of agile, the vision behind the workshop, and the exciting possibilities that lie ahead for the agile community.
Kumar: Hello, Erika!
Erika: Hi, Kumar. Thank you for having us.
Kumar: Of course. Thank you for being here. So, maybe we can start with you, Erika. Just give a brief introduction to who you are and how you came to be where you are today. You know, go back as far as or as recently as you want.
Erika: Okay. I'm bad at brief introductions, so I'm probably going to keep it overly brief. I've been working in the agile space for 13 years or something like that. Most of that as an agile coach. I am now the co-founder of Kinetic Change, which is my next move. We want to focus on helping change leaders improve their skills for guiding change. So that's clearly informed by all my experience doing agile transformations and seeing that leadership is not always prepared for what we come to know as the mess of agile transformation. So working with them and helping them get ready for iterative, evolutionary change is what we're focusing on.
Kumar: That's excellent. Thank you for that. I'm going to for sure come back and ask you more questions about that. Martin, how about you?
Martin: I was going to go through the few decades of experience to sort of give you a quick insight into the different focuses over the decades. In the first decade, I was really a system analyst working with designing systems using large models, you know, that got replaced with the light models for data. And then in the second decade, I was delivering collaborative systems, which was much more nimble, small batches, incremental delivery. Then in the third decade, I was doing more management and project management, but I had adopted a sort of a servant leader approach and used small batches and incremental delivery.
And then in the fourth decade, I sort of got very frustrated with the level of dysfunction that I saw in organizations and went off and studied conflict resolution at university for a couple of years. And then, sort of been working on bringing resolution into business processes since then. As part of that journey, I've been involved with agile more directly, as a program lead for implementing a product management system, and working at a retail company leading agile, introducing agile. And as part of my startup, obviously, we get to choose and have full agency over the processes and choices that we make around agile. So that's sort of my background.
Kumar: That's great. So you have a really deep background in the more technical part of the craft, right, and have been doing things in a more iterative, incremental manner, delivering small batches. And then I'm sure getting frustrated at times with how organizations are structured that limit that to a certain extent.
Martin: Yeah. That's an interesting way of also describing your background. So I tend to think of your professional life in terms of decades. And my early experience was running restaurants, and I like to tell people that was where I learned how to be agile and nimble. You cannot help but be agile and fast, running a restaurant.
Kumar: Alright. So, I wanted to maybe start us off with the question, and this is part of the introduction that I mentioned. Right? So, how much is the current state of agile or how much did it influence the creation of this workshop?
Erika: It's hard to talk about the current state of agile. Right now, the top topic is the tech layoffs that have included a fair number of agile coaches and scrum masters. But if we're honest, the agile community is so large and so varied at this point that it's hard to draw some sort of generalization about where we are.
In terms of Martin and I connecting around the workshop and deciding that it was a good idea to implement it, it really came out of a personal conversation we were having around seeing a lot of people out of work, seeing a lot of people starting to question what was next for them. And noticing that playing with JANERS and talking a lot about how to facilitate through adaptive change, there was an opening here, an opening to help people come together, tell stories, and see what we could learn together.
On a deeper level, it's personally fulfilling for me because I'm at a pivot point myself. I mean, I started as a scrum master 13 years ago, and during my journey, I had lots of opportunities to work with a lot of different types of agile. So I worked with extreme programming teams, I worked with scrum teams. I worked with software teams and marketing teams and an HR team at one point. I worked with a lot of UX practitioners, both embedded on teams and on separate teams themselves.
And I was lucky enough to work with a lot of coaching teams where there was a whole lot of coherence around what we cared about, what our values and principles were, and what approach we were taking within a given context. I think we don't have that kind of coherence now across the agile community as a whole.
I had some very enjoyable experiences with SAFe transformations when I was kind of mid-career. My experiences with SAFe transformations recently have not been particularly enjoyable because it feels like we've, as a community writ large, moved a long way over 23 years from the original feeling around the values and principles.
So our hope, and Martin, you can speak to your hope as well. I don't want to speak for you. But then I'll say my hope is that by bringing people together and telling stories, we can help create a little more coherence, at least in small pockets, connect people who wouldn't normally talk to each other, hear stories from people who are in very different contexts so that it's not just consultants and coaches who have been in 12, 15 different companies who get the view, the perspective of seeing all of those different contexts. Maybe we can have agilists who have been in the same company for 7 years tell their stories to each other and help them broaden their view.
Kumar: That's a really broad view of what prompted this workshop. I'd love to hear from Martin, what your thoughts are.
Martin: It was going back to that conversation that Erika and I were having. I think part of the frustration was the types of conversations that were actually happening. It was more of a debating, you know, this method versus that method or this should be changed, this should be changed, rather than sort of digging down into our own and reflecting on our own practices and our own stories and what we found highly valuable from agile and what we found maybe less valuable and like to change and have those stories being told in a collective where everybody is hearing each other's stories, and there's huge power in that, sort of observing... people being able to observe and connect with other people's stories and build that broader perspective. And let's see what can happen from there and how to move that forward in sets of conversations. So that was what we were hoping for, what I was hoping for.
Erika: Yeah. I'd like to add something to this. I don't want to name drop, so I won't, but I was having a kind of extended conversation with one of the manifesto signatories. And he was saying that he doesn't think that what we need to be doing right now is revisioning agile. It's not the right thing. We're at a point where we're experiencing a kind of punctuated equilibrium. It's an evolution term, but the idea is that, you know, a meteor has come down and created some natural selection force. And what needs to happen next is that there needs to be a kind of explosion of experimentation.
We have AI in the mix. We have some tech layoffs in the mix. We have rapid constant change happening in a way that was not so prominent 23 years ago. And we need to experiment, and we need to experiment in different contexts. So part of what we're trying to do with this collaborative space is to connect people so that they have an opportunity to do some of those experiments on their own. So we're thinking about that as a networking point for people to come together.
Kumar: That makes sense. So you mentioned coherence and how earlier in your career, there was coherence. You had good experiences with being a scrum master, good experiences in SAFe transformations and so on. And, more recently, that hasn't been the case. What do you suppose is the reason for that, or if there's one reason?
Erika: I don't want to generalize because I think it's specifically attributable to the fact that the size of organizations that I've been working with has gone up over time. So I think a lot of it has to do with agility at scale or at least attempts at agility at scale. And working in large organizations is much more complicated, and there's a lot more inertia that you have to overcome. And there are just the sheer volume of politics is larger. I think humans have politics no matter what scale they're working at, but in a large organization, you have a hundred thousand people doing political things, rather than 500. And politics almost always get in the way of agile transformations. It's a very common anti-pattern. Someone has something to prove and the thing that they're trying to prove may be taking down the transformation. And someone with enough power is able to do that with not much effort.
Kumar: That's a good point. Martin, what are your thoughts on this question?
Martin: I think I've got an overall question about whether agile should be scaled. I'm getting away from the idea that we're trying it, and in fact, maybe the change that needs to happen is around leadership and adaptation. And that leadership change then brings everybody forward into whatever agile methodology that you're using below that. So leaders have a critical role. I feel like agile has sort of put the leader aside a little bit where the leaders not only have responsibility, but they have the experience. They have the ability to be major contributors to the agility system that we have. And we need them as much as the coaches, as much as the teams, as much as the software developers. It sort of needs to be a holistic system.
I did a podcast series called the Agility Narratives. And that was the aim of that. It was for people to tell their personal stories around their findings around agility and how they got there, and then what was the impact of that agility and their experiences implementing that method. And like you have, Kumar, you have a method on disruption, and there are many people who have these different methods.
So I sort of wonder whether agile is already disrupted. It's just that, you know, because people are doing so many different things... I was interviewing, I interviewed 80 coaches or something like that as part of my study for work for JANERS. And what I found is that most organizations had a mix of agile implementations. Some little pockets were doing it at scale, somebody else was doing scrum, somebody else was doing some other method or some mix of methods.
Erika: So I think one of the things that I... the conversation I would like to start having more broadly is that I think we use that word "agile" to mean a whole lot of stuff. And when we're talking about agile at the team or team of teams level or the midsize company level, even, you know, we're talking about 600, 700 developers that need to be coordinated. The principles in the original manifesto, the values and principles are applicable, are relatively easy to have conversations about, they're wonderful guardrails, and you can stay connected to the original intent, which is that all of it is grounded in... intended to be grounded in disciplined software development practices.
And the way it's constructed, the history of how it was created, the people who signed it were all disciplined experienced practitioners of developing software. And they were experimenting with a whole bunch of new methods that they saw had things in common.
When we're talking about implementing agile at scale, I think we're actually talking about a different discipline that is inspired by some of the general ideas talked about in the manifesto. And I really wish we could start using different words, not just different adjectives, like business agility, or agile transformation or agile at scale in whatever way we're talking about it. But we're talking about large group human dynamics when we're talking at scale. We're talking about organizational structure. We're talking about organizational level operations. How do finance and HR and marketing and technical operations and development and IT and field operations... How do they all interact and interconnect at the organizational level in a way that impacts or doesn't impact agility?
And as we've trained up our coaches, we have them working with wonderful practices like theory U, or management 3.0 or adaptive leadership. I mean, we've stuck our fingers into a whole bunch of disciplines and pulled them under the agile umbrella because we need them. If we're talking about agile at scale or agility at scale, we need to think more broadly than we do when we're talking about building software and focusing on things like making sure we're talking to the customer, making sure that we are having good communication within and around the team. So I hope that we can start getting a little more creative with language and a little more specific with language.
Kumar: You both bring up really interesting points that I frankly haven't thought about deeply enough, but just through this conversation, I think there's a lot of merit to them. The fact that agile was created by disciplined software people that wanted a better way to work, and of course, maybe in the early years, it was easier to have success scaling this to a certain level, smaller companies perhaps. And maybe the incoherence that we're seeing now is a result of much larger organizations trying to implement these practices that need a lot of other legs to stand on to be able to scale to the organizational level change that is required for business agility at scale or whatever it might be.
It certainly resonates with my experience and experience with me and my partners, and what led to the disruptor method. Just sort of the appetite or lack of appetite for companies to try this agile thing, even if they've done it before. They're like, "That stuff, we didn't have a good experience with it." They don't want to hear the words even. So I think that resonates, that maybe we need a different language or a different word or a different set of words to describe what it is that we do. Any thoughts on that reaction, Martin or Erika?
Martin: I think I've sort of got a question that comes up from that, which is, are we going to try and do change top-down, or are we going to try to do change bottom-up? So is it going to be that we have a method and everybody has to follow that method, or is it going to be, what does each team need? And percolate some collected voice upwards, led by leaders. Leaders have a critical role. I feel like agile has sort of put the leader aside a little bit where the leaders not only have responsibility, but they have the experience. They have the ability to be major contributors to the agile system or the agility system that we have. And we need them as much as the coaches, as much as the teams, as much as the software developers. It sort of needs to be a holistic system.
And any sort of future thing would be great if the leaders were leading, and they were taking ownership, hopefully from a vulnerable, open, safe position. But being a leader and being introspective and being reflective and being able to lead... I've seen all leaders being able to do that, and it's just beautiful to see when that comes together.
Kumar: It is a beautiful thing for sure.
Erika: I'd like to add to that. We have top-down as one option. We have bottom-up as one option. And as a third option, we have at least the concept of evolving things systemically. And so this is a lot of what if you look at transformation models and how people try to implement transformations, they're trying to get that systemic view. I think we're not very good at it yet because systems thinking is hard, and it requires very big eyes. And I have yet to see a serious application of systems thinking in an agile transformation.
And I hope someone says, "Erika, you're wrong. I've done it. I'm going to contact you on LinkedIn." And then I want to see it. So I would love to see how that works. I see a lot of people talking about doing it, I have yet to see it connected to real cultural change and maybe even a decentralization that we would hope to see that's well hung together. I think the idea of doing evolutionary continuous improvement at scale is lovely, and I think it's also very complicated.
Kumar: Of course. Because you got humans involved. It's hard when you have a large group.
Erika: Absolutely. I will say, and I don't want to derail the podcast and talk about disruptor, but I will say that we've had success with large scale leadership-led change, and not only changing how a company makes decisions because it's been really transformative for the companies that have used it. But also, how it has resulted in gains for the company in terms of revenue increases and EBITDA increases and things that a company or business is interested in. And so tying it to certain outcomes that not only improve the culture of the company and the way people are rewarded and recognized for their effort, but also the bottom line and the top line.
Kumar: I want to shift to the workshops and maybe probe a little bit into how the workshop... I know you've already said how it does it, and I'm specifically interested in a question. Before we came on live, I mentioned I was leading a workshop today, and it wasn't going well. So I shifted, thinking that I was doing what your workshop is, in sort of a similar track that your workshop follows. And if I'm going to read what Martin shared with me, what JANERS stands for: Joint Accountability, Neutral Advocacy, and Resolution Services. Did I get that right?
Martin: You did.
Kumar: Okay. Thank you. And so my impression was, okay, my workshop that I ran this morning... I'm going to mute you again because there's a bit of an echo. So thank you.
My workshop didn't start out that well. It was mostly an ideation type workshop, and it didn't work out. There was too much ideation, sort of digging and diving deep into some aspect of whatever it was that we were discussing. We changed it to try to sort of achieve some outcomes by the end of the day, which they did. So I thought, maybe I did that. So tell me how this workshop is different and how my assumption was wrong.
Martin: I don't think it's necessarily wrong. The sort of the often basic patterns for great communication is these sort of divergence and then convergence. You've got the double diamond in design thinking, in interest-based negotiation. You have the same thing. You have the storytelling. Then you have the sort of issues in trying to get the agenda out and understanding everybody's perspective. And then you've got the options expanding, and then you've got the negotiation.
So that pattern is very much the common pattern and is often used. Steve Jobs had a great way he used to do this. When everybody is really happy and they've got this conclusion, he'd go, "So what's next? What are we going to do now?" And it would open it all up again, and it would sort of validate the end conclusion that everybody had come to, and then you knew that that conclusion was the right conclusion because that was the next step. And then you would... I often learn more as you think.
So in terms of the workshop, the sort of observation or the balcony... getting people to reflect is the initial personal storytelling. And then hearing that as a collective. So each so we're creating this voice because you're hearing other people's perspectives, and that helps sort of create... it involves sort of identification of a gap, and sort of where that gap happens. And then out of that, you can start to discuss maybe some of the challenges and against the sort of overall statement... is the problem statement around agile or agility changed? And so we can sort of reflect on that.
And then we're now going back into sort of options. What are the things we would love to ask? And we can use AI to sort of reflect back on... So what are the themes of the story? What are the mindset changes of the stories that we've told? And go back into small groups and create these things that people are interested in discussing further. And then we're going to basically put them out there and sort of talk about them and then people are going to show interest in them and we're going to try and design experiments around those particular items and then see if people want to go beyond the workshop and start building these experiments. And we're aiming and supporting them to that. So that's sort of the flow, and it is a bit of a double diamond as well.
Kumar: Okay. Yeah. What I love about JANERS is that so I've facilitated for years, in both in-person and online. And there's often, especially if you're doing a longer facilitation, like a day or two, there's often this sense that stuff that came up in exercise number one that you had in the first hour somehow needs to be carried through the thread of conversation. I used to do multi-day liftoff style workshops with clients and teams. And we often wanted to pull stuff through. And the way you do that in the room is you keep all your exercises up on the wall, and people can walk around and look and say, "Well, there was this piece..." and then they make a new sticky and they carry it over to the next exercise.
JANERS is a platform that allows that flow of information to be documented and worked with and labeled and subset. And so as a tool, as a facilitator looking at this tool, I'm like, "Yes. I've wanted this for a very, very long time." I've wanted something that kept me from having to manually piece things together, as well as something that would help hang together the group process.
Since what we're aiming for is starting with individual stories and getting at the end of three hours, which is a very short amount of time, to people engaging in specific topical areas and then hopefully coming up with collaborations and experiments that will extend far beyond the workshop, and hopefully create new relationships if we had our wildest dreams met... since we're trying to do this arc, it's really helpful to have a tool that helps us do that. And that also integrates AI into the mix so that it's like having a neutral observer and summarizer and synthesizer of ideas sitting at the table with you.
Kumar: It sounds like a really fantastic tool, JANERS. I'm just blown away. So I'm trying to imagine how this would work. So if I'm facilitating a workshop, is JANERS listening in the background, or does this only work in remote settings, or will it work in remote or in-person settings? How does it work?
Martin: It's designed for online global groups, but it can be used in person as well.
Kumar: And so is it just listening and sort of makes these connections?
Martin: No, no, no. We don't... We have that ability, but we don't necessarily think that's the best way. The idea often is to get, when you're talking in small groups, is to get different roles. So one person is the speaker, the other person is the listener. One person is a documenter or observer, and you switch those roles. And then it's useful to visualize the conversation as it's going. So that helps the speaker as well as the listener and the observer to sort of create this environment, which is much more supportive of development of ideas.
Kumar: Okay. And what does the AI do then? Does it summarize? Does it provide feedback? How does it enhance the experience for the attendees and for the facilitators, really?
Martin: Yeah. So the way I think about it is that it's a partner for each individual. So you can use it in... you can use the conversation that's been captured. You can query on that. You can query on documents that have been added to the knowledge set. So if you're doing a workshop on agility, then you could have all of the core documents around agility embedded, and you can query on that and that will ground any queries that get made. So it's a personal tool, and then it can be a collective tool. So whenever everybody's gone off and done their work, their breakouts, you can come back and immediately summarize all of the breakouts. And you can, when data gets captured, you can filter it based on particular labels, and create different views and different work groups so that you can... So the AI will help you respond to the particular data set that you've actually just filtered and created.
Kumar: I can use that today. Hopefully... I was busy trying to find visuals, you know, from PowerPoints or whatever slides to paste onto a Miro board, to provide some relevance to the conversations that people were having. I assume with JANERS, you would be able to load them up in there and provide some context that would ground a group around whatever the ideas are that they're meant to be discussing.
Martin: Absolutely. That's the purpose of it. Yeah.
Kumar: Yeah. So, what is the vision behind this particular Agility 4Q workshop? I mean, I know you said it's trying to bring back some coherence and maybe form lasting relationships. What else? What can people expect to learn and then take away from this workshop?
Erika: We're not defining that because people are going to bring the knowledge into the room. I mean, we'll be putting some structure around it and certainly making sure people are walking away with something valuable, but part of the experiment of the workshop itself is who comes into the room and what stories do they have to tell and how does that impact other people in a particular workshop.
Kumar: Interesting. It's almost like an open space that you're not structuring the... I mean, the topic is around agility, I'm assuming, and the stories that people have about it, but it's more open in that you're not defining a set of learning objectives, if you will.
Erika: Yes. I would call it a highly facilitated open space, which is kind of a contradiction in terms, because the structure of it is very clear. You know, we want to create an evolution and experience over the three hours that people go through. And we have a pretty well-crafted agenda that we're going to be implementing to do that. But we don't want to presume that we know what people are coming in needing to learn. And I think my hope at least is that people would be surprised by what they're learning.
Kumar: Want to leave room for that surprise and innovation and some epiphanies to happen.
Erika: Yes.
Kumar: When is the workshop?
Erika: We have three dates coming up: May 14th, May 21st, May 23rd. We have two basic time frames that we're putting it in, one for Europe and Asia time zones, one for North and South America time zones, roughly speaking. We have the specific UTC zones up there to help people choose between the two. And I suspect that we will have more than that, but those are the three dates set up right now.
Kumar: Okay. Very good. So I would love to attend just to experience it, so I'm going to check it out. And, of course, we'll have the dates in the show notes here when this goes live. So you just look below, you'll see the dates and links to the show and so on and so forth. What have I not asked you that you'd like to share with the audience about this workshop or anything else we've discussed? Maybe, Martin, you go first.
Martin: I don't... I think you've done a fantastic job of running through this agenda. I don't have much more to add to that. I hopefully Erika does.
Erika: I have one thing that I care about a lot. We've been talking recently about who we want to show up. And, of course, we don't have much control over that. We're opening the doors and saying the right people are going to show up in open space style. And what we're aiming for is a cross-functional group because the conversations will be better. We're not looking at filling the session with scrum masters. We're looking at a few scrum masters, a few product managers, some business agility folks, some technical coaches, some software developers, people who are doing mobile apps and people who are building much more complicated desktop apps, whatever that looks like, so that we can get a broader survey and hopefully more opportunities for surprise. So when you share out the information, if you're interested and you want your friends to show up, try to invite your friends who are not like you a little bit.
Kumar: Yeah. That's a really good point that it adds to the level of learning that people can expect from a workshop like this, right, where you are learning from people that don't share the same experiences that you've had. And that becomes a really important part of the workshop. You don't want a whole bunch of coaches that have had the same experiences as you have in big large organizations. Maybe you want a cross-section of folks that have had slightly different experiences.
Erika: Makes sense.
Kumar: All right. Well, with that, thank you so much for appearing on the show. I really appreciate you being here. And for those of you watching, please do check out the workshop. I'm certainly going to do that and find a date that works for me and my schedule because I want to learn more. I have some selfish reasons. I want to see how this JANERS AI works because, you know, facilitation is hard, especially in this day and age when everything's remote. And it's hard to make a connection.
I just had my last podcast episode with a grief coach. And she was talking about how she's trying to work on getting leaders to see the invisible, especially true in the current work state where most people are remote and there's so much that's invisible to us, especially when the cameras are off, right? Because in most companies, the cameras are off. You can't even see the person.
And so how do you find, how do you see the invisible? And so that was a really good interview and a really good comment. And I think we all need to do a little bit more of that. And if this platform can provide some tools to increase engagement in our remote meetings, I think that's fantastic. And so just for that reason alone, you should go to this workshop.
Erika: I agree.
Kumar: All right. Take care, everyone. Thanks for watching. Bye-bye.
Erika: Thank you, Kumar.
