ļ»æWelcome everybody to our 100th episode on Meridian Point. I have my esteemed colleagues here, my partners in crime and business, with me today. We're all very busy these days, working in different spaces, in different parts of the company, actually different parts of the world. Jolly, I think you're in India today. Is that correct?
That is correct.
This is very special for us to have our 100th episode, and we just wanted to talk a little bit about how we've gone on journeys ourselves. We, as a company, help people go on journeys. We help them go from where they are today to try to achieve greater success and greater results in whatever mission or vision they have for their organizations or in their personal lives, if we can make that happen at the same time. But we wanted to talk a little bit about how those things have changed today, and really kind of get it down personally to each one of us and ask: what is it that you're seeing today in your personal journey in terms of being a facilitator of change and helping people to disrupt their spaces? How are you doing that differently today? How do you see that differently, and what is it that you're focused on?
We'll take a little bit of a trip down memory lane for each of us, but also talk about how things are changing today and how we're doing things differently than we were 2, 3, 5 years ago, even with the techniques and the tools that we use. Because let's face it, even Agile is being disrupted in this day and age. Agile is over 25 years old, so there's quite a bit of change going on in the world, and it's exciting to get together with all of you guys today and to talk a little bit about that.
So, let's see. Jolly, you're first on the top right-hand side of my screen. So I'm going to let you start it off and talk about how your journey has changed over the last several years, and what you're doing to help people deal with change and to disrupt their space.
Jolly: Yeah. So as you said, Mike, I'm in India now. I've been here for a month, and I'm working with a local client here in India. For the first time since COVID, I'm actually at an office. The biggest change that I see is I'm surrounded by really young people who are maybe, like, literally half my age. I have never worked with such a big, really young crowd, which is pretty amazing.
One of the things that I realized when I went into the offices is this is the first time I've been to an office in probably like 4 years since COVID hit in March of 2020. This is probably one of the most extended times I've spent in an office. I've maybe gone to an office once or twice for a day or two. But I've been there for a week so far. And I realized how different this coaching journey has been for me pre-COVID versus now.
I mean, I have been kind of rooted in the concept of the Agile values and principles which say face-to-face conversation solves 90% of the problems. And it's most of the time true. But over the past 4 years, we all have found different ways to compensate for the fact that we are not face-to-face anymore. Like, 95% of the time, we are coaching remotely. We are running our developments remotely. We are running our projects remotely. We are working with our clients remotely. Everything is remote, almost all the time.
And it has been a pleasant journey for me, but I had my tough moments. Don't get me wrong. I was really doubtful when COVID hit, and this became an extended stay-at-home or work-from-home situation, whether I could do my job well. The fact is that I can probably do my job well, but I don't have the relationships I used to make. I don't have that anymore. I'm still effective at my job, but that is probably because I'm overcompensating for the fact that I don't have those relationships anymore, which I used to leverage to a greater advantage. So that has been a very disruptive thing for me over the last 4 years since COVID.
Mike: That's got to be interesting going into an office for full days when you haven't been doing it for a while.
Jolly: That's right. I get to work at 8:30 in the morning, and I get out at 6:30. It's been pretty amazing. I love it.
Mike: Yeah, that's great. It's a little bit of normalcy, if you would call it that, from the old days.
Jolly: That is correct. Exactly.
Mike: Well, I want to move over to Kumar and ask you the same question. How has this changed for you? How has it impacted you? And what are you doing differently today?
Kumar: Yeah, it's been an interesting journey. I'll start with just this YouTube podcast, Meridian Point, that we started, what, two and a half, three years ago or so. Like Jolly, I was used to going into an office and being around people, and then all of a sudden that changed, and we've had to all learn new skills. I never envisioned that we would be hosting a podcast, or that we would have as many videos as we have on YouTube. A hundred of these episodes plus probably another 150 other short videos on various topics that this team has put together. There's so much content out there. And who knew that two and a half years later, we'd have all this content?
But personally, for me, it's been a journey, getting used to working in a remote fashion, getting used to all the tools, getting used to facilitating conversations on a remote basis. I personally miss the contact and the context that you get from being in the same room with people and the relationships that you can build. However, I feel that I've gotten better at building relationships remotely. I would never have thought, a year ago, two years ago, that I would be as involved as I am in networking. Networking is a big part of my routine, my weekly routine. I attend a couple of networking sessions every week with people from around the country, and we exchange ideas and ways to build our businesses.
I have gotten more into business coaching. We've started, as part of Agile Meridian, a new business coaching service where we provide small business owners the tools and the coaching they need to truly become business owners. In fact, this morning, I had a really good conversation with someone that described it perfectly. Running a business isn't just trading your time for dollars. That's not running a business. That's, how do you put it, pimping yourself out. Running a business is creating something that's sustainable, where you are building a livelihood not just for yourself, but for others within your company. And doing that takes great care, patience, foresight, commitment, insight, and above all, a keen awareness of your own leadership behaviors, your own emotional intelligence, things like that.
And the last thing I'd like to say about the channel specifically is we've been focusing a lot on disruption and innovation. I've met some amazing people that have disrupted industries, or disrupted themselves in many ways. And a common thread seems to run across all of these conversations, and it is how nimble and agile they are without really knowing the first thing about the manifesto. And to me, it's interesting that people are generally wired to work in an iterative and incremental fashion. It's just, if given the right opportunity and the right environment, people will normally and naturally gravitate to that. So maybe we need to think about how we provide those environments to people so that they can be more agile and more nimble, rather than force down on people's way of working. That's my journey, my thoughts today.
And so for me, it's been a journey in all of those facets over the past four years since Agile Meridian was born. And Agile is still a part of our DNA, I would say. You know, we still peddle in Agile frameworks and we still coach to the frameworks. However, it's become much more under the surface, under the covers, if you will, the way of working for us. We don't shout Agile from the rooftops. Rather, we help people on their journeys utilizing tools and techniques that may be considered Agile, but we don't come out and say you have to do Scrum or you have to do this. It's more about what works for them and meeting people where they are.
Mike: That's fantastic. And the opportunity to meet all those people, that's great.
Jolly: Yeah, I just want to add one thing, which I wanted to add at the end of my part. I mean, this channel or this Meridian Point hit 100 episodes mostly because of Kumar. Otherwise, we wouldn't be at this 100. The energy that Kumar brings to this is like 10 times beyond what we do. So thank you, Kumar, for leading all this content that we have on this channel. It has been really wonderful seeing all this. We would not be at 100 episodes if you had not had the passion you had around this.
Mike: Exactly. Absolutely. Well, and Chris, same question. So we know that you're in the Midwest, like myself, and making some waves in the Indianapolis area, especially as of the last 6 to 8 months. Tell us what you're doing and how that differs from what you've seen and been doing over the last 2, 3 years.
Chris: Well, first of all, we drafted the best female basketball player in the world, Caitlin Clark. So come to Indiana, come to a game. It's fantastic.
Yeah, so in the last 6 to 8 months, I've been working as a fractional leadership with an organization called 1150 Academy. And I have been inserted in a place of leadership, even though I'm a contractor, and asked to help them innovate. And so what we've done is we've created a new program that I think is going to disrupt work-based learning.
Chris: It's a program where we train the students, in this case, high school students. They're going to be 10th, 11th, and 12th graders in the fall of 2024. Once we get them trained with 24 hours worth of training, we then immediately take them into an internship where they're working on projects that we've found from businesses in their areas. We've actually got 5 sites. We're starting up our 5th site on Thursday. We've got about 75 kids that are engaged. They're all high schoolers. Any of you that have had high schoolers or have been around them know how crazy it is.
So we're doing that, and it's working really, really well. We're teaching them how to use ChatGPT and DALL-E, Midjourney, but we're also teaching them, rather than just teaching them the AI piece, how to apply it, how to use it. Because at the end of the day, ChatGPT is going to go away. You're going to move into some kind of new interface. 99% of the population at some point is going to move away from ChatGPT and do it through the software they use. But we're taking advantage of that and teaching them how to do complexity thinking, problem-solving, emotional intelligence.
Speaking to what Kumar said, doing Agile under the covers, I'm using the same exercises that we as a team use. I'm using those same exercises on the students, and I just call it iterative and incremental. That's all I say. I talk to them about that. I talk about, okay, we're going to have a status meeting every morning, and we're going to just find out where everybody's at. We're not going to problem-solve. I call it the status meeting, and it works. I mean, it just works. To Kumar's point, people gravitate toward that. They gravitate toward that.
So I've been doing that. And then the other thing that I've been doing that is even crazier is that as part of Agile Meridian, we got part of a grant to work with 6th to 8th graders in under-resourced areas, and we're teaching them STEM. So we're going out to the poorest areas in Indianapolis, and we're actually going into a community center and bringing the kids in and introducing them to laptops, VR headsets, you know, those kind of things. And we're going to teach them a little bit of AI, but again, we're always using the technology to let them explore.
Chris: I mean, kids, if you tell them what to do, they're not going to do it. They just don't do it. You're an adult, you don't know what you're talking about. But if we give them a tool and let them just go explore, it's, you know, and say, "Okay, you need to generally explore what Martin Luther King did," or George Washington Carver or Abraham Lincoln. Just go figure it out. And you give them a laptop and you get away from them. Or you give them a VR set and say, "Go explore the Roman Colosseum." They're learning, but they're learning through the technology. And that's what I want to get them. That's what I'm focused on from a STEM standpoint, is not the actual content, but how do you use tools to get to the content?
And it's been a very interesting ride. I've been here two years, right? And this is our 100th episode. You know, for me, it's been a very interesting journey. At the time when I joined Agile Meridian in January of 2022, I was coming off a rough patch. And these guys let me join them. They've supported me all the way through. And so I just want to take a minute or two and just acknowledge the fact that I appreciate everything you guys have done for me and helping me get to this point. I would not be here without you.
Mike: Well, it's certainly a pleasure having you here. I know, Chris, I've had the luxury and the privilege of knowing you for well over 10 years now and seeing that journey that you've made, both in your personal life and your professional life, has been amazing. And you're doing some really creative stuff. And I think that's, you know, that really hits the nail on the head.
I remember when the four of us got together a couple of times over the last couple of years when we would meet at a locality to talk about stuff. It's kind of like, where do we want to go with this? Where are things going? Where's that next direction? And what I love is we're all being able to find we've got these passions and these things that we like to do, and we've got this structure that really allows for the freedom and the ability to explore into those areas and to dive into those areas and to see what kind of an impact you can have in certain spaces, not just physically or locally around our areas, but around subject matters or areas of interest or industries or concepts, philosophies of sort as well.
Mike: And there's been a lot of that that we've all been able to jump into and experiment with, especially in the last year. It feels like we're a little bit going off into different directions, but we're reaching out to new things and then we're bringing it back in to the group. And I think that's really impressive because it's something we talk about our clients doing for themselves, and we have for a long time, and now we're actually doing it ourselves. And it's fun and exciting to see, and it's very rewarding, I know, for me, and it sounds like it has been for all of you as well.
Jolly: Yeah. And the funniest thing about that is...
Mike: Sorry. No, go ahead.
Jolly: I was just going to say the funniest thing about that was, we went through some of the growing pains of that as well, right? I mean, we did that kind of change in maybe a true Agile fashion. We had challenges in getting to the place where we could all independently sometimes, sometimes collaboratively try different things. And we had to use Agile techniques in our own way to get to that point where it is successful. We are happy in our own spaces at times. We are happy in common spaces together when that works. And we have all succeeded in different ways in that respect. So that is our own journey where we have found ways to succeed. I want to hear about your journey, Mike, as well.
Mike: Yeah. For myself, I've really enjoyed moving closer to the people side of the equation over the last several years. And the ability, obviously, as consultants, when we get to go out and work with different industries and stuff, we get to learn all these great new things. I'm working with a bevy of different companies now that do things that I never knew anything about, which is great. But I was never really equipped or able to help the human side. I was always focused on that process side and stuff. I always knew it was important, but I wasn't quite able to engage in those other sides.
Post-COVID, you talk about things that changed during COVID. That became so much more apparent to everyone that that was a valuable part of the equation with the fact when we all got barricaded into our homes and couldn't go anywhere or talk or see anybody.
Mike: I took that experience out of that era and brought it forward into what we've all done in the past and all the techniques. My partners here have heard me say "arrows in the quiver," right? I carry around a quiver of arrows, and there are over 60 things that I have used in the past in different ways for different situations. And what I'm finding is I'm getting to use, I'm finding new arrows to put in the quiver. I'm finding new ways to use the arrows I had in the quiver, and I'm finding there's more uses for each of them in the environments that I'm in.
I've had a great amount of experience now in being able to work with senior leaders, C-level executives, especially those senior level groups to do what you were talking about earlier, Kumar, which is that environmental aspect of an organization to help them realize and envision what does an environment look like that actually helps to promote all of the great things you want to see your people be able to do and open them up to be able to do them without it being something that you have to manage all the time.
And it frees you up to go look forward and be the visionary in the organization because, frankly, we all know VUCA is creating a lot of complexity and ambiguity in the world that we have to deal with. You know, giving them that freedom and the joy, seeing them have more joy in their work and be more successful and get the financial numbers and the metrics and the measures to all the stakeholders, but also to see them retain people and hire and train new people and build apprenticeship programs within their organizations to grow their own talent that they can't find as business starts to ramp back up has been super rewarding.
And similar to you, Kumar, in terms of just learning about all these great things that people are doing and the ideas and the aspirations they have to disrupt their space, but never had the time or the tools or the method to go about doing that. And just being able to help those organizations and those individuals along has been really where I've been focusing most of my time. And it's so rewarding because you get that you build those relationships and friendships. I have CEOs that text me on a run in the morning. "Hey, I got a thought. What do you think of this?" Just out of the blue and building those. It's really been really rich. And I never, to your point, Jolly, I never thought that would have come out of COVID. I thought that those days were done. I didn't think we would have a chance to do those things because of the disparateness or dispersedness of the people that we work with.
So it's been a really fun journey. Bumpy, but fun. And I really feel like we get our stride in getting individuals and organizations to see the value of becoming a disruptor and being a change, taking on change every day and every week is a part of what you do and the value and the excitement that that can generate in their organizations. And that's been really rewarding for me.
Kumar: That's pretty awesome. I don't know what the next 100 episodes will be like if we have that many, but hopefully we will. But it's been a good run of content. And not just the content, it's really the content is just a reflection of where we are right in that moment, the types of guests that we attract and the types of conversations that we have on the show. But hopefully we will continue to have valuable conversations moving forward.
Mike: Yeah. And I would say moving forward, I think we've all committed to finding those others that we run into and bringing them into the conversation as well. I'm really looking forward to over the next hundred episodes, finding folks outside of this little four quadrant here that we've got, bringing them and getting their experiences, getting all of their knowledge and insight and their challenges and impediments that they've overcome and the types of things they've achieved. So this has been great, guys. This has been great.
Kumar: It has been. So on to the next year.
Mike: Yeah, absolutely. Looking forward to hearing about everybody's successes moving forward. If any of you out there have any topics or interests you want to see us cover, we'd love to hear from you. Also, if you have a story to tell, if you have a story of your own to tell about being disrupted or overcoming disruption or even starting a disruption in the areas that you work in, whether it's your personal or professional life, we'd love to hear about it. We'd love to get it on. We're looking for those stories. So, for my partners at Agile Meridian, thank you everyone for attending our 100th, and we hope to see you soon.
All: See you all. Bye.
