The Meridian Point: 2024 Year-End Review
Complete Transcript
Hey, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with Agile Meridian and The Meridian Point. This is our final episode of 2024, and I thought it would be fitting to do a recap of the year—our best-performing videos and the most popular podcasts in one episode. We're going to be going fairly rapid-fire through these episodes. There's about 9 or 10 of them, maybe 11. I don't know. We'll see what happens.
They follow a general theme. We did a lot of episodes on AI and the impact of artificial intelligence on industry, the disruption that it's causing, and, of course, the opportunities that it's creating for us. That's one of the themes that we're going to be covering here because several of the videos that we did were about AI.
Another theme is about the disruption in the agile space and what it's doing to people—people that provide coaching services to companies like me, and how we've had to adapt and change our approach to serving our clients and so on. Finally, we're going to end the series with some uplifting positive messages from some of our guests on the show.
I would say this has been a year of transition. Our podcast started off as purely agile, scrum, lean, and now we've broadened the scope to be more around disruption and innovation. We've had some amazing thought leaders come on the show and give us their thoughts on how their niche is doing and what they're doing to make it better.
Through all the conversations, I've noticed a thread that a lot of it is focusing on whether you're a sales leader or you're a leadership coach or whatever it might be. The focus is always on developing relationships that are sustainable, providing value, making things more efficient, automating processes that may otherwise take a long time. This theme permeates and is sustained throughout these interviews. Even though I don't know much about these industries, I can recognize that these people are really Agilists at heart, whether they know it or not.
So anyway, let's get started. Our first video is going to be with Peter Merrill and Glenn Marshall. This is actually a video that was shot towards the end of '23, but it's still getting lots of views and likes and comments, and it's about AI and agile alignment. So let me cue that video up, and we'll take a listen into what made it popular.
[Peter Merrill and Glenn Marshall Interview] "How confident are you that AI-generated code will avoid problems like bias and security vulnerabilities without extensive human review? What safeguards need to be in place?"
"I'm not confident at all that it will avoid those problems without heavily constraining what it can do. If the humans themselves are not aligned with business goals, then we can be pretty certain that the AI isn't going to wind up aligned with business goals. The developers don't go away just because we have AI. We will be driving the AI, but we need to have people who are critically informed on what it is doing technically involved in the conversation. So if we're going to meet business goals, then they have to be motivated not to meet KPIs or OKRs. They have to be motivated to try and improve business throughput."
Alright. I love that episode. There's a lot more to it, so I encourage you to look at the show notes below. Look at the link below and watch it in its entirety or listen to it. It's on all the major podcast apps, so you can always find it on Meridian if you search for Meridian Point.
So the next video we're going to queue up is another one focused on AI, and this is an interview I did in Q1-ish of '24 with Haldor. I don't know how to say his last name, so I'm not even going to attempt it because I respect him too much for that. The interview was really about agents that he created to simulate the role of the scrum master and also a lot of the other roles on the team. So let's take a listen to that interview, at least a clip of it, and it's really quite fascinating what he was able to do.
[Haldor Interview] "So this interview is really to learn more about how you created this scrum master bot and what that's meant to the companies that you install these bots in."
"I realized that most of my time as a scrum master, when I was hired as that, was to arrange meetings, do some summaries, get some statistics, reports, and so on. So I was thinking, could that be done by AI? It takes some knowledge about writing a prompt, an initial prompt, and a lot of prompting afterwards to train the team in the direction you really want to go. And then from that, building up the prompt to be more specific and with a lot of background. So I had to train it individually to the teams that I was working with in different companies as well.
So it started with the scrum master, and then I added the admin persona to do the summaries and sending out the emails after our meetings. And eventually, also data analyst to keep track of what we are doing and how long it took and all the waiting time. And eventually, I also wanted the scrum master to be more like a human, so to speak, to run all the meetings. So then I had to train it to be the facilitator of every meeting that we have. That could be a retrospective, that could be a sprint planning, whatever. And then I needed to modify the prompts and train it along the way."
Okay, so I don't know about you, but I was pretty blown away by that episode because he was able to train an agent to facilitate meetings. Now think about that for a minute. A little scary, right? Because it could put people out of work. Interestingly, no one lost their jobs there. That company that he worked for, they had trouble finding qualified scrum masters, so this was a way for him to train these agents to help the ones that they had elevate their skills and become more of the coaches for the teams and let the bots—these agents—do the more menial stuff, if you will. Although I don't think of facilitation as being very menial. But listen to the interview. It's really quite fascinating what he was able to do.
Our next interview is going to be with a gentleman named Joussef Tafwick, and he is a business owner based out of Egypt. He has a team out there, and what they do is build AI and automation systems geared to small companies. Typically, small companies are kind of left out. You know, the business owners are busy enough as it is trying to run their companies—what time do they have to really implement AI into their systems and into automating their systems so that they can be more efficient? And so what Joussef has done is, he does that for them at a pretty reasonable price. So let's take a listen to what he does.
[Joussef Tafwick Interview] "I value human intelligence so much that when I see something that is redundant, you would want to automate that so the human can do something that is way more productive, that can embrace the intelligence and the complexity of any human brain. So some of the basic tasks—or not even the complex tasks—within a business, I call them operational inefficiencies.
So think of AI as your intern. How can you really make it do the busy work for you? I'm sure you reached out for a contractor—it took them like weeks to get back to you with a quote, and sometimes they even forget. So we basically help them using automation and software, bring their quoting process and digitalize it into an automated flow using code or using software."
"It seems like a paradigm shift in how small businesses can really become more efficient and more effective in delivering value to their customers."
"People don't really know how to use AI and what are the actual possibilities. What we are doing today is educating the people, just giving them a nudge, something that is really small that would just open up their minds. We want the light bulb to light up, basically."
Well, I certainly lit up my light bulb because we're going to be doing something similar with Agile Meridian in 2025—helping small to medium-size, maybe even large firms, use AI more intelligently. It's not just the scattershot approach, but we're going to be doing more of that. And if you want to listen to more of Joussef's interview, again, the link's down below. He goes on to detail one of the case studies that he was able to do for a small business and the impact it made on that small business. I'm not going to give it away, so you have to listen to it. You have to go view it or listen to it later after this video.
Complete Corrected Transcript - The Meridian Point 2024 Year-End Review
So staying with the AI theme, this next clip is from an interview I did with one of my business partners, Chris Daily. He spent the summer and fall really on educating kids on AI. And he had some spectacular results, absolutely stunning results. And well, I'll let you listen to this because it's really quite fascinating. This particular clip is about the high school students that he helped. And these high school students, after several weeks in the program, they were hired as interns and they developed some amazing applications that were featured in some big AI conference that big companies weren't able to do, but these kids were able to do it. So let's take a listen.
[Chris Daily Interview] "We got approved for a grant where we could provide additional training as well as an internship for high school students. We decided to take somewhat of a unique approach, and that is it's a work-based learning grant with an internship. So instead of taking the students and having the students go to the organizations, we had the organizations come to the students. We created five sites in Indianapolis. We hired site managers. We bought all the equipment. We then trained the students on AI. So we put them through 24 hours of AI training, and it was led by me.
When they got done with my training, what we did is we then rolled them into a paid internship, and then we paid them. We provided all the computer equipment and everything. We allowed them to pick what they wanted to do. We created, you know, 40-some-odd GPTs, ranging from everything from Fortnite to Grand Theft Auto to a virtual assistant to a project management one, product owner GPT—all these different kinds of GPTs. It was just fascinating to watch them. It was a matter of giving them the technology, giving them the tools, and getting the hell out of the way."
I love that last line. Give them the tools, give them the technology, and get the hell out of the way. Why don't we do more of that? You know, empower people with the tools and the knowledge and let them create something amazing. We don't do enough of that and maybe we ought to, so think about that for 2025. How can you empower your employees to create greatness? How can you empower them to come up with the solutions? You, as a leader, don't have to have all the answers. Maybe the answers lie in the people that are working for you. So, think about that for a minute.
Okay. We're going to shift focus here and focus on some videos that are more on the interview side of things. So this lady, Nidhi Raj, I interviewed her—I don't remember exactly when, but it was sometime last year. Amazing woman. She is trying to change the face of women's literacy, financial literacy in India. That's a big deal. You know, culturally, women haven't had that much control over money in India. Actually, none of us are really all that financially literate. I could certainly learn more about finances, right? And everyone can, but what she's doing is really targeting working women in India and helping them become more financially literate. Let's take a listen to that clip.
[Nidhi Raj Interview] "What sparked your passion for improving financial literacy, especially among women in India?"
"That's an interesting question. So I think there is an increasing number of women who are joining the workforce now. We still haven't reached our diversity goals, either globally or in India. But at the same time, women's participation in the workforce is increasing and they are subject matter experts. In spite of that fact, they do not have enough knowledge to manage their hard-earned money. And so their money doesn't work as hard as they do. And that's what triggered my thought on why not support them to do so. They need to live life more independently, freely, and comfortably.
Firstly, the most important is lack of financial literacy. That's the first one. Secondly, the cultural barriers. Now, the cultural barriers are more on dependency on men in their lives. And it's like the entire focus of financial decision-making lying with the men in their lives. And finally, it is the confidence that they lack because of not having the right knowledge. So these factors, when I see around, I really felt that there is a need for this space."
I really need to get Nidhi back on my show because I know she's launched this endeavor. It took her about a year to put this together, this program together, and she spent a lot of time building it up. Nidhi is a former client of mine, a coachee of mine, and she's done some amazing things. And so if you get a chance, please watch the entire interview. And I think I have some links to her website that she's starting to put together now. So it would be great to learn more about it because she's disrupting the financial literacy space for women in India, and that's what the show is about—it's about disruption.
So having said that, our next clip that I want to highlight is going to be more on that theme of disruption. So for me personally, I've gone through a year of disruption myself, and I've launched a new endeavor, a new company focused on small business coaching. And so while I'm still majority of my work is spent in the agile space and coaching large firms, Profit Sensei was formed about a year ago focusing on small businesses. And so this guest, his name is Courtney Lodge. He's a master coach, tremendously successful, and our interviews center around the self. How do you help yourself become, you know, reach your potential, your leadership potential, your potential to run a business? Whatever it is you want to do, how do you do that? So he's written a couple of books, and this interview speaks about those books that he's written and his perspectives on business, running a business.
[Courtney Lodge Interview] "I want to just talk a little bit about the first book that you wrote and the way you frame the seven dimensions of mastery, mental, emotional mastery, physical mastery, relational mastery, vocational mastery, and then financial mastery. Can you say a few words about this book and how it influenced you in your life as a coach and a person?"
"This one is a toolkit for anyone who wants to grow, wants to develop a step-by-step methodology. People who go to work for organizations, they go there to help the organization execute on or even to create the organization's strategic plan. But they themselves as individuals, Kumar, they do not have their own strategic plan. So from that business perspective, I decided that for individuals, we all should have our personal mastery strategic life plan. That's what this book is based upon—you creating that plan for your life that is going to guide you, take you along as you move forward to whatever destination you have in mind."
"Your next book, which is coming out, this book is really focused on business coaching. So what inspired you to develop this system and write this book?"
"An important aspect of that is leadership. And we have been told so many different theories of leadership. The great man theory, for example, it's suggesting that you have to be born great. You have to be born a leader. You cannot be made into a leader. And this book is saying, hey, that is absolutely not so. You have things like the skills approach to leadership where they say you have to develop certain leadership skills."
I enjoy listening to Courtney Lodge. It was a great interview. It was one of the most watched last year, and I encourage you to take a listen to that. It's a pretty long one, so it's, again, it's on podcast. So on your next longest drive, take a listen because he's got some incredible advice for anyone really, any kind of leader, if you're a business owner, if you're an executive or a doer—it doesn't matter. It's going to be impactful for you in some way, shape, or form. So take a listen to that one.
Alright. Shifting gears a little bit, you know, I—this theme of disruption is not limited to just businesses and industry and all that, it affects us personally as well, and it certainly has affected me and my colleagues at Agile Meridian, and so the next couple of videos are really about the disruption the agile industry has faced over the past few years. This one is an interview with a couple of guests that were on the show. They were running a workshop, and they came on to talk about the workshop. And more importantly, I think the things that we talked about highlight the state of agile today and the future of it, as we see it now. So let's take a look at that video.
[Workshop Guests Interview] "So it's hard to talk about the current state of agile, 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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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 first, 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 leaders have a critical role. I feel like Agile has sort of put the leader aside a little bit where, you know, 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."
That was a fascinating interview, and I encourage you to watch the rest of it. We talk a lot about not only the future of agile but also the workshop that they ran. And actually, I need to reach out to them and see how it went and when the next one is because I would love to attend it.
So this next video is a sort of a monologue. It's me talking about the future of agile coaching and how people, agile coaches, scrum masters, what in my opinion, what you need to do to be more relevant in today's world. So let's take a listen to that.
[Kumar's Monologue] "And agile coaching is something that has taken a hit over the last year or so. You know, companies are not—they're not moving away from agile necessarily, but they're certainly moving away from hiring a number of coaches to help them in their agile implementations, which is actually a good thing. It's a healthy thing. So the question, the premise of this talk is really, how do you add value as a coach? And maybe more importantly, how do you shift your role from that of being an outsider, a coach, you know, sort of observing and helping the organization change to more of, not just an advocate for the change, but also an agent of that change.
What matters is the results. And so teach yourself how to speak in a different language without using the agile buzzwords, without using those things that have served us well and have served organizations well. It's getting back to foundations, getting back to basics. It's helping leadership. And the more you can do that, whether it's technology-related or not, the more in demand you're going to be as a coach. And so step into that role of facilitator, emcee, whatever it may be, and you're casting a vision every time you get in front of people. And so that way, you can start to advocate for yourself to say, hey, I want to take on a bigger role in the organization."
I did pretty good, I think. There were some questions that came up there from one of the audience members about how to break through and coach at a higher level. You'll have to watch the video to get my response to that. So, I encourage you to do that.
Alright, let's see. What do we want to look at next? We only have a couple left here that made the cut, if you will, and so let's take a look. Alright. This next one is one of my favorites of the year. It hasn't gotten that many views as some of the top videos, but it's trending in the right direction. It was an interview with Michael Gerhardt. I think that's how you say the name. Anyway, I'm going to stop talking and let you just watch the clip because it was amazing.
[Michael Gerhardt Interview] "So in this book, the book focused on a gap in strategy literature. Can you elaborate on what this gap is and why it's crucial for business leaders to address it?"
"The idea for the book actually originated from my work where I saw a pattern emerge that when strategies fail, it's often not that the strategy was bad or that the vision wasn't bold enough, but that it wasn't communicated effectively. Libraries have been filled with books about strategy and how to craft a smart strategy, but there's hardly any good book on how to bridge that gap—how to inform our teams about the most crucial question here: what actually is our strategy all about? And being able to say that in a way that anyone on the team can understand it, and translate it to what it means for the everyday actions that they need to take in their jobs."
That was quite profound. Lots of books on strategy, but not really any clarity on how to communicate it to people. Isn't that interesting? And I see it all the time in my role as an agile coach and enterprise coach—the ability to communicate strategy, to cast a vision is so important, not that many people do it that well. And so, great interview. I encourage you to listen to the whole bit, the whole interview. Either watch it on YouTube or listen to it on your favorite podcast. It's a really good one.
Alright. Next short clip, and this one I think needs to get more airtime because it's such an important one. It's with my colleague, Mike Jebber, and the clip is about, well, the video, the interview is about positive deviance and it's a technique where you look for the things that work well and figure out why they work well and repeat it. Rather than looking for things that didn't work well and figuring out why they didn't work well and take them out, you're looking at the things that do work well, and by doing that, by focusing on the positive, you can have a major impact. And so let's listen to this clip because it's really quite fascinating.
[Mike Jebber Interview] "Because I had never thought about approaching work in the way that positive deviance talks about approaching it, but I'd never really considered it like a way of doing things. I did some more deep diving on it and learned that this positive deviance concept has been around for quite a while. And while root cause analysis is pretty popular and well-known, positive deviance, I found, is not. Hence, I haven't been using it, even though I've been using root cause analysis for well over 20 years. So what's interesting is they can work very well together, and they're very complementary. One of the things around positive deviance is it's really about approaching problem-solving from that positive mindset."
I love it. You know, Mike, if you know him, he is a glass-half-full guy. I'm a glass-half-full guy, and so we kind of tend to gravitate to more positive ways of doing things. And so I'm definitely going to try the positive deviance model in the work that I do, and I encourage you to listen to the rest of that episode to get more on it.
Alright, we're up to our last clip. And this last clip, I think is super important in our day and age. It's an interview with Raciel Castillo. He's the founder of RC Technologies, and I'm just going to let you listen to this clip—he's pretty amazing.
[Raciel Castillo Interview] "Doing something. You're building a company that will, and part of the ecosystem that you live in will help us get back in balance with nature. But political changes are afoot, and how do these types of changes, these yo-yoing back and forth every 4 or 8 years happen? How do we sustain change?"
"I say first and foremost, going with the flow. I've never really—in the beginning, I was keeping tabs on everything in this industry. I was keeping tabs on policy. I was keeping tabs on changes left and right in the technology sector, what was going on in nature, what kind of companies were doing this and that. And it got to a point where there was something new happening every single day that I couldn't keep up. And I didn't want to. I was so overwhelmed that I was like, you know what? I'm just going to do what I was always doing and focus solely on the technology and everything else will sort of fall into place.
That's my philosophy. It may seem like a laid-back approach, but it's what I see—this movement has to happen regardless of what side of the table you're on. And in fact, I'll tell you, there are many climate deniers out there who are now starting to see how real climate change is when they don't wake up to the same amount of snow that they used to when they were a kid, when the summers are hotter than they used to be 20 years ago. And people are seeing these very real, very tangible effects."
Alright. That was probably one of my favorite interviews, and that's because it just happened a few weeks ago. But more importantly, because of the message and the attitude, the positivity that Rafael radiates all the time. You know, his positivity sort of is infectious. And he's a technologist, and he understands the ecosystem that he's part of, the business ecosystem. And he is making a difference in the world, right? I mean, his company is not revenue positive yet, still in the startup phase, but I'm sure it will be in the very near future. He has a vision to turn all of our cities into major carbon sinks to pull CO2 out of the air. And he talks about the people in his space—there's millions of them working on solutions to our climate crisis. And so I was really inspired by this video, by this interview, and I think you will be too. So please watch it.
So that brings us to the end of this show. I know it went a little long. I hope you stayed through the end and watched all of it. Please subscribe if you haven't already, and give me suggestions on topics to cover. Our—you know, I would love to talk to more disruptors in the space, whether you're disrupting education—and there's an episode on that—or you're disrupting leadership—there's several episodes on that. You know, come on the show. Let's talk.
Have a fantastic 2025, and I will see you all in the new year. Thank you.
