Disruption and Innovation Podcast
Episode: From Agile Burnout to Reinvention Coach
Guest: Todd Kamens
Host: Kumar Dattatreyan
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KUMAR DATTATREYAN: Hello, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with the Meridian Point. Thank you for joining. Today, we are joined by Todd Kamens, a seasonedāI don't know what he's seasoned with, but he's seasoned, he's experiencedāagile coach and business transformation expert who's been at the forefront of organizational change for over two decades. After learning Scrum directly from Ken Schwaber, one of the founders of Scrum, or creators of Scrum, and spending years helping Fortune 500 companies like Anthem transform their operations, Todd has reached a fascinating inflection point.
He's evolved from implementing agile processes to something much more strategic: what he calls reinvention coaching, inspired by Dr. NadiaāI don't know how to say her name, so I'm going to not say it and butcher it in the processāDr. Nadia, who Todd will tell you about. She's the Chief Reinvention Officer, created a Chief Reinvention Officer framework, and Todd draws parallels to Medicine 3.0's proactive approach. So we'll be diving into both of those topics.
Todd is pioneering ways to help organizations anticipate and design for change rather than just react to it. He's here to share his journey from agile burnout to reinvention catalyst. So without further ado, let me welcome him to the stage and we will get started. Hi, Todd. Great to have you here.
TODD KAMENS: Thank you very much, Kumar. Good to be here.
KUMAR: Yeah, yeah. This has been a little work in progress of getting this podcast scheduled, so I'm glad you hung with me.
TODD: Yeah.
KUMAR: So, Todd, you've had what sounds like a powerful aha moment around the 2016 timeframe when you spoke about Agile 2.0. Your title, your talk, was called "People and Connections." Take us back to that moment. What made you realize that agile failure wasn't about processes, but about people and culture?
TODD: Yeah, that's a great opening. And so, as you mentioned in the intro, I did learn Scrum originally backāwe hired a consultant named Ken Schwaber. He taught us how to break through a lot of our impediments that we had and deliver. And I fell in love with everything I learned. I studied operations management in college, and I never thought I would see some of the things that I learned that were specifically focused on manufacturing and flow and queuing and Kanban now being applied to software. And so, long story short, I find myself sitting one day. I've been meditating for about three years at this point in a meditation practice.
And a buddy of mine, we were talking about how, you know, agile's sort of like a practice as well. You know, it ebbs and it flows and different companies get it and some don't get it. And it's sort ofāthe light bulb went off. I was asked to speak at this PMI conference and they're like, "What do you want to talk about? It's agile day." And I'm like, "Well, I think what I want to talk about is, you know, I've consulted with a bunch of companies and some companies, they get it, they love it. And some companies they get it, they hate it. And it doesn't work for them." Right? You've heard that a million times. "We can't get it to work here."
And at the point in time, it was 2016. I'm like, Scrum hasn't changed really much at all since I learned it. Yeah, really the only thing I could think of was it's all about the people. It's about the people. It's about how they're introduced to change. Change is a four-letter word to a lot of people. And so I wrote my whole PowerPoint and my slides. Everything was all aboutāI called it Agile 2.0. It's about people and connections. And I said, you know, I think we're focusing too much on the process and too little on the people, the culture. And then the big piece of it is their emotional readiness to change.
And so I don't know if it was then, but I guess you could say I started to become more of like a transformation partner where I was not so much focused on the frameworks anymore. I wanted to be focused more on the human side. That was my initial aha moment.
KUMAR: Yeah. It's interesting that you have that revelation when, you know, it's very clear in the manifesto, it's about people over process. And yet these frameworks, at least from your experience and mine too, that I think a lot of us coaches, our colleagues of ours have been more focused on the process of agile and the process that's embedded within these frameworks. However, lightweight, they are still a process and not maybe as much on the people.
TODD: Absolutely. And the tools don't help.
KUMAR: Yeah, that's right. I mean, they do and they don't. But yeah, well, agile was invented in an age before all these tools were available, right? It kind of forced the collaboration with writing your stories on an index card. And it forced the conversations to happen and all those things that don't really happen today, right, with the tools that we have.
TODD: Yes, collaboration needs to be intentional and that doesn't always happen when you have tools. You sort of leave it to the tools to be the repository of the documents that we create.
KUMAR: So I want to get back to the revelation. So after that revelation of yours, you sort of became this voracious reader focused on change management and organizational psychology. And your focus on people, can you share an example of how this understanding and this sort of revelation for you helped transform maybe in a specific engagement or maybe your approach to change?
TODD: Yeah, absolutely. So after a 2016 webinar, I had an idea where I was going to do an online summit and I was going to interview a bunch of people about people, people change, psychology, things like that. And I successfully recorded five episodes. And that's as far as I went. But one of the episodes I did record and I released it last week was with a local psychologist here in the Boston area. His name is Dr. Ryan Madigan. And you'd probably think he's a child psychologist and why would I want to interview a child psychologist?
And what we did is we sort of ran a bunch of parallels between his young story children that are struck with anxiety about change, right? And here I am in the business world and I'm working with people that are also struck with change. And it really, really hit me. He said something in our interview where I was telling him about, you know, I'm coming into organizations and I'm introducing these new processes. And he's like, "But at the same time, you might be stepping on somebody else's process that they built. And they maybe got a huge bonus ten years ago for building this amazing new process. But here you are, you're the change man. And what does that feel like for them?"
And I started to really think about it and he said something that was so profound and I think he said it comes from the AA world but he said, "Unsolicited advice can be criticism in disguise." And I thought like how amazing is this connection and we come in as coaches and we're like, somebody said in the organization, "We're going to start working in an agile manner," but does anybody ever pause and think about how does the person, the employee, how do they feel? Like, how do they feel? Because what if I am Todd, the person that created this amazing process that's worked great for the last ten years and in comes a coach that says, "Here's a new way." Are they telling me my way doesn't work anymore?
KUMAR: Yeah.
TODD: And so, Kumar, what I started to think about is almost like putting myself in their shoes. Right? And maybe asking them, like, what are you feeling? What does this feel like to you? Because it's not just a new process, right? It's not something being done to them. You really have to understand, you know, what is their perspective? Where are they coming from? So that you can show them why this new way might be something worth going for.
KUMAR: Yeah. I totally, that totally resonates with me. And I was in a meeting earlier and it was about technology and implementation of technology and this huge new system. And one of the insights from the people in this meeting was how the technology was really secondary to the people implementing it. Right? So at the end of the day, no matter how advanced we get with AI and all that stuff, it's still about the people and it's about how the people deal with change.
And the sobering statistic, of course, today is and for a long time, for decades, is that the average engagement of employees in companies and big companies are in the 30% range, mid-30s, which means that 65% of the people in these big companies are disengaged or actively, actively and passively resisting whatever it is that you're trying to change in that culture and that environment. That's amazing.
And so when you're talking about big changes like, you know, a bunch of an army of consultants coming in and telling people how they should be working, they're already resisting whatever is in place.
TODD: Yeah. Like we're humanly, right. We're humans and we're programmed, right. Fight or flight. And even though, you know, they say, right, that in our brains, the fight or flight response, even though, you know, it was originally right to keep us alive. A change event at work in our brain is the same, it's the same sense, right? We feel the same threat when someone's coming in and telling us to change the way we work.
KUMAR: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm sure you've come up with approaches to deal with that. And one of the things that was interesting to me, and I haven't looked into it yet in any great detail is Dr. Peter Attia. I think it's how you say Medicine 3.0 concept and business transformation moving from reactive to proactive systems building. Can you talk to us a little bit about what is this? This is the Medicine 3.0 and how it relates to what you're doing now.
TODD: Yeah. Yeah. And so a lot of, and I mentioned, or you mentioned that I am a voracious reader. And I don't always read books that are tied to, you know, to agile in any way. I mean, I think this book now is, you know, anyāI don't know if you can see it, but, you know, Gary Ridge, "Any Dumb Ass Can Do It." And he talks about, you know, he's the former CEO of WD-40 and he talks a lot about culture.
And what led me to Peter Attia's 3.0 book is, he was talking about, you know, and I think today's medicine, you know, there's thisāI think they call it functional medicine. So we used to live in a world where, you know, somebody had a heart attack and now you say, "Oh, well, we've saved you. Now you need to diet a certain way. So maybe you won't have another heart attack."
And then they went into, "Well, let's do tests once a year. And maybe we can see if there are trends to monitor that could maybe at some point when one of those trends comes up in a negative way, maybe now's the time to take a medicine."
And what Peter's book talked about, which really blew me away, is how can you be even more proactive? So for instance, you know, looking at your genetics, looking at, you know, your blood work and your chemistry, you know, are you more susceptible to certain things than other people are?
And the one example I could give you right now that I think is a good point to look at is there's all these commercials now, right? For people, do you want to wear one of those little sensors on the back of your arm to track your blood sugar? And I have a son who's a type one diabetic who has to track his blood sugar to live. And I always wondered when I see these commercials, like, well, what is that about?
And what it's really starting to do is if you can see the trends, even though you're not diabetic, if you can start to see the trends, then maybe you can start to be more proactive and eat something differently before your body reacts.
And so I started down this path of, you know, well, how could that be applied to business? And that's ultimately what led me. And you mentioned Dr. Nadia. I think it's pronounced Zaksymbaeva. And I'll save, I'll bring her up in a few minutes, but I started to think about, well, you know, so many things go on in the business world. I mean, we just saw all these tariffs and companies that didn't think about, "Well, what if it happens?" They just waited for it to happen. Well, they're probably in a lot of trouble. Right?
And so how could we be more proactive in looking for signals that could impact our business and then have a process that sort of digests those and makes sense of those and tells us, "Well, when should we address one of those?" And then we can get into the agile frameworks that help us implement a solution. And so that's where Peter's book really led me down this sort of rabbit hole of, you know, could we be more proactive in our approach to everything that we do, including our careers?
KUMAR: I really like that. It's sort of like a, I mean, I wear this watch, you know, this Garmin watch and it tracks my heart rate. And I try to stay active. And so it tracks my heart health and my recovery zones and all this stuff. And I look at the data, you know, not obsessively so, but I do look at the data to see if I'm improving, my health is improving, if my performance is improving on my bike rides and things.
And so it gives me, it's motivating in some way, right? So you look at the data, you look at the metrics and you see the trend improving over time and you're like, "Oh, okay, this is working."
And I think what you're suggesting is that companies should have sort of these sensors, if you will, leaders should have sensors that are built in that are tuned to how the people are feeling, what they're working on, what they aren't working on, what's motivating them, what's demotivating them, so that the leaders and the doers can sort of take action, right, and be rewarded for the things that they do that are useful and stop doing those things, the behaviors that are maybe less useful.
And I'm drawing a very, very nebulous parallel with maybe the work of Dr. Peter Attia, but I, again, I don't know if it applies or not, but that's my interpretation of it. And I think it's so powerful though. Right? So because, social media has captured this so well, don't you think? It's the instant gratification of putting a post out there and collecting the likes and being constantly reaffirmed that, "Okay, there are people that like my posts or don't like my post or whatever." It's sort of like a drug. I'm not saying the company should do that, but I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that.
TODD: Yeah. Well, so I think it's important that, so when you mentioned about putting those triggers or monitors, I think it's not only for inside the company. I think it's also, you know, a lot of these should be what's happening in the outside world. Yeah. I mean, for anybody that's watching, I was watching it earlier today, Sam Altman in his last presentation, I don't know how many businesses maybe are now really, really having scary board meetings today because of some technology that OpenAI can now just do out of the box.
Well, the question I would have is, were there signals a year ago that you should have been listening to and then maybe reacting, right? Or like the easy one, and I don't want to talk politics at all, but the easy one to talk about is the tariffs. Trump ran on a campaign talking about tariffs. You had to think if he got elected, he's going to institute tariffs. I would hope that if you're a business that's going to be heavily impacted by tariffs, you didn't wait until he got elected. Right?
So think about in your business, what part of AI is going to potentially impact your business? And then at what point should you take action? Because if you wait too long, you're out of business.
KUMAR: Yeah, we talk about this quite a lot at Agile Meridian about being disrupted. Either you disrupt or you will be disrupted. And so sort of developing the senses and the signals and the monitors, even if it's just up here, the type of thinking that you do, systemic thinking that you do to be prepared for the events that you think may occur, right? And what do you do for that so that you don't get disrupted, so that you can be more on the disruptor side than the disrupted side.
TODD: Right. And not only being aware of the signals and the disruptors, but also internally inside your company, do you have like a, let's say a quarterly review process where you've set five signals out there that you're looking at either in the market or within your own organization and once a quarter, do you look at those signals and say, "Well, this just happened and this just happened. So what are we going to do about this? Because if this happens, we're going to lose all our people." Yeah. Or we're going to lose a whole line of business. Right?
KUMAR: No, that's really good. I like the way you're thinking on that. So let's move to Dr. Nadia. You were at the summit in Dublin, the Reinvention Summit. And it seemed like a watershed moment, maybe. You want to talk about that and how did that influence your thinking?
TODD: Yeah, completely, completely. So I was sitting at my desk here and my wife was at a conference in Boston. And this woman I've never heard of before, her name's Dr. Nadia Zaksymbaeva. She was the speaker that day. And she was talking about something that she calls the Titanic syndrome. And the idea behind this is basically, as we all know, the Titanic didn't need to sink, right? I mean, they had binoculars, they had radios, they had boats in the area that told them what was going on.
And she applied it through her doctorate. And now through her movement around reinvention, she's applied it to businesses, right? Like what's going to sink our company. And wouldn't it be a shame if we knew it. Right?
So I listened to, of course she has a TED Talk. I listened to her TED Talk and I was blown away and I started to do more research. And next thing I know I'm in Dublin. I'm at a conference. The conference was hosted by her and another big thought leader in Europe. His name's Aidan McCullen. And he hosts the podcast called The Innovation Show. Yeah.
And I've become good friends with Aidan. And we've spoken a bunch since before, during, and after the summit. And basically, what Aidan talks about is four things. He talks about, you know, that every business goes through an S-curve of growth. Right. And the idea is how do we reinvent before the peak? Yeah. Right. Because if we wait to the peak, then we're hurt. So how do we reinvent when things are comfortable?
He talks about this idea of a transformation tax because the longer you wait to reinvent, the higher the cost. Yeah. So almost like technical debt. Right. And a lot of the work that we've done and as agile coaches, he does talk about the iceberg or the Titanic syndrome where, you know, the disruption rarely begins with a catastrophe. Right. A lot of the times it's because we've just ignored warning signs for a long time.
And then I really love this one concept is he recreated the S-curve and he calls it now more like an infinity symbol where it's just permanent reinvention that we're never done, right? But what we need is we need a system that will allow us and a culture that will reward us to constantly reinvent.
KUMAR: Yeah.
TODD: And so Aidan is a consultant. He speaks, he does workshops and Nadia as an academic, you know, her approach has really been more around training. And so, you know, I encourage you to, you know, if you're listening go look up either of them. They both have some really great information. But I found myself out at this Reinvention Summit and honestly, I felt like I was at like the first TED Talk. It was unbelievable. I mean, they had someone from Patagonia there. They had Alex Osterwalder, right? He created the canvas. It was just unbelievable.
And all of them were sort of had a similar thread is you can't wait in these days. Yeah. Things are just changing too fast. And so you have to constantly be reinventing your business or you'll be out of business.
KUMAR: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And that is so true. And probably the central premise of our disruptor method. And I really like the concept of the S-curve applied to businesses. Right. So what is the next thing that you're going to sort of replace? Whatever it is that is your cash cow now, because eventually that's going to die. And I think companies like Apple back in the 2000s were really famously good at cannibalizing their own products with something better that, like, you know, from iPod to the iPhone, for instance, the iPod was obsolete. Right? And once the iPhone came out and then the iPad and so on.
And I think it applies to people too, individuals like that go through an S-curve of growth and reinvention. And I think there's a book by Dr. Whitney Johnson that talks about "Disrupt Yourself," I think is the title of the book where she introduces this concept of the S-curve for people. And that there's a half-lifeāit's about two years for individuals as they sort of grow in their company and then stagnate. And at that point is an inflection point where they either leave or they become one of those disengaged employees. Right. And so, really good insights there.
All right. We're running short of time. We could probably talk like for an hour on that. I think so. Let me ask you sort of the future of coaching for you. Where do you see the biggest opportunities for business coaches, coaches like us, that want to move with more, a reactive, a move away from a reactive implementation to more of a proactive implementation?
TODD: Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, now where most companies, you know, are saying, you know, "We work in an agile way." So, you know, "Do we need to bring in a coach?" Right? It's become a little bit, "Well, you know, can our manager just coach?"
And so what I've seen a few things is, you know, I've been a consultant since 2001. And the one thing that I've always loved is that outsider perspective. You know, I've seen different things in different organizations, and I like to think that I can bring a different mindset or a different way of thinking. And so I think there's that, you know, outsider perspective that you can bring into an organization. Here's what other companies are doing.
And I honestly think right now, you know, I'm reinventing myself, right. I'm taking what I've learned about agile transformations. I've led many large organizations through this and I'm saying now, "Well, what if we looked at it sort of as three sort of phases? Are we looking at things that could impact us in the early, you know, warning signs? Do we have a system in the middle for what to do with these early warning signs if they happen? And then at the end, do we have an agile framework that can rapidly deploy what we need to deploy based on those early warning signs?"
And I think if you put it sort of all together, I think you're going to start to help people understand that we really need to design, you know, a framework where we can be continuously reinventing our businesses with these frameworks so that we can pivot and pivoting isn't so hard.
And I will say, you know, I know you talked a little bit about AI. I've already built, you know, my own GPT that I've been playing around with that, you know, right now you can say, you know, to it, it's like an early warning sign GPT and you could throw into it, you know, "I'm a junior software developer. What's going to happen to my job with OpenAI coming out with Codex?"
And it will walk you through some of these steps and the idea behind it is let's say you see yourself in three years from now where Codex is the way you code. Well, maybe. So what should I be doing six months from now, a year from now, two years from now? What should I be looking for? And as some of these signals start to turn green, "Okay, well, I didn't wait until three years from now until I lost my job." Right? I waited maybe a month. Yeah. Because you're starting to prepare yourself for that possibility. It's not a certainty, but it's a possibility. And that won't happen. That won't hurt you in your current role. It'll just help you because it'll make you more prepared for what might come.
KUMAR: Correct. I love that you brought up the personal because I spoke to a few people at this conference. Yes, we know we need to create systems that can help a business continuously reinvent, but we also need personally to continuously reinvent. Two years ago, did any of us have ChatGPT open all throughout the day? Right. Right. And now here we are and we have it on our phones. And so, you know, how do we personally reinvent ourselves so that we don't become obsolete?
TODD: Yeah.
KUMAR: I'm going to end this with just maybe one lightning round question. What is one book that every leader should read right now to prepare for the future?
TODD: Oh, boy. Yeah. One book. I guess I'll give kudos to Aidan McCullen. He wrote a book called "Undisruptable," and he talks about, you know, permanent reinvention. It's not a framework. It's not something where you follow every step of the way, but it really does lead a great conversation about what you should be focused on.
KUMAR: Wonderful. All right. I would love to have Aidan on the show. Maybe I'll ask you for an introduction at some point.
TODD: Yeah, I can certainly try. He's a very busy man.
KUMAR: Yeah, I'm sure he is. All right. Well, it's been a pleasure, Todd, having you on the show. There's probably there are more questions here on my list that I didn't get to. We'll have to have you back on and maybe take a different angle on the questions and maybe probe a little bit more into the framework that you're building and certainly in the ChatGPT, the custom GPT that you've built to see how that can be helpful.
So for people that want to get in contact with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
TODD: Yeah, the easiest way would be to go to my website. It's guidance-technology.com or LinkedIn, right? We're all on LinkedIn. I am posting a lot on LinkedIn, short snippets. I have a newsletter on there that you can join as well. And as of last week, I have a book in the making. So stay tuned.
KUMAR: That's amazing. All right. Well, thank you again for joining. I'll have all of your links in the show notes that you just mentioned and maybe some others as well. So thanks for watching. For folks that are still watching, thanks for being here, and we'll see you all in a couple weeks. Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye.
TODD: Thank you. Bye-bye.
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