Kumar: Hi, everyone. Kumar Dattatreyan here with The Meridian Point. And today I'm pleased to talk to Ari Dragan. I think that's how you say his name. I'm sure he'll correct me when he comes on stage. He has spent nearly three decades inside the machinery of transformation. Ari founded InterPraxis Advisory and has worked with more than two dozen Fortune 500 companies across technology, banking, healthcare and government. He was practicing what we now call Agile before Agile had a name. He's watched it emerge. He's watched it scale, become institutionalized and, in many cases, lose sight of the problems it was built to solve. So today, we'll talk about where Agile stands, why a perfect storm is building around it, and what happens when superintelligence starts rewriting how organizations think about teams, delivery and transformation. Ari, welcome to The Meridian Point. Glad to have you on.
Ari: Hi, Kumar. Thank you for having me.
Kumar: Of course. So you were doing this work before Agile had a name, right? In fact, I often tell people, and I've said it on the show many times, that I was probably more Agile before I learned about Agile than after I became Agile. That's a mouthful. But I used to run restaurants, and in the restaurant industry, you have no choice. You have to be agile, very responsive to customer needs. So what were you doing in the early years, and what problem were you trying to solve?
Ari: So in the nineties, I had been a Java developer and a solution architect, and it was back in Canada, in 1997 to 2000, when I was kind of kidding around with my colleagues and finding ways to stay more agile and work on development of the code in an incremental, iterative approach. And we played around with the thing that became Kanban. We didn't know about that. We didn't invent it, obviously. But we found it useful to go from one stage to another, and the boards create visibility and all this. So that's kind of my beginnings in the Agile play, if you want.
Kumar: Maybe you didn't call it that, but what problem was having the visibility? What problem did that solve for you and the people you worked with?
Ari: Well, it was just a means to collaborate and create visibility of where we are, each of us, the developers, the architects, in terms of progressing with the code, progressing with the delivery, with the outcomes, and see where the blockers are and so on. So it was pretty much the basics. The basics of the basics, as you know, right? Kanban is really simple and obvious. So we didn't have project management back then, you know, to get in a very heavy, structured way of delivering code and being micromanaged or anything like that. So we needed to figure out a way to manage ourselves.
Kumar: Right. Okay. So, you know, you've been around the Agile movement since the beginning, right? Since the nineties, and that's when Scrum was born, so to speak. So walk us from the nineties to today. What did each decade of agility add, and what did it lose, perhaps, as we progressed from the nineties to today?
Ari: Yeah. So if we look at the evolution of Agile in these decades, from the nineties to date, it's going to be very interesting to observe the changes, the pivoting of the meanings and the way of doing things in Agile. So in the nineties, pretty much everybody was trying their own, like I did, like you did, like many others, you know. Google started a little bit more structured than us. They did a little bit of Scrum, they did a little bit of Kanban, and they got Objectives and Key Results back in the nineties. If you remember the famous video about how Google did implement OKRs, that became very famous and kind of popularized the notion of OKRs. And we had Google, we had Amazon back in the day in the nineties that were playing around with concepts of agility. But the biggest turning point was the Agile Manifesto in February, when a group of Agilists got together in a ski resort and decided that they had found a new way of doing things, and they called it Agile. That's where the Agile Manifesto came into place, and the Agile mindset was kind of standardized, because before that it was just talking about Lean, talking about the Toyota Production System, but in the sixties and seventies, Kaizen, a little bit of Kanban, but nothing was solidified until the Agile Manifesto, right? And then in the same decade, 2001 to 2010, we observed the beginning of the Scrum Alliance. And then Scrum.org came up, and Jeff Sutherland and Ken came up with the Scrum Guide. And that was the evolution to simplicity of Scrum, right? They are founders of Scrum, and Scrum got also structured in 2009. So we assisted in that decade to an effort of solidifying and kind of formalizing the Agile mindset and also the Agile methodology of Scrum, besides Kanban, which was kind of simple and known. And then the next decade started with the beginning of SAFe, Scaled Agile Framework, which was a huge paradigm change in the Agile, not mindset, but the Agile implementation style, because SAFe came up with the concept of, yes, you create teams in Scrum and Kanban, but you also bring the business into the picture. Right. Versions one to four of SAFe, they were bringing in two layers, program and portfolios of business. That's kind of more like an entry-level development of the concepts themselves. Version five came up with a big change when they said, okay, now you have Agile at the team level, IT is really looking at doing the Agile development, assisted by the product owners and product managers from the business side. No, we need to talk about business agility. So that term came into the picture. Yes. And then that was a big change, because it kind of expanded from the product ownership, product management and portfolio management levels across the organization, all over the place, in the finance, in the HR, all over the place. All the aspects of the enterprise were designed to become agile. SAFe. And that's, you know, the decade from 2020, with COVID, and toward today, right now, was a decade which is kind of in the middle right now, that got to a point where it's solidifying the concept of business agility, enterprise agility. And surprise, surprise, SAFe, which stands for, again, Scrum Scale Agile Framework, right? It changed its name to just Scale. Why? And this is probably one of the subjects that we're going to talk about, because they took out Agile from the title.
Kumar: Yeah. I think I talked about this a couple of episodes ago with Tonya, who was on my show, and how Agile has become a bad word in some circles and almost a non-starter with some companies. They don't want to hear it because maybe they've tried it. They had some experience with it and it didn't work for them, or it did work for them. They just don't want all the baggage that comes with the word, the language that Agile brings to them. But I like the story arc that you described. So in the beginning, in the 2000s, and even before Agile was in use, I mean, Scrum was created in the early nineties. Maybe it wasn't codified until the 2000s, but it was created in '92 or '93, I think it was. But my point is that I remember those years in the 2000s, because that's when I got introduced to Agile, in 2004, actually. Right around that time. And it was exciting. It was new. People were experimenting with this and sort of jumping all in. Oh, this is great. This is the way we should be working. You know, none of that waterfall stuff. And then it started to scale, right? So the 2010s were all about scaling and business agility. And the 2020s are almost not de-scaling, but de-agilizing, if you will, or taking the word Agile out, which is an interesting term. And I'm wondering what you think. Why do you think that is?
Ari: Right. I think that we got to a point where we got to a perfect storm, if you want. So from the movie, right, The Perfect Storm, remember the three components that needed to form a perfect storm? We have it here as well. We have three components that form this Agile perfect storm. First of all is that the transformation is complete, you know, across the industries right now. So we had how many decades? The nineties, the 2000s, the 2010s. Three and a half decades. Three good decades, let's say, right? All the companies, all the businesses across all the industries, they jumped on the Agile train sooner or later. The most progressive, the most open-minded, the newest, the most innovative companies, they started first. They jumped right in the first decade: Google, Amazon, Netflix back then, Spotify, right? They jumped in the nineties. Then in the early 2000s, they consolidated and others jumped in. We witnessed the healthcare industry jump on board as well, back then, and the finance industry, right? So those were the two big players that jumped right away. All the big corporations got involved. And after that, you saw companies that actually got in with Scrum and Kanban in the previous decade, now they started to scale and they got really serious about Agile. And in the meantime, they've been joined by some of the manufacturing, a little bit of the government.
Kumar: Yeah, I think, and state and federal as well, right? But I'm wondering if it's just that the market is saturated, or is it more? Because I don't see that companies are working all that more nimbly or agilely now than they were ten years ago.
Ari: Yeah, I think it's a matter of the culture of the organization, right? Because if you think about saturation, there are two ways to look at saturation, right? If you're looking at the saturation of the industry, if we kind of covered everybody that wanted to jump in, and also the saturation inside the enterprise itself, if the transformation went all the way to the maximum that the enterprise could afford or could stand in terms of change. I think they're both applying here, because we got to a saturation in both areas, right? So we got a saturation in the industries. All the other progressive organizations got on board, and you saw partially on the ones that actually were still able to deliver work with project management. They didn't jump, all of them. Only a partial.
Kumar: Right, right. Yeah, I'm wondering also, how much you talk about transformation, and how companies that are going to change, they changed or they attempted to change. I wonder how much of that is that they changed to a certain point and then they stopped and they weren't going to do it anymore, or if they actually went all the way, sort of, to try to achieve business agility. I would say that the portion of companies that achieve that are pretty small, they're pretty minimal out of the whole, if you think about the companies in the various industries that went through a transformation of some sort. I would say it's probably a small percentage. Because I still see a lot of waste, and I don't know about you, but I see a lot of waste in companies and a lot of opportunities to improve how people work and how people interact with each other. All the things that Agile, I think, brings to the table, the focus on people over process and the focus on value over documentation, or whatever it might be, right? Those things I still don't see in a company that is purportedly agile. I don't see them really living by those values all that much. So I don't know. My impression is that some shiny new thing came up in the 2020s, and that shiny new thing is, you know, AI. So Agile is supposed to be this productivity boost, right? It's going to help companies deliver more with the same number of people, or fewer people, because velocity is going to go up. And wouldn't you say that AI is the same promise?
Ari: You're totally right. So AI is one of the three factors of the perfect storm, right? But I would say that's the last one. The other one, the second one, just to wrap up the three factors, is the oversupply of Agilists, right? So in three decades, this field was totally lucrative, and everybody who wanted to have a good income kind of switched from project management to Agile, kind of went from development or from business analysis or any other field. Everybody wanted to play a role in agility. And now the market is oversaturated. The demand has plummeted, right? It's almost zero. And as you said, AI is eating all the focus right now. So all these eyes are on AI, or Super Intelligence, as they want to call it right now. It's amazing. It's really a super storm that actually sinks everything. And to your point, you know, on the enterprise, how they look at that agility, why did they stop? Because they're not complete, you said. You're very right. Only a few of them actually completed the transformation. I think that they're looking at Agile in different ways. So there is a misunderstanding of agility. On one way, you know, in the nineties we were looking at Agile development, everything that we were doing, we were just focusing on the lower level of how are we going to develop, how are we going to code. That's how we came up with the Scrum and Kanban teams. And then once we started to scale up, we looked at business agility, right? And then we looked at enterprise agility. So it's very confusing right now with the leaders of all these organizations. When they say Agile, what do they mean? Do they mean, oh, we just need to have a few Agile teams, or do the work that we want to do in Scrum and Kanban teams and we call it a day? Or maybe we are a little bit more sophisticated. We got the business as well. But what is business? Is it just product or product managers? Are we talking about lean portfolio management? Are we talking about value stream management? When you bring those paradigms into the picture, you're looking at the big enterprise engagement in agility. So, of course, we, as Agilists, we want to see the whole nine yards, right? We want to see the whole enterprise transform, everybody take advantage of this wonderful collaboration and efficiency, making everything organic in the organization. But the truth is, it's a big disconnection usually between IT and business, as you probably...
Kumar: Yeah, I'm living it now in the company I support. It's a set of ceremonies and practices, but not anything really that connects the delivery of value to the strategy part of the business. So because of that disconnect, there's a chasm. There's a gap in people's understanding of what Agile can be or should be. And so, you know, I see this pattern, and I've seen it so many times, that it's playing out now where I am. It's kind of stalled. The transformation is stalled because of that. And me and some other people are trying to un-stall it or un-stick it, get it unstuck and get it moving in the right direction again. But at the end of the day, it's about the humans and how humans work with other humans. I think the thing that kills Agile, like any other transformation effort, is the competition between people, the reward structures that exist in companies that pit people against each other rather than in collaboration with each other. And I see this playing out all the time in most engagements that I've been in. You know, the silos, the siloism that comes from that. It's really kind of disappointing when you see it, because you know these people. You put them in a room together, they seem to get along, but then they can't agree on anything, because if it's going to affect their bonus or affect their team's bonus or whatever it might be, it might make them look bad. And so those are the kinds of things that I think agility is meant to solve, but it may take a different approach to solve them. So I personally don't think Agilists are not needed anymore. I think we're more needed now than ever, especially with AI in the picture, or SI, Super Intelligence, whatever, you know, people want to call it. But I think that because of the rapid pace of change and how rapidly AI is evolving and how we're evolving to use it, we need some Agile thinking, Agile mindsets to be able to sort of define what's the value that we're getting out of AI. How can we integrate it, incorporate it better in the way we work, in the way we plan, the way we disseminate the value to our customers, our shareholders, our employees, all of those things. But I don't know. The jobs don't support it, right? The people that are looking for work that are Agilists, it seems to be, I meet more and more of them all the time, right? People that are extremely talented, very experienced, but can't find work.
Ari: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I think one of the factors that add to this problem, and will expose this as a very high risk, is the fact that maybe they are looking at the wrong thing right now. I believe that, you know, I'm looking back in my past experience, I moved from project management to Agile and I never looked back. But back in the day, I loved the concept of project management as made by PMI, very structured, very well organized. I really thought that was the biggest invention after sliced bread. I was totally into it. And after I moved to Agile, I realized that most companies were hoping to implement Agile to solve their problems. Not only to get faster, better, cheaper, but to solve their problems. They had lots of dysfunctionalities in the organization, lots of constraints and problems and things that are not going smoothly. And they're expecting, okay, we're going to do Agile and this is going to resolve everything. Well, it doesn't. Who didn't do project management right, they weren't doing Agile right either. And that's going to transfer to AI as well. Why? Because it's a matter of culture, and it's a matter of ethic of work, and it's a matter of how they collaborate with each other and how everything in the organization functions. So if they don't look at the underlying problems, to fix those, to fix the constraints, to fix the functionality of the organization, you know, the fundamentals. Not talking about advanced concepts of Agile or AI or anything. It's just the fundamentals. How the operations work, how the funding of the work works, how the work is funneled down to the teams, how the decision-making process works. You have all kinds of glitches after glitches. So it's so useless if you adopt an Agile methodology that actually triples or quadruples the efficiency, but when you have to take a decision, you wait two weeks for that manager to come back from vacation, or just for somebody to be aware that they need to take a decision on something. I mean, it can be a total disaster. And I've seen this over and over. It's so much waste of money and energy, because all these transformations cost a lot, right? Transform to Agile, transform to AI, it costs a lot. And if you don't have your things in proper order, your ducks in a row in the organization to begin with, all these investments are useless and they don't work. We discussed earlier the fact that when you do this, it's kind of having a bad driver who drives a car and has a fender bender at 30 miles per hour, or maybe 5 miles per hour in the parking lot, right? And that's okay. We see this all the time and it's not a big deal. You fix it and you move on. But if you take this bad driver and you give him a Formula One car and you put him on the track, you know, in Monaco, for example, where it's high risk, right, on the streets, and you expect him to perform, imagine what is going to happen, right? So this is the thing that we're looking at with AI right now. Everything is exponential. So yes, your performance is going to go up exponentially if you adopt it, but also the risk of getting into very, very bad areas. I don't even want to mention those. That risk is also exponential. The fact that you're a bad driver is a sign that you need to stop a little bit and fix your problems first. Take some driving lessons.
Kumar: That's a really good analogy. And I keep picturing the idea of me in an F1 car, right? It would be a disaster. Not that I'm a bad driver. I'm actually a pretty good driver. But still, that F1 car is, you know, 800 horsepower, whatever it is, super low center of gravity, amazing G-forces around curves and acceleration and all that. I wouldn't know what to do with that. I've never done it before. And I think the analogy is appropriate. AI is like that. AI is going to supercharge your outputs, and given to anyone that hasn't been trained or taught in the responsible use of it, it can be a danger to themselves and others. Huge changes to themselves and others. So it's a really good analogy to use. I want to go back to something that you and I talked about on a blog I wrote, maybe a month or six weeks ago. And your position, I think the argument you were making, is that Agile itself didn't fail. Incompetent leadership failed, right? Because, again, the analogy of the bad driver in charge is something that's much more powerful than you are capable of leading, right? My position in that thread was that it was more structural than it was incompetence from a leadership standpoint, because the real change means reworking incentives, budgets, you mentioned budgets, right? So from the top down, the budgeting cycle, how are we funneling money to the most important and valuable things for our customers and for the business? And if you don't have that structure in place, then leaders are going to optimize for what they're rewarded for. So my argument was it's as much structure as it is leadership. So what do you think? Is it a failure of character, or is it a failure of structure, or maybe a little bit of both?
Ari: So the way I look at leadership, structure is part of that. So you're perfectly right. It's definitely structure and the framework and the organization and operations. The whole governance of the business is part of it, it's a cause for this. But the way I see it is that this belongs to the leadership. They need to take care of that. So at the end of the day, everything is leadership. I'm not looking at leadership just as a character, as a style of leadership, or knowledge base or anything like that. It's everything, because we expect a lot from the leaders, not to know everything, but to have the right people in place to take care of everything and to control if these aspects of the enterprise are properly done, right? So structure and governance and all these factors, at the end of the day, belong to the top leadership to be supervised.
Kumar: Yeah, I'm with you. I just think that leaders are just people with more responsibility. They're just people. You're a leader, I'm a leader, you know, we're just people, and we operate within a certain framework of guidelines and what we can and cannot do and what the organization expects from us and what we give back in return, right? And so, yes, 100 percent leadership needs to set the direction, but the leaders themselves, whatever level you are, are being rewarded for certain things and not rewarded for other things, maybe rewarded for things that lead to siloed behavior. Maybe they're not intentional about it. It's just a structure, right? Then can you blame the leader, or do you blame the structure, whoever created the structure? I mean, at the end of the day, yes, there's someone that's responsible, that should be held responsible for that. But I'm just saying that anytime you have an organization that's, and I've used this analogy before, an organization is like an organism, right? It's made up of many parts that need to work together in close collaboration for the organism to be healthy. And in my view, that organism follows a set of rules, the structure, the rules by which the cells in your body operate. Every cell has a certain job to do, and if they don't do it, then that leads to disease and dysfunction that you feel, right? You can't function. And so an organization is much the same. If the structure doesn't exist, can you blame the cells for not working the way they're supposed to? If you pump your body with bad food and you don't get exercise and stuff, those are external factors that are causing the organism to break down. And in an organization's case, maybe there are external factors, but the system, the structure, has to be resilient enough to cope with that, right? Both internally and externally. So that's my argument.
Ari: Yeah, no, I totally see where we're coming from. And that's what Agile wants too, to create this organic ecosystem, right? But when you have certain areas in the organism that are not even functioning, or if they're sick or they're affected, you really need to fix them and make them part of the organism again, right, to function properly. And to your point with the focus, right, that leaders got their focus moved, that's exactly what happens with AI right now, right? So the board of directors of each big organization right now is asking them, hey, what are you doing with AI? Where are you with implementing AI in the organization? So, no, they're looking to check some boxes. They're not looking to... I mean, some of them do, some of them... I'm not trying to put a blanket blame on the leaders, but from my experience, I've been quite disappointed with many, many of them.
Kumar: Yeah, I'm with you. Believe me, I'm with you. I mean, yeah, people shoulder the blame, for sure. People choose to act the way they do. It's not all about structure, but I just wanted to make that point. So tell us about InterPraxis and the Magnificent Seven. Why seven, and what are those Magnificent Seven?
Ari: So, yeah, I created this company. It's still in progress. The website is in development, exactly to the point of solving these structural and fundamental problems that organizations have right now, to create that healthy, organic environment that everybody needs to do any transformation, to do any change, to adopt Agile, to adopt whatever they need to do. First of all, you need to have a healthy organism. InterPraxis is supposed to look into the health of the organization and identify the constraints, identify the illnesses of the organization and fix them, basically. So it's, you know, AI and Agile, they're not silver bullets, or if they are, I believe that by doing this healthy cleanup, you put the silver in the silver bullet and you enable everything that you do after that to become a silver bullet, right? Instead of just not even a bullet, maybe something sharp.
Kumar: Yeah, yeah, that's good. So what are those seven?
Ari: So there are seven aspects of the organization that I believe are critical for the right, healthy functioning of the organization. So it's looking at outcomes and economics, that's the first one. And then flow of work, demand intake and capacity allocation, then operating models, interfaces of those operating models. Five is the decision flow, how the decision is taking place in the flow of work and how fast it goes, you know, to my point earlier, that may get lost in people not knowing that they need to do certain things, or you don't have the right people in the right places, right? So here come the roles and responsibilities, to be clearly identified and taught and played properly. Then you have the funding and incentives, to your point that people are not incentivized to do the right things. You have HR that is doing the annual assessments of the performance, and that's based on the old-school, you know, checkbox, checkpoints to do the whole assessment, which is totally diverted from the outcomes that we're looking for in people when we implement Agile, right? So it's a totally different paradigm. In Agile you want them to collaborate instead of being individual, and so on, right? And the last one is technical constraints, which refers to the whole assembly of technologies, you know, clouds, infrastructure, all the big pieces, the platform that you build in the organization, and how these collaborate and how the work is passed from one to another or supported from one department to another. So all these seven aspects create this ecosystem of work, people interaction, logic, decision-making process, realistic constraints of technology, funding, which is a realistic constraint, and how you divide the funding across the organization in a prioritized way, you know, from the top down. I'm using the right prioritization, because this is an interesting factor too, right? So you know that in SAFe we do WSJF, the shortest job first, right? So it's a method to prioritize work, sequencing the most important work based mostly on the business value. So we expect, you know, and this is an open question for you and for all the Agilists, we were trying to convince all these companies to switch to WSJF, because it's the most objective way to really prioritize things that we know, and the easiest one, because it's relative instead of ROI, which is absolute, and it gets obsolete after two or three months, so we need to do it again anyway. So WSJF is the most pragmatic one, right? But at the same time, when coming with WSJF, we're asking the leaders to get rid of the intuitive approach they have in determining the prioritization of their work, right? And I'm thinking, you know, I don't know the answer, but I'm thinking maybe, is there any value in intuition here that we kind of leave on the table in the whole corporate world, right? Because we want to have everything pragmatic, everything structured, and very organized and technological.
Kumar: I think there's still some intuition left in having to come up with the values, right? So on the pieces that make up weighted shortest job first, you know, the cost of delay and the sizing of the work, there's some intuition. It's not objective. It's still subjective. It's based on your intuition that something has less or more value in those characteristics that make up the cost of delay: the risk reduction, or the business value, or whatever the third thing is. I don't remember right off the top of my head. So I think there's something that's still left there. It's not quite as pure as the intuition I think that you're talking about, which is, what do I really think? What's my gut tell me about this product idea, this thing that I think is going to change the world? I think it's a little different from that. And I still think you need that in order to advance something, to say, okay, here's an idea that we need to do some discovery on as part of an intake. And that takes that gut instinct to say, yes, I think this is a good idea, I'm going to pitch it. After which, I think when you do that initial analysis and research to see what is this thing, what would it mean for the business and for our customers? I think there's two sides to ROI. It's what value does it bring to the people that are going to be using it, the business, the customer, the customer outcome. But then there's the business impact, you know, is this going to improve our profits or improve our sales or improve our revenue? Or is it going to be a loss leader? Like, you know, like the Costco chicken, right? You go into Costco, not for the chicken, but the smell of the chicken roasting in the back of the store drags you back there, and you pick one of those up, and on the way, you pick up a whole bunch of other stuff, right? But if you just take the chicken on its own, the WSJF on the chicken is probably not very high. It's probably pretty low.
Ari: Yeah, you're totally right. I mean, it's a combination of intuition and objectivity and analysis. I started with this because this was my trigger point on the intuition thing, but I was wondering, at the higher scale in the organization, not only on the prioritization itself but in decision making itself, if we trust our intuition more. Because intuition is based on experiences and knowledge. It's an accumulation of everything that we have, right? Knowledge, emotion, intuition, experiences. And I was thinking maybe, you know, it's kind of similar to the Super Intelligence that is building right now, with the accumulation of all these experiences that the AI is having, that builds it to be smarter and smarter and smarter. And the human brain is made such that it is thinking and using the processing for the things that are new to the brain, but it uses the subconscious and intuition for the routine work that is already experienced. And then it's kind of saving the power for the more important and more unusual tasks, and it is using intuition just to fly in the known territories, right? And this intuition is building and building, because as we go, everything is becoming new territory, and the intuition grows, and this is kind of a Super Intelligence in itself.
Kumar: Yeah, I think you have a good point. I think most people, I don't know how much people like WSJF and going through those sessions. I think they do it, but at the end of the day, they probably still stick with their intuition when they come up with it.
Ari: That's exactly right. So it happens, you know, if you implement WSJF, it's not really, it's not going to stick for a long time.
Kumar: Yeah. I don't think so. I mean, I implemented something like WSJF way early in my career as a Scrum Master for a few teams, internal teams. And we used something like WSJF. I thought I was really smart and I came up with it myself. And then I went to the SAFe class and it was there. I'm like, whoa, they stole this from me. I came up with this. I think I must have researched something and I put together a formula, and it worked. It worked for those teams and the leadership that was prioritizing the work. But I'll tell you what I remember from that. It was a guide. It sort of gave you the first cut of where things would fall in priority, right? But at the end of the day, it was the intuition that won out. People would say, you know what? Yeah, I see it's not in position five, but it's really the most important thing. We really have to work on it right now, which denies the whole process of calculating.
Ari: Yeah, exactly.
Kumar: So my response, and I wasn't that experienced back then, right? This was 15, 16 years ago. But I did remember saying, well, okay, we can do that, but that means that everything else is going to take a lot longer before it gets started. So can we at least maybe cut it in size? Can we reduce the size and scope of this thing so we can get the most important pieces out first? And that way we don't have to delay all these other things that are sitting behind it.
Ari: Exactly, yeah.
Kumar: And that seemed to work. But I think you're right. I think you're right. Intuition will, at the end of the day, win out, unless there's evidence to prove that the intuition that people are having has a consequence. Right? There's a consequence to every decision you make. And if you can articulate that or make it visible, then I think people will change how they decide things. We're getting a little long. We're almost an hour. I wanted to just ask you a couple of fun questions to end our show. So, 30 seconds or less, right? So these answers. Is Agile practitioner still a real job in the next five years, or does something else replace it?
Ari: It's a real job, and it's going to evolve into becoming full-time people that are supporting these types of roles instead of contractors. So the time of consulting in Agile and coaching as a contractor, I think those times are over right now. We're looking at a consolidation for full-time jobs inside the organization, with people that have expertise, and they've been like us, consultants, and they have a broad range of experience.
Kumar: Right, right. So what's one book that should be required reading for someone that calls themselves an Agile coach?
Ari: Oh. Yeah, there is a list of, unfortunately, not too many, about 10 or 15 books that have been out since 2001. Which one is best? It's a hard question. I'm thinking too. See, for agility in itself, I think the best source is SAFe itself, and Scrum.org with the Scrum Guide, if you want. I don't think, and I never learned about Agile from the books. From the books, I learned more about leadership, about Lean. About The Goal, for example, was an amazing book where you learn about implementing Lean in an organization step by step. I think The Goal is a great book for someone that calls himself an Agile coach, because it helps you in so many ways. I mean, it's written as a fable, as a business fable, but it's about identifying the bottlenecks inside of an organization in such a nice way.
Kumar: Yeah. I think that's a great book. All right. Last question. So you're in Chapel Hill, and your daughter's in DC, not too far from where I live. What's the last thing she talked you into trying when you visited?
Ari: I'm sorry, it broke up a little.
Kumar: What's the last thing that she convinced you to try when you last visited?
Ari: Oh. Actually, we went to a nice restaurant. I'm trying to remember the name. It was something with seafood, and I'm not very much into Mexican tortillas and stuff, but those were a combination of Mexican and seafood, with shrimp and some other stuff. And since then, I'm looking forward to going to that place again, because that is amazing.
Kumar: I mean, it's hard in DC to fail in a restaurant.
Ari: That's true. Yeah.
Kumar: Good food scene in DC, for sure.
Ari: Yeah.
Kumar: All right. Well, Ari, did I butcher your last name?
Ari: No, no. No.
Kumar: Dragan?
Ari: It goes Dragan or Dragan.
Kumar: Dragan. Dragan. Okay. Either way.
Ari: Yeah. I'll get noticed when somebody says that, it's going to light up, you know.
Kumar: So, yeah, very nice to have you on the show. I really appreciate you being here. And we should definitely have another conversation, maybe in a few months, just to see where things are, because AI is constantly evolving. Maybe that can be the topic of our next conversation.
Ari: Yes, that will be great. And Kumar, thank you so much for having me. It's an honor and a pleasure.
Kumar: Yeah, I'm happy you're here. All right, thanks, everyone. See you next time. Bye.
