Agile Mentors Podcast

• #137: Stop Wasting Time with Guests Kate Megaw

  In this episode, Kate Megaw joins Brian Milner to share simple but powerful techniques that can turn those soul-sucking meetings into dynamic, action-driven conversations. If you're ready to make meetings worth attending, this one’s for you! Overview Brian Milner and Kate Megaw uncover the secrets to running highly effective and engaging meetings. They tackle common facilitation pitfalls, the staggering amount of time wasted in ineffective meetings, and how simple tweaks can transform team collaboration. Kate shares practical strategies for keeping participants engaged, fostering psychological safety, and ensuring meetings lead to real action—because no one has time for another pointless meeting. References and resources mentioned in the show: Kate Megaw ARCLight Agile Katanu Katanu’s Facilitator Certification Course Katanu Resources #44: Transformations Take People with Anu Smalley Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected] This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Kate Megaw is the Founder and CEO of ARCLight Agile, specializing in helping organizations create empowered, high-performing teams through agility and collaboration. A dynamic Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Certified Team Coach (CTC), and Project Management Professional (PMP), Kate is a sought-after speaker known for sparking ‘aha’ moments that drive real transformation. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back here for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm here as I always am, Brian Milner. I'm with you as your host. But today I have the one and only, amazing Kate McGaw is with us. Kate, thank you for coming on. Kate Megaw (00:17) Thank you for having me. Brian Milner (00:19) Absolutely. If there's some of you out there that aren't familiar with Kate, she is a CST, a Scrum trainer like myself. She's also a certified team coach. And she also has the other side of things, the dark side. She's a PMP. So she has that project management kind of background that she brings to the table as well, which I think is awesome. She's a CEO of a company called Arclight Agile. And she's a co-founder of one of our favorites here that's come on the show, Anu. But they team up together. So it's Kate and Anu. And so their company is Katanu. I love it. love it. So why we decided to have Kate on is because Kate and Anu both have done a lot of work around facilitation. And we did have a user request. Kate Megaw (00:57) That's it. Brian Milner (01:09) to have an episode where we focused on facilitation. And listeners of the show know there's nothing I love more than being able to fulfill listener requests here and try to do those as soon as possible. So let's dive in. Let's talk about facilitation. It's a funny word. There's lots of different misconceptions and things about it, I'm sure. What do you find people misunderstand most about facilitation? Kate Megaw (01:34) think one of the key misunderstandings around facilitation is that you're part of the meeting, you're part of the event, you're actively involved. And when you're facilitating, you're actually, taking a step back because you are accountable for making sure that everyone is speaking and that we're keeping an eye on the agenda and things like that. And if you are actively involved in the discussion, You can't be doing that because you're missing body language. You're missing people who need to talk and who aren't talking. So I think one of the main misconceptions is, or that people forget is a facilitator is neutral. So if, for example, you have a scrum master facilitating a retrospective and they need to be actively involved in the retrospective, they should be inviting somebody else in to facilitate it. and I think We're beginning to see a lot more interest in it now because it's one of these key things. If it's done badly, people generally will notice. If it's done well, hopefully you don't notice that much other than, you know what, that meeting was very efficient. We achieved the goal and I feel as though it was worth my time. One of the things I like to say to people at the end of a meeting is the fist of five, how worth your time was this meeting? And I'm looking for fives or fours. If we're getting threes, twos and ones, we've not facilitated it well, or the meeting didn't achieve its agenda and things like that. think a lot of the statistics around facilitation that have come out recently, and you and I were talking about these briefly before we started that the average at the Microsoft trend index shows us that average time spent in meetings by employees at the moment is 21 and a half hours a week, which is an increase, I know, an increase of 252 % since the pre-pandemic. So. Brian Milner (03:36) That's incredible. Yeah, I mean, that's more than half of a work week, right? I mean, we're spending more than half our work week in just locked in meetings. So you're right. We had this conversation beforehand and you were telling me that stat and it just kind of floored me that we're spending that much time in meetings. But it was the next one you told me that really floored me. And it's a combination of these two, I think, that people need to really grasp onto. So tell them what you told me next. Kate Megaw (03:49) Mm hmm. Yep. Yep. Yeah. So the next one is that the Harvard Business Review indicates their research, 67 % of meetings are considered by executives to be failures. So if we look at the financial impact of that, and this is something I didn't share with you, but the financial impact of that is for a company, imagine you have a company with 100 employees, unproductive meetings are wasting upward of $1.7 million a year. If you have a thousand employees, increase that number. it's one of these things that it is not difficult to do. It is just understanding why we need someone in the facilitator role. And the basics around the basic facilitation, the basic getting ready for the meeting, facilitating during the meeting and properly closing the meeting. takes those unsuccessful numbers up to successful numbers where you're getting those fives and people are sort of, yep, that meeting totally achieved the purpose and the outcome and it finished early. So I've got 20 minutes back before my next meeting. Brian Milner (05:24) Yeah, it's so incredible that combination of those two stats. I thinking that we're spending over half our time in meetings and that 67 % of them are failures, we're having a lot of them and we're not doing them well, clearly. Kate Megaw (05:36) Absolutely. I think with, I don't know with Zoom, well, I think with Zoom, it's got easier to have meetings. So we're probably having meetings where we don't need to have meetings. That's one of my favorite things to ask is, does this need to be a meeting? Or are you just going to talk at me and roll data out? In which case, send it to me in email. Don't tie me up for a meeting. Brian Milner (05:44) Yep. Kate Megaw (06:02) Because so many meetings are a waste of time that a lot of people are spending meetings multitasking. So we're taking an hour for a meeting that we could do in 25 minutes if people were 100 % engaged and following the agenda and things like that. Brian Milner (06:22) Yeah, yeah, that's so fascinating. it seems like such a, it's hard to believe that there's not more of that skill in just basic business training, right? Because if we're having all those meetings, then it would seem natural that there would be more segments that would say, you know, a little facilitation skill for, you know, a, you know, bachelor's in business, you know, like that might be a little helpful, right? Kate Megaw (06:41) Yep. Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely. And it's a small investment for something that will make a huge difference. I mean, one of the things Anu and I have been working on is the mnemonic of ready, reach, and wrap in order to make sure we have effective meetings. And the ready part of it is setting the foundation. So before you even get to your meeting, this is ahead of time. You're understanding, okay, what are the Rs? What are the roles and responsibilities? So if I'm facilitating, then who are the decision makers? Who is mandatory? Who's required to be there? Who are the, you can come if you want. Let's stop doing meetings to 30 people and expecting 30 people to show up. So we've got to understand the roles and responsibilities. The other, the E for the ready is expectations and engagement. Brian Milner (07:29) Ha ha ha. Kate Megaw (07:41) So if the expectations are that this is an interactive meeting, we're using Lucid or Mural or Mira, whatever tool we're using, it's going to be collaborative, webcams are going to be on, multitasking is going to be at a minimum, everyone knows going into that meeting what the expectations are. And then the A again is the agenda and the alignment. The agenda should be very clearly saying these are the items that the D is making sure where we have defined the purpose and the outcome. So every meeting, we need to know what the purpose of the meeting is, what the outcome of the meeting is, and they should be included in the agenda. We shouldn't be accepting meetings. Imagine the power of being able to decline a meeting if it didn't have an agenda in it. And if you think about it, why do we attend meetings? Brian Milner (08:27) Ha Yeah. Kate Megaw (08:33) with no agenda and people turn up to the meeting and said, okay, so what's this meeting for? Pretty sure we've all got better things to be doing. So make sure for every meeting we have a defined purpose and outcome. And then the why is making sure we as facilitators have your logistics ready. If it's Zoom, if we're using a remote whiteboard, do people need to practice it? Do we need to set up an environment? Do we need to make sure webcams are on? All that type of thing. So a huge amount of meetings would be better if we did nothing other than better planning with the roles, responsibilities, the expectations, the agenda, the defining the outcome and the logistics. If we just did that. Brian Milner (09:09) Yeah. Kate Megaw (09:23) I bet we're going to see the amount of productive meetings increase considerably. Brian Milner (09:29) Yeah, there's so much transfer here too as well, just to the normal scrum meetings that we have because, you know, one of the things I'll talk about lot in class is just to say, you know, you can't just expect to show up to something like Sprint Planning and have it go smoothly. You have to put in some work beforehand and get ready for it. Same thing with like a Sprint Review. You got to put in some work beforehand and make sure you know who's going when and who's speaking, you know, that speaking order and all that stuff. Kate Megaw (09:42) Yeah. Brian Milner (09:55) goes miles in making those more successful meetings. But the other thing that really interested me in that is you talk a little bit about purpose and that we don't really understand the purpose of the meetings. And that's something that's really stuck out to me is when I talk to people who don't like their Scrum meetings, it feels like 90 % that is just Brian math, but it feels like 90 % of the time, right? Feels like this. It feels like 90 % of the time. Kate Megaw (10:04) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (10:20) that the people who have a problem with those meetings don't know the purpose of the meeting and that's really the root cause of it, right? If they knew why we were here, then the meeting makes sense. Now I understand what we're trying to do. Kate Megaw (10:26) Yep, absolutely. And I think one of the interesting things, I would love to repeat these numbers around the Scrum events, because I think by default, the Scrum events do have a purpose. They do have an outcome. We know what the roles and responsibilities are. We know what the expectations for engagement are. So I think the Scrum events are much more productive than your average event. Brian Milner (10:41) Yeah. Kate Megaw (10:59) But I do feel if we don't have well-facilitated Scrum events, that's where we get our criticism, or, this meeting was a waste of time. Okay, well, let's look at our facilitation and see, it an error in planning or was it an error in expectations? But it always surprises me when people say, well, Scrum's just so many meetings. And I'm so... No, we should have fewer meetings and if they're well facilitated, we need all of those meetings. So it's not as though we're having a meeting for meeting sake, which I think is unfortunately something we can't say for our non-scrum events. Brian Milner (11:43) Yeah, yeah, I mean, I go so far as to say, if you don't understand the purpose of it, don't show up. I mean, there's really no need to be there if you don't know what we're trying to get out of it. One other little side correlation there too, because this kind of ties in a little bit to some of the stuff I did this last year in kind of studying a little bit about neurodivergency and different neuro types and that kind of thing. And one of the things I found really fascinating was certain neurodivergent types, Kate Megaw (11:48) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (12:12) really need to have an agenda in advance. And if they don't, then it just raises their anxiety level. they're just, you even not, you know, neurodivergent types, just regular, normal, you know, neurotypical people. There are those that just don't respond well when you're just throwing out a blank slate and saying, give us your best idea, right? They need time to process and think in advance and Kate Megaw (12:15) Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yep. Mm-hmm. Yep. Brian Milner (12:38) And so yeah, if we could send out that just the day before, it's not that much work. It's just one day earlier, right? It's actually the same amount of work. It's just doing it a day earlier. Right. Kate Megaw (12:45) Absolutely. Absolutely. It's just better organized. Yeah. I mean, I even on my team meetings, I know some members of my team want to know, because I always like to start them with segue questions and some of my team completely fine. Ask them a question, favorite food or you want to have any sort of segue question and they're fine with it. But I have my thinkers who want to think about it ahead of time. So I think it's important when we're facilitating any event that we understand the audience. How many of the audience are going to want to maybe read a document ahead of time? How many of the audience are, you know what, they can think on the feet, I can throw anything at them, but there are others that do need the preparation. yeah, I think that the planning that we do, if we can do it just slightly ahead. And then things like when we get into the meeting, of the mnemonic that we use for actually facilitating during the meeting is the mnemonic of reach, which is we're guiding the process. The very first thing we do when we go into the meeting is we review the agenda and open the meeting. So here's the agenda. I've got the agenda visible. mean, what the agenda that we use in classes. Is the to do doing and done. I use that for all my meetings. I've got that up on the virtual board and the topics of the meeting are moving across to doing and done because then our visual people can see how we're doing. But the reviewing, at the start of every meeting we said, OK, let's just review the agenda. Let's just remind everyone this is the purpose and this is the desired outcomes. And if the right people are not in the meeting. There's no point having a meeting that we cannot achieve the purpose and the outcomes because we don't have the right people. So, I mean, I always say open it, open it with a segue question and things like that, but level set on the agenda. And then the middle part of the meeting is the bit that people are familiar with, which is the gathering ideas. It's exploring. It's the A is the assessing, making sure we've got the collaboration and the discussion and the... Brian Milner (14:39) Yeah. Yeah. Kate Megaw (15:07) The C is our concluding, are we doing dot voting or is somebody else who makes the final decision? But the H is the one that we often forget at the end, which is let's highlight the action items from the meeting. Let's make sure we know what it is, who's accountable for it, when it's going to be done by, and then close the meeting. mean, you... Brian Milner (15:18) Hmm. Kate Megaw (15:33) you and I will both close out our classes. Maybe we use one word, maybe we use, give us a statement, all sorts of different things, but we forget to close out meetings. go, time's up. Okay. Bye everyone. And we've not reviewed the, this is what we're going to do for next time. And we've not formally closed the meeting, even if it's as simple as one word, but we've got to open and close it. Sorry. Passionate about that. No. Brian Milner (15:44) You You mean that's not how you close out a class? I've been closing classes like that for years. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, exactly. Ding, sorry. Kate Megaw (16:03) Yes, sorry, time's up, clunk. Yeah, sorry, dog's barking, dog needs to go out. So, but yeah. Brian Milner (16:11) Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, no. And there was something I came across just in trying to put together materials for classes where we have little segments on facilitation in it. Because I think sometimes there's a lot of focus on the different various techniques, like fist to five or thumbs up or whatever. There's different kind of techniques. I'm not trying to belittle those. Those are things we need to know. But. Kate Megaw (16:21) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (16:36) One of the things I came across was that the root word of this thing is this Latin word, facilius. stands or it means literally to make easy. And I've always had that kind of in the back of my mind when I'm a facilitator is like, what are they trying to do? And whatever they're trying to do, just, my job is just to make that as easy as possible, right? You know, it's always difficult when you're trying to make a decision and you have no direction about how that decision is going to be made. Kate Megaw (16:46) Yeah. Brian Milner (17:05) But a good facilitator can give the structure to it and say, no, no, no, it's OK, I got you. We're going to go through this little journey together, and we're going to end in this other side, and you're going to have something to take away from it. Kate Megaw (17:16) Yeah, we're going to have heard everyone's voices as we go through. We're not going to let one person dominate the conversation. We're going to use techniques like, that's a great point. Can we also check in on the other side of the table? Let's hear some counter points here. It's pulling people in, it's summarizing. So if I'm hearing you correctly, Brian, you're saying A, B, C, D. It's all of that going into it. And I think one of the other... big has when we teach facilitation is the facilitator is not the scribe. So people say, well, I'm the project manager or I'm the facilitator. need to be taking all the meeting notes. And I'm like, well, what direction is your head pointing when you're taking notes? And it's down at a piece of paper. So you're not seeing who's yawning because you're tired and you need to take a break. You're not seeing people who are confused or wanting to talk and things like that. sort of either you turn on the AI tool and have the AI tool summarize the meeting for you. Do check it before you submit, it out or B have everyone in the meeting as a grown ass adult. They can take their own agenda items. mean, their own action items, have an area on your virtual board or in the room you're having the meeting in that is action items. And again, what is it? Brian Milner (18:18) Sure. Kate Megaw (18:36) Who's gonna be doing it? When's it gonna be done by? And I think one of the key criticisms of meetings is, and you'll hear this as well, particularly by retrospectives is, well, nothing changes. And I'm sort of, well, who has the action item? well, there isn't an action item. And I'm sort of, at the end of every meeting, we should be doing the mnemonic we use here is rap. The first thing is retrospect. Brian Milner (18:53) you Kate Megaw (19:04) How was this meeting? We talked about the fist of five. Give me one word. Anything we need to do differently next time. And then the A is make sure we have all of these action items assigned to someone. And then the P is the one we forget about. Tracking that progress. How are we going to hold each other accountable for making sure that something changes as a result of the meeting? So. Brian Milner (19:22) Mm-hmm. Kate Megaw (19:31) If we're doing retrospectives, if the team is voting whatever technique they're using to choose the one thing they want to do differently, how do we make it visible? Do we put it on our scrum board somewhere? Do we talk about it every day as part of after we've done daily scrum? How are we doing with the communication techniques that we wanted to try and do differently going forward? We've got to have that visibility. Otherwise nothing changes. Brian Milner (19:57) Yeah, yeah, that's so awesome. I completely agree. And that's something that I think you're right is missing, not just from retrospectives, but just a lot of meetings in general. We don't really understand, all right, well, what's the takeaway? What's the thing we need to do as a result of this to make this not a waste of our time, to make this something that was a useful, not the 67 % that were failures, but something that actually leads to success. I want to. Kate Megaw (19:59) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah, yes, so that we're not having the same meeting again next week and the week after and nothing's changing. Brian Milner (20:30) Exactly. Exactly. I want to ask you one question about facilitation. I've heard this a lot in regards to retrospectives, but probably it's more a facilitation thing than it is a retrospective thing. But I think probably the number one question we get from people about retrospectives is, how do you handle a quiet team? so I'm just kind of curious. When you talk about facilitating and working with individuals who are a little more introverted, Kate Megaw (20:50) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (20:57) or just not as comfortable speaking out in public, are there special considerations or are there things that you do differently just to try to accommodate and make those people feel more comfortable when you're facilitating them? Kate Megaw (21:09) So yes, several things. So one, I will look at a theme. So do they have a team name and do I want to set up a mnemonic around the team name to gather the data? Are they a visual team? Do I want to do something like the sailboat that's interactive and people can add things to the board? Are they a movie buffs? Do I need to do a Star Wars themed retrospective? So I'll generally try and find something to connect the team. I've done it before where I'm working with airlines. Okay, what is it keeps our planes in the air? What is it that grounds our planes? What are the storm clouds we need to be aware of? What are causing bumps during the air? So all of that type of thing, it's a theme relevant to the team. And I generally will find that if I can start a team talking, I can keep them talking. So if... one of the ways that I will often start a retrospective is if the retrospective, if your last retrospective was a ride at Disney, what ride would it have been? and get them talking or give me one word that describes the last retro or in a scale of one to the, mean, the last sprint, give me one word that describes it or scale of one to 10. How well do you think we did at the last sprint? But I love to get people talking. If I'm in the office, I sort of adapted the Adam Weisbart's retrospective cookies and I'll use candy bars and I'll wrap questions around candy bars and the team grabs a candy bar and there is a question on it which they answer and then other people in the room will then answer as well. Maybe things like, what can I do to better support you as a scrum master? Or, What can we do to better support each other as team members? So I think it's getting people talking, making sure the big reminder for me is as a facilitator, if you did not write the Post-It note, you should not be reading the Post-It note and you should not be moving the Post-It note. The team owns the Post-It notes. Everyone should be adding their own Post-It notes, whether it's virtual or in person. Brian Milner (23:07) Yeah. Kate Megaw (23:28) They should be grouping their own Post-it notes. They should be moving them. And the other one, people always say, well, what happens if there's the elephant in the room and this thing on the board that nobody wants to talk about? And I'm said, well, often I will say, okay, I'm going to add, we're going to do something different for this round. This time, I'm going to ask you to introduce something you did not write on the board. And let's talk about, I'm going to ask you to choose a topic and we're going to talk about that. Just read it, you read it out. Brian Milner (23:39) Yeah. Kate Megaw (23:58) and then we'll have a discussion around it. So as a facilitator, I can uncover the elephants in the room without anyone feeling too uncomfortable. Brian Milner (24:07) Yeah, that's great stuff. of parallel to this, think is kind of, I know we've, I've heard you talk about this, but the sense of safety in the room and just that people feel safe to talk about that. Are there things we can do as facilitators to actually raise that sense of safety? Kate Megaw (24:25) There are absolutely, there's a lot of things we can do. And I, every now and then I will hear something and I will just cringe. And there's, well my team doesn't really like sharing. They're not honest in the retrospective until the CTO disconnects from the retrospective. And I'm sort of, okay, so maybe what do you think this is maybe telling us? I'm sort of retrospectives are Vegas rules. It is the team. I will do retrospectives even with non-scrum teams, but it is the team that is there. There are no visitors. It is the team only. The other thing that makes me cringe is, yes, well we sent out the minutes of the retrospective and I'm sort of, excuse me, the retrospective again, Vegas rules. What is the one thing we're going to do differently as a team in the next sprint? Okay, is everyone okay if I put this up on our scrum board so it's visible? Brian Milner (25:07) Ha Kate Megaw (25:20) Okay, that's the one thing we're taking away. But back to the question you were asking, one of the biggest signs of a lack of psychological safety is that the team just doesn't want to talk. They're worried that the minutes are going to be captured. Somebody, one of the leaders is in there and, well, everyone's fine with my leadership. They're completely open and honest in front of me. And I'm sort of, okay, let's try a retrospective then with you there. Brian Milner (25:32) Yeah. Kate Megaw (25:50) And then we'll also try retrospective without you there. And let's see which one is more comfortable because otherwise it's a, it's a colossal waste of time. If nothing's going to change, why are we wasting sort of 45 minutes to an hour or even doing it? So I think that the psychological safety is a key one, making sure it is the right people, making sure that minutes are not being captured. The other thing is. A lot of times people say, well, I need to capture it because I need to bring all of the information again next time. And I'm sort of, no, you're trashing the Post-it notes. You're trashing the mural board, whatever. You're starting from scratch next time. they're sort of, well, I'm going to lose all this information. I'm sort of, no, if it's important enough, it's going to come up again next time. Brian Milner (26:23) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And things change, right? mean, what the universe of things we might identify this sprint could be entirely different for next sprint. I've always loved, Jeff Sutherland had this phrase, he would say about it to say that, you have to remove that one big thing. And when you move that one big thing, then the system adjusts and you don't really know where the next bottleneck is going to come from until you remove that one big thing. Kate Megaw (26:58) Yeah. Brian Milner (27:02) So it's likely to be somewhere you wouldn't expect. so you can't just hang on to your number two issue from one retrospective and then say, well, next retrospective, we'll just do that and we can cut out having the conversation because we identified important things in this one. Kate Megaw (27:14) Yeah. And it anchors the tea. It stops the creativity. that's the other thing with retrospectives. I occasionally will work with a client and there's the, oh yes, we've been doing what's going well and what's not going so well every two weeks for six months. And I'm sort of, it's not really any wonder your team's bored out of their minds at retrospectives and nothing new is coming up. There's so many websites out there. Brian Milner (27:41) Yeah. Kate Megaw (27:42) that retrospective should never, in fact, no meeting should ever be boring because we should always be opening and closing a meeting in a creative way. Even if it's, mean, one of the things that we like to do in the morning of class is have music. So when people are joining, the energy is there so that we're getting that interaction and things like that. So people are starting on a high and then... I mean, you'll notice in the afternoons people begin to yawn, especially after lunch. Okay, you know what? It's been 65 minutes. Let's take a break. Let's do a segue question at break. So when we come back, show us something on your desk that tells us a bit about you. Or one of the ones I like is go stand up, go and look outside and come back and tell us something you saw outside. We have chickens. We have all sorts of things that people are saying. but it's encouraging them to get up and go get some oxygen in their system, take a break and then come back and then it's more engaging. But if as a facilitator, I'm not planning that type of thing, the energy is going to go down and I'm not going to achieve the purpose of my half day event or my one day class, whatever it is. Brian Milner (28:56) Yeah, it doesn't happen by accident. It's all very intentional. Well, this is fascinating. And we could have this conversation for another several hours, I'm sure. I just wanted to let everyone know that in case you were scrambling to write down these mnemonics and other things, we're going to link that in our show notes. So you can go to our show notes, and we'll put you over to Katanu team. Kate Megaw (28:58) No. Yep, absolutely. Yep. Brian Milner (29:20) Katanu, I keep on saying cat and Anu, trying to say it right way. Yeah, but we'll link you over them so you can get those three Rs for meetings and know kind of what each one of those little letters stands for in there. Kate Megaw (29:24) Yeah. Brian Milner (29:33) This has been really eye-opening for me and it just is a fascinating topic and it's so delightful just to hear the intentionality and how we can do simple things. They're not hard things, but simple things that make such a huge difference. Kate Megaw (29:48) Yeah, yeah, mean, that's the key. This is not rocket science. It's one or two simple things that helps us take that if we are going to spend 20 % or 20 hours a week, which is half of our time in meetings, let's at least make sure they're productive meetings so that we're not literally burning money by having unproductive meetings. Brian Milner (30:12) Yeah, absolutely. Well, I also forgot to mention here at the beginning, and we'll put this in the show notes as well, but Team Katanu also has a facilitation course. The Scrum Alliance has a certified Agile facilitator designation that you could obtain if you were interested in that. We'll link that off as well. But yeah, I couldn't recommend any better people for you to take that from than Kate in a new idea. We were saying that she had a, when she was younger, used to have the nickname Cat, and now everyone's calling her Cat from that. Well, thank you again for coming on and sharing your wisdom with us. I really appreciate it. Kate Megaw (30:46) Yep. Yep. Thank you very much for having me, Brian. And I look forward to hearing amazing facilitation stories from everyone once they've implemented some of this stuff. Brian Milner (31:03) Absolutely.

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• #136: The Future of Agile Coaching with Andreas Schliep

  What’s next for Agile coaching? Brian Milner and Andreas Schliep dive into the shifting landscape of Agile coaching, the differences between Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, and how to carve out a sustainable career in a changing industry. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner and Andreas Schliep explore the evolving role of Agile coaching, the challenges coaches face in today’s market, and the skills needed to thrive in a shifting industry. They break down the differences between Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, discuss how to develop a personal coaching style, and emphasize the importance of integrity and resilience. From navigating layoffs to redefining what it means to be an Agile leader, this conversation offers valuable insights for anyone looking to grow in their Agile career. References and resources mentioned in the show: Andreas Schliep Certified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum Certification Certified Scrum Product Owner® Training Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected] This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Andreas Schliep is a Certified Scrum Trainer and executive partner at DasScrumTeam AG, helping organizations navigate complex projects with agile methodologies. A thought leader and co-author on Enterprise Scrum, he empowers teams—from startups to Fortune 500 companies—through high-impact coaching, training, and a passion for continuous learning. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We are back here for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm here as always, Brian Milner, and today I have someone we've been trying to get on here for a little bit, and I'm excited to have him here. Mr. Andreas Schliepp is with us. Andreas, thank you for being on. Andreas Schliep (00:17) Thank you for inviting me. Brian Milner (00:19) Yeah, very excited to have Andreas on here. Andreas has been in the community here for a long, time. He's been just really generous with his time and he's mentored a lot of people. He's a CST, a Scrum trainer. He's also a certified enterprise coach. So he has kind of those dual high level certifications with the Scrum Alliance. But he mentioned to me earlier, he's kind of always considered himself a Scrum trainer. But he's also a coach in this group called the Leadership Gift, or there's also another name here that they've used recently, Responsibility Immersion. So that might come to play in our conversation here because we wanted to talk about sort of the future of agile coaching and agile coaches in general. There's a lot of turmoil, there's a lot of upheaval and things that are shifting and changing every day in our profession. So I guess, you know, let's just dive into the topic here. Andreas, how do you see things currently? And, you know, in a broad sense, where do you see them going? Andreas Schliep (01:18) Yeah, so first of all, why am I concerned? So typically I say that I kind of, train coaches and I coach trainers. So most of my work is centered around the path of scrum masters and how they can kind of acquire the necessarily skills and insights to become actual coaches themselves. Or scrum coaches as I would prefer to say it. And that includes a lot of stuff like we want to equip them with facilitation, with training skills, with coaching skills, with systemic observations and other methods. And we've been doing that for a couple of years. And so of course we came across lots of good people, good coaches and good trainers, good consultants out there. And we kind of kept our community open. So it's not like people attend our classes and then we forget them or we only have closer relationships to our corporate customers. It's like we kind of managed to build some kind of little community. People keep coming back and we keep chatting about what's going on, what's happening in their environment. And as a mainly training focused company, one of the first effects that we notice is that our classes are getting emptier and emptier. So what's going on, especially advanced classes are not that well. So we still have some, well, yeah. basic attendance, but it's not as it used to be. well, a couple of years ago, we had like full classes and everything, and then COVID hit and we could say, okay, so COVID kind of reduced the demand for edutraining. And then the next crisis came and the next catastrophe and the next disaster. But there have also been some structural changes. I think that we are currently experiencing two effects that happen at the same time. So the one thing is that, well, Diana Larsen put it that way, Agile has won. So there's no doubt that organizations employ Agile methods and want to use Agile practices, some of them with, some of them without any clue about what that even means or what Agile thinking or Agile attitude behind it is, but still, there's no shortage on like the use of Agile or the, but there's also no shortage of the Agile basic training or educational videos, content or whatever. So people get lots of more resources than we used to get back then when we had like this one scrum book by Ken Schwabe. So read this and then you went out and said, how do I do that? So. And then came the second book by Mike Cohen and the third book and so on. had to, had all these puzzle pieces coming together where we needed to find our own way and build our proficiency. And now you get a flood of books and stuff going on, which is fine. So the one thing is that of course our profession is developing and it's kind of natural that you will notice some kind of within that. But there's another effect and this is one thing where we scrum trainers can kind of take responsibility for our own contribution. It's the fact that organizations can hire an unlimited number of low-level agile coaches nowadays. There's been no quality control. Anyone who went through a two-day CSM class could call themselves agile coaches and they got hired for lots of money and eventually produced nothing. some of them, some agile coaches or people who call themselves agile coaches even caused chaos. So, and the systems. that they were affecting started to kind of fix themselves and heal themselves from the Agile coaches by expelling those. So, and of course, maybe you have a third effect, which is sometimes it just doesn't work and you blame the Agile coaches. So if you just lay on your couch and you do nothing and your doctor tells you, you have to get moving, you have to get up and get moving and say, yeah, it's a bad doctor because... I still lie on my couch and my health is deteriorating and this doctor doesn't help me. He doesn't give me what I want. What do you want? Yeah, I want just, I would just want a pill that I can swallow that I'm healthy. It doesn't work that way. And then we had those people who were selling those pills, yeah, who were telling people, here we got a, we got a safe way that you can do this. All you need to do is implement this process, hire our consultants. Brian Milner (05:26) Yeah. Andreas Schliep (05:43) We kind of made all the thoughts and the heavy thinking ourselves beforehand and you just need to install it. Here's the roadmap, here's the process manual, here's the 300 page guide. Just do it this way. And this is also detrimental. now we have, I've been talking to many people, many great people, you've been laid off, who are looking for a new orientation. Brian Milner (06:05) Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, I think you laid that out really, really well because there's I think you're right. It's kind of a multi effect scenario. There's a lot of things affecting it. And I know I've had conversations with with friends and colleagues about this. And, you know, we've talked a lot about the I think more kind of the second thing that you're talking about, just that and It's sort of a chicken and egg thing because the industry has built up and spread agile concepts through offerings of usually two day classes. You and I both do those quite regularly. And I think we probably both would say that's a very valuable thing. to go through sort of that immersion kind of a couple of days to learn it and get a foundation in it. But there may have been sort of a misconception or it may have been sold incorrectly to say, now you're ready to lead an organization and transforming from zero to 60 in Agile. when you're not, right? I mean, you've got a good grounding. You're ready to begin learning with a team, but it's the first step. There's gotta be some sort of ongoing support system that when you come up against something that you don't really know how to handle, that you have someone to ask. You have somewhere to go to get help and get answers. Even the, you I work with Mike Cohn, I think he's a great trainer. But even a two day class with Mike Cohn, I don't think is gonna make anyone an expert that now you're ready to, you know, take on the huge challenge of cultural change within the organization, you know? Andreas Schliep (07:53) Yeah, yeah, it's like with anything agile, these classes are a starting point or a waypoint and not a designation. It's not the goal. So when I made my driving license, my driving instructor told me, and in Germany you have to spend lots of hours with your driving instructor. And my driving instructor told me gladly, now you can get to practice on your own. He was happy that he didn't have to co-practice with me any longer because I wasn't the best driver. So I actually aced the theory test, but the practical driving was a little more difficult and kind of probably was bad for the blood pressure of my driving instructor. yeah. And that way, but I never thought about this. So the idea was I get the permission or I get the next level to the next step. And the next step will be, I want to learn proper driving. And that's something that you need to do on your own. And with this understanding, we try to kind of provide a path for people to become better scrum masters and agile coaches by kind of revamping the CSP path, the scrum aligns and other things. A glorious project that also failed gloriously. I'm still not entirely sure why, but probably because the Scrum Alliance and many other people failed to understand the similarities between Agile Coach as a profession and the Scrum Master as a role. So they claimed that there were two different things. And I think that's also a structural issue in organizations. Brian Milner (09:16) Yeah. Andreas Schliep (09:25) that they see Scrum Masters and Edge of Coaches as different things. So the Scrum Masters work on the team level and they just know their Scrum and they facilitate the meetings and then they come up with nice cookies for the retrospective so that everybody on the team is happy. And occasionally they take one of the team members aside when they have some issues and help them go through that. That's totally fine, but the Edge of Coaches do the real stuff. release train engineers and the others, do the organizational thing and they don't bother with what's happening on the team level because they need to do the important things on the higher level. And with this attitude somehow fueled by some decisions by Scrum Alliance and other organizations like, yeah, in order to become a certified team coach or certified enterprise coach, you have to kind of prove that you're... had coached like 2000 hours or 2500 hours. But by the way, the scrum master worked. It doesn't count towards this coaching, which is totally ridiculous. So that means the misunderstanding of the role is a structural problem. Another structural problem is that the organizations that would need the most experienced scrum masters, they attract all the rookies. Brian Milner (10:16) you Andreas Schliep (10:34) because they don't even know what a good scrum master would cost like. They have those two day or even less day. I heard about a transformation at a large automobile builder in Germany. They had something like a half day class for scrum master training within the safe environment. And they wonder why they fail. They wonder why they're failing. Brian Milner (10:53) Ha Andreas Schliep (10:54) On the other hand, we have organizations, even here in Germany, they have great leadership and coaching concepts. So they develop the Scrum Masters. They have the finest Scrum Masters ever on such a high level that the teams actually don't need them because the teams also evolved by taking care and taking responsibility for themselves and paying attention to the work. So they're kind of over-coached. So like, I think it was at Rally 10 or 15 years ago. There was a period when the external rally coaches didn't get so many contracts. And so they went inside and coach all the software teams and rallies at Rally. And after three or four months, the software team said, please, please give us a timeout, give us a break. We over coach. It's just too much. We just want to do some work and maybe not get better for like a month or two before we, because it's Brian Milner (11:42) Yeah. Andreas Schliep (11:47) It's hard always to get better and even better and you're so excellent coaches, cut us some slack. So that's so, but this is the structure. So on the individual level, it's just the same as with any major shift in any kind of industry. If your current profession or your current job title doesn't fit any longer, focus on what you're good at and see that you Brian Milner (11:54) Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Andreas Schliep (12:13) become excellent at that. So that's, it's an old formula. It's an old formula and it can be different things. So I know about some scrum trainers who go and went into software development again, because they said, actually, I'm passionate about software development. I can understand that. I have a developer background as well. So sometimes I'm not that unhappy about taking care of a website and other stuff. It's a nice distraction. But some are really great facilitators. But if they only go out with a label, agile coach, and do not let the facilitation skills and experience shine, then they might get a mis-hired. So we have great personal coaches in there. So people with various skill sets. And if you take a look at the agile coaching growth, we have Biomark, some of them others. Brian Milner (12:37) Right. Andreas Schliep (13:00) You see that it's a vast field. So you cannot expect anyone, maybe the two of us, but you cannot expect anyone to be, not even me, so anyone to be excellent in all these knowledge areas and to be such a light and catalyst in everything. So the idea is to find your own way how you can contribute best. and then collaborate with others in their fields. So for me, the most interesting areas in that field are training and facilitation. Because I think that's the main thing that agile coaches or scrum masters can shine in. Brian Milner (13:41) Yeah, I've always loved, know, Lisa Atkins has that kind of different aspects of a coaching stance. And one of the ones that she had there that I've always loved is the idea of having a signature presence. And I remember when I first kind of encountered that, was, when it kind of sunk in, it was a very freeing idea for me. Andreas Schliep (13:49) See you. Brian Milner (14:01) to, you know, kind of like you're describing there, there's so many different aspects that you could, you know, try to do and you could do well, but it's too much for any one person to do all of it. So that signature presence to me, one of the things that I really kind of took away from that was know what you're good at, right? I mean, there's something about you that you bring from your own personality and your history and and everything that's made you who you are that is unique. And when you can find what that is, then it's almost like prior to that recognition to me, I was almost even a little ashamed that that was where my strength was. And I felt like I had to make up on these other areas that I struggle with or I didn't do as well. But that concept to me, Andreas Schliep (14:47) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (14:52) kind of help me see, no, there's something that's really unique about how you approach things. And if you recognize that, lean into it because nobody else can offer that, right? Nobody else brings that to the table because that's uniquely you. Andreas Schliep (15:06) Yeah. Yeah. I have to admit, well, we're both with Scrum Alliance and I've been with Scrum Alliance for more than 20 years now. But some of the biggest insights about Scrum and the role of Scrum Master were some things that I actually learned by looking through the Scrum.org certification parts. So just out of curiosity, I started digging into the... Professional Scrum Master Series by Scrum.psm1. Okay, PSM1 is a walking part, so that's no big deal. 50 minutes without preparation, A's are done. Okay, next thing, PSM2, was a little more chilling. Okay, there are some different concepts in the way they address Scrum. And I completely faded PSM3. So that's interesting. So I should have known that. And the point is that... Brian Milner (15:52) Huh. Yeah. Andreas Schliep (15:58) There are differences in the message and the Scrum Master and the Scrum.org framing of Scrum is far more of a leader. So they take far more responsibilities. They are much closer to a sports team coach actually, even taking care of the crew and even throwing people out of the team if necessary. Then the fluffy Scrum Master social worker thing. with no real responsibility always in the background that we appear to propagate sometimes that I even have propagated lots of times. And I see this in my own style as well. So I'm rather strong at the facilitation part and working from the side of the background of people. But sometimes I see, and I think that's a big challenge for many agile coaching scrummers out there. Brian Milner (16:32) Yeah. Andreas Schliep (16:48) When it comes to the situation where I should take the lead, I'm still reluctant when I say, okay, yeah, somehow I don't want to step under the feet of others. I want to give them room. I want to be in my facilitator stance because I love that stance and that's my personal brand or whatever. The calm way and listening to people and integrating all voices. But all of a sudden, I encounter situations where say, my voice first. So, yeah. So let's do it that way. this week, I kind of stopped the client workshop in the middle. I said, so yeah, what is that? here you booked me for the entire day, but I noticed that you're very upset about important stakeholders missing. Brian Milner (17:19) Yeah. Andreas Schliep (17:39) I also noticed that you don't see the point in reiterating some other concepts that I prepared. you could use these methods and then talk to your stakeholders, but you rather want me in this room with your stakeholders and have this discussion together. So let's just stop this now. And I offer you a gift. I will come back for another half of days. So we stop this half day. You can use your time for something else. I can use my time for something else. And then I come back, but only if you have your manager in here. So if you bring your boss, I will come for another half day and then we finish this and deal with these questions. And they were kind of impressed that I was offering them. But where's the point? I needed to change the mode. I couldn't stay and I think this is something Brian Milner (18:20) you Yeah. Andreas Schliep (18:29) which is another great opportunity for Scrum Masters or agricultural coaches to say, what if I stepped into this leadership role? Brian Milner (18:37) Yeah. Yeah, that's a great kind of approach to it. And I know we've had some similar things at Mountain Goat as well, where we've worked with some clients and you kind of show up and you start to get into the things. Or even sometimes in the kind of just pre-work calls where you're trying to arrange things and talk through what is it you want to get out of this. And you sort of get that feedback and understanding that this is really just checking a box, right? They wanna check the box that they did this, but really making the change. No, they really don't wanna make the change. They really don't wanna have to change what they do on a day-to-day basis. you kind of are, as a coach or a trainer, you kind of get to that decision point where you have to say, at what point do I call this out? At what point do I say, you know what? You're gonna waste your money. Right? mean, I can come and do this. I can take your check. I can go away, but it's not going to make any difference. And you're not ready for it yet. and, that's, that's always a really hard decision. When you get to that point, when you realize, you know what? It's not serving your needs for me to, move forward here. You know, it's, it's, you're not going to be happy with me. Andreas Schliep (19:48) Yeah. I think it's important to maintain the personal integrity. the whole point about resilience is that you kind of are able to change while you maintain your own identity. So the path that you are trying to. And this change can mean a lot of things. So if someone would tell me, you've got to stop with Scrum now because Scrum is now forbidden everywhere. I would kind of dig into the facilitation. So I joined the IAF, the International Association for Facilitators. I don't have a credential there yet, but this is something if I would go into more facilitation gigs, this would be very interesting for me. I also became a coach in the responsibility program with Christopher Avery. First of all, I think that was a nice addition to my training or to my work with leaders. But then I also discovered that this is kind of navigation aid for myself. So whenever I do something, I start with what do I want? So what do I want? How do I want the situation to evolve? What is the outcome that I want to achieve? And how am I blocking myself from that? So what is kind of my inner blocker that prevents me from getting what I want? Brian Milner (21:03) Yeah. Andreas Schliep (21:04) So I could also talk about external blockers, but these external blockers are sometimes just things on my path that I choose to say, okay, I can't go there because there's this blocker. And when I found these two things, so what do I really want and what is blocking me? I can go and make a decision. I can confront myself. And with this ability, I'm pretty sure that I'm able to respond to any kind of situation. So, and... whether I pursue the facilitator part further or whether I go into the coaching way. I love to work with groups so that just the one-on-one coaching is not so interesting for me. But these are kind of independent from what I'm doing now, but also based on what I'm doing now. So I can derive lots of good skills and insights and approaches from what I did as a scrum trainer so far, what I have done as a scrum trainer. Brian Milner (21:58) Yeah. Well, I think when I'm hearing and tell me if I'm misquoting this or saying it or misunderstanding, but it feels like there's sort of an element here that, you know, I think a lot of us sometimes, have some kind of a title that we've earned. and we, we sort of inherit from that, set of, activities or things that we feel empowered to do. based on that title. And what it sounds like I'm hearing from you is it should kind of be the reverse. You should think about what you do well and the titles may come and go. They may change the descriptors that people use to describe what you do, it might change, but what you love to do with the activity, what you're good at, that can shift and change a little bit and don't be so concerned with the title. Andreas Schliep (22:45) Yeah, so edge-hired coaches still can keep this kind of title for the tribe to identify a peer group. And I've also joined edge-hired coach camps even as a scrum trainer. because this identification is important to say, okay, I know a couple of people who have different skills or different things who are some more similar to me, but I don't think we should stick to Agile Coach as a job title and only look for Agile Coach offers. But rather go out and see what's out there, what opportunities do we see. Apply for weird stuff. So at the beginning of this year, I applied as a facilitator for United Nations volunteer program and even made an extra language proficiency exam before that because I had to kind of prove that I'm at least at level C1. for this job. I just did it because it was there because this opportunity came through the International Association for Facilitators. I just said, okay, I don't know. They didn't even throw me back. I don't have anything, but I just, I want to apply for this. I want to get this material together. I want to show that I'm potentially able to do this. I will be far too expensive with my current rate, but yeah. And I think anyone currently in the situation as an edge on coach being laid off or looking for another job should kind of step back and go through these steps. So what do I want? What are the activities that I'm really passionate about? Brian Milner (24:13) Yeah. Andreas Schliep (24:13) And the answer might be surprising. So sometimes, it's actually coding. Maybe we'll get back to the basics. Brian Milner (24:19) Yeah, yeah, you're right. I've known a lot of people or I've known several people, I guess I should say, that have kind of maybe migrated backwards. If you think of it in that way, I don't know that's backwards, but migrated to their roots a little bit more, you know, and maybe left training, but went back to doing, you know, managing software teams or even coding just because they enjoy it. And I think that's a great thing if that's... Andreas Schliep (24:41) Yeah. Brian Milner (24:45) brings them happiness, you know? Andreas Schliep (24:47) Yeah, you know, when the whole agile thing started, they came up with a little website and the website says something like, we're discovering better ways to sort fire customers or so. I don't have a probably and helping others to do it. And if even if you go back or if you go to actually start working as a developer again. You still bring the edge of spirit and you still bring the ideas and methods of collaboration. It's going to be so helpful in your environment. Especially with new technologies, AI stuff and remote work and all these things kicking in. Everything looks like it's making your work more difficult. Massive layers like even media firing developers now, not only edge of coaches. So we have... so many disruptions to deal with. And I think that, well, kind of resilient HR coaching tribe stance is helpful in whatever role you fulfill afterwards. Brian Milner (25:43) That's really good. Yeah. Well, this has been great. I really enjoyed the conversation. Sometimes you're not really quite sure where we're going to end up and where we're going to travel, but I've really enjoyed all the directions we've taken here, Andreas. So I can't thank you enough. Thank you for making time and coming on and sharing your experience and wisdom with everyone. Andreas Schliep (26:00) Mm-hmm. Yeah, was great fun and thanks for the opportunity and I hope that this will help some people find little more guidance, least a little more confidence if they don't find guidance yet. Brian Milner (26:13) Yeah, I agree. Thank you very much. Andreas Schliep (26:15) Thank you.

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  32:00
• #135: Leading Without Authority with Pete Behrens

  In this episode, Brian Milner and Pete Behrens explore the difference between managing and leading, the critical role of middle management in transformation, and how anyone—at any level—can drive real change in their organization. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner sits down with leadership expert Pete Behrens to unpack what it truly means to be an Agile leader. They dive into the difference between leadership by authority and leadership by respect, the importance of competency in leadership roles, and why middle managers often hold the key to lasting organizational change. Pete shares insights on how leaders can navigate cultural shifts, manage organizational tensions, and empower teams to operate effectively in today’s fast-moving world. Whether you're a Scrum Master, Product Owner, or executive leader, this episode is packed with actionable strategies for leveling up your leadership impact. References and resources mentioned in the show: Pete Behrens Agile For Leaders Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected] This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Pete Behrens is a leadership coach and Agile pioneer, shaping organizational agility for over 20 years—long before scaling frameworks took center stage. As the creator of the Scrum Alliance® Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC) and Certified Agile Leadership (CAL) programs, he continues to empower leaders worldwide through Agile Leadership Journey™, a global network dedicated to leadership growth and culture transformation. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Well, welcome back Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have the one and only Mr. Pete Barron's with us. Pete, welcome in. Pete Behrens (00:15) Thank you, Brian, for the invitation and happy to be here. Brian Milner (00:17) Very, very excited to have Pete with us. If you're not familiar with Pete's work, you're in for a treat. Pete has been doing this for a long time and he has been really a foundational person in some of the things that the Scrum Alliance has done over the years as far as being involved with the coaching program and the leadership program and helping to design and put that together. His main focus has been in leadership. for several years now. And that's why we wanted to have Pete on, is to have him talk a little bit about Agile leadership. Because in today's world, in the context of a lot of the things that are shifting and changing in our day and age, I know that there's just a lot to consider in the area of Agile leadership. why don't we start, and I know this is kind of a softball, you probably get this question a lot, how do you define that? How do you define, is Agile leadership different than leadership, or is it... Is it essentially the same thing? Pete Behrens (01:12) Yeah, good, good starting question. So think of leadership as, you know, the ability or capability of influencing others towards a common goal. Right. That's that's what we look at as a behavior, a capability. Some people confuse that with being a leader. And that's actually different. We think of that as being, you know, having a title of authority. Right. So if you think about influence, there's really two aspects. One is I actually have a title that gives me the authority or I have respect. that allows me to do that regardless of title. So we do that a lot with leaders to actually kind of reset some of that and think about, right, this is a capability anybody at any level, any title can do as somebody. Now, the agile, you know, part of that, obviously, you you and I live in an agile industry and world. Why? Because things are changing, right? Things are changing faster than we've seen. Things are more complex. software has created endless possibilities of paths. And we like to use the metaphor of fog. So think of your operating in the fog. You need to sense and respond to make appropriate decisions. It's no longer available to us to kind of leverage the plan, follow the plan. And so Agile is simply a capability of leadership to operate in that complex, fast-changing world. Brian Milner (02:31) Love that. Yeah, I love that analogy. mean, I think about like all the times I've done cross country road trips and you drive into a fog bank, you're a lot more alert. You have to be really on point the whole time versus, you know, driving out in middle of Arizona somewhere where you can see, you know, the next five miles ahead, maybe relax a little bit more behind the wheel. That's a great analogy. So if we have to be kind of There's a difference here between being, I'm a leader in the organization because they've given me a job title and I'm a leader because I'm recognized as a leader. I'm recognized as such. What kind of characteristics, qualities come with that recognition? How do people, what differentiates somebody who is a recognized leader in an organization from someone who's not? Pete Behrens (03:14) Yeah, you know, certainly title is a recognition, right? So it's one way, you know, people and it's in effect, probably the most desired way to become a leader is I want the title. you may have seen this. I know I did when I was, you know, I was a director of engineering, VP of engineering before I became, you know, a coach and consultants. And a lot of times I'd get people coming to me and say, Pete, I want that job. I want that leadership position. I want to be the tech lead. I want to be the development manager. I'm like, well, prove it to me. They're like, well, no, can't until you give me the title. And one of the things we've realized over time as we've been studying leadership and developing leadership programs is people who receive a title before they develop competency actually are worse leaders because they end up depending on the title to influence. And leaders who develop the capability and now where do you get this? You develop respect. How do you get respect? Brian Milner (03:47) Yeah. Pete Behrens (04:11) you develop respect through expertise, right? This is some combination of education and experience that people are willing and choosing to follow your lead. And this is the basis of where most people kind of get into leadership is they've developed a certain respect in the organization. Others are willing to follow them. And so that's a typical starting point, a typical entry into leadership. One of the things we also help leaders understand is that's also a trap. And I'll just pause there to let you reflect on it. We can go into that rabbit hole if you'd like to. Brian Milner (04:48) Yeah, no, let's talk about that because you're right. There's a lot of times when you see someone in an organization that they've been there, they don't necessarily have to have been there for a long time, but they've been there and they've developed the respect of their peers. They're the best programmer on the team. So the organization recognizes that, recognizes that others in the organization see them as being exceptional. So they elevate them. Now they're no longer just programmer where they did an exceptional job. Now they are manager of of the programming team and they've been elevated simply because they were the best among the bunch. Is that the right thing to do? Pete Behrens (05:22) Right. Well, it's definitely a common thing to do. And it's not it's not the wrong thing to do. I think the mistake a lot of organizations make and you know, you can go back to Marshall Goldsmith, who wrote the book What Got You Here Won't Get You There. And what he's alluding to is exactly that. The skills you need to get into leadership aren't the skills you need in leadership. And so the trap that that leaders fall into is, okay, and this is my path. And maybe your path as well is I'm the best engineer. I'm the best salesperson, marketing person, whatever that is. I'm now coming into leadership. What is your comfort? Well, your comfort is in the work itself. And so all this new stuff about working with people and projects and project management and people management culture and, and other things are very uncomfortable. So I go back to my comfort zone and that's when I start to micromanage. start to redo other people's work. I start to get too detailed into the weeds and I'm not doing the job of leadership, which is really influencing others down this path. And this is one of those traps that many leaders fall into is we get these steps up to leadership, but then we're not properly educated and provided the tools we need to do that job. I think the studies we've seen of only about a third of leaders get proper education, mentoring or coaching to be a leader. And the way we look at this is, is, you know, hiring anybody into an organization from the outside world. You would never hire somebody without a detailed resume that outlines every bit of education, every bit of experience. And then you're matching against 30 applicants or 100 applicants picking the best one. Yet every day. We're promoting people with zero expertise, zero education in leadership into those positions, and it's just It's really silly and it's really backwards. And yes, we want to give them opportunities, but we also need to help them. And that's what we're not seeing, is we're not seeing that help. Brian Milner (07:20) Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm old enough. I know that I remember in my dad's day and age, you know, it was not uncommon for any large organization to have a leadership training program within the organization. You would be recognized as being exceptional. You would be put forward and then you'd enter the leadership training program of the organization that would help you to elevate and become an effective leader. And we don't see that. as much anymore. You just kind of are elevated and hey, kids, you're on your own. Pete Behrens (07:51) Well, and what they're teaching is management, not leadership. And I think one of things we differentiate with leadership is we manage things like projects. We manage programs. We manage technology. We can manage documents and even HR programs, things like that. We lead people. And so, yes, there are a number of things that organizations, HR programs, et cetera, do to kind of help. Oh, you need to do a one-on-one. or you need to do basic communication. Like there is some, but it's not the things we realize help elevate. You know, we separate this concept of vertical development from horizontal development. we often teach or organizations often teach the horizontal. That's the skills. OK, so you need to communicate. You need to delegate. You need to empower. But we're not teaching what we call the vertical development. And so what they're doing is their mindset is stuck in this kind of one stage. They got all this like this toolbox, but they don't know how to use the tools. And what we're trying to do is help them understand and give them a bigger toolbox to help them understand how to use these tools effectively to be better leaders. And that's a much different problem. It gets into self-awareness. gets into my focus as a leader from shifting in terms of the system and what I'm focused on and what my goals are. as well as just the time horizon I work in and how tactical, strategic or visionary am I. Those are harder things to teach, yet that's where leadership starts to emerge. Brian Milner (09:29) Yeah, well, it makes me think back to what you were saying about the person that would come to you and say, I want to be promoted. I want to be put into this next position. And your response of, me, kind of help me see that. I know you're right. There's a lot of times when people will look at things and say, I need the title or I'll be a leader when I am called this or when I'm put in this position. But what I'm hearing from you and what I hope everyone's hearing as well is, this starts far before that. If you're going to be on that road to being a leader, then it's actually something that you begin wherever you're at. And these are skills you can start to build over a lifetime to venture into that vertical area as you describe it. Does that sound correct? Pete Behrens (10:10) Exactly, exactly. And, you know, one of the things that, you know, I want to, you know, maybe warn the listener on here, we get a lot of people who come through and we work with a lot of, you know, agile coaches or leaders who want to become a coach or, you know, we have change agents, right? People who are, you know, their focus is change in the organization, right? This is where you see a lot of scrum coaches and things like that. And one of the things that we've realized over time is this notion of individual as change agent is incredibly challenging. And for the most part, we, the way we visualize or we talk about this to leaders is it's like, you know, you start singing a song and everybody looks at you like, okay, he's crazy. Like he went to like this evangelical school. He drank this Kool-Aid and he's coming back and he's like, yeah, yeah, that's just Tom or that's just Susie. And, and nobody listens to him. And we see this over and over again. And, and You know, one of the things we talk about is we've got to shift that solo into a chorus, right? So the construct of leadership, we think of often as an individual sport, but truly the only way change really starts to take hold in an organization, and that's where we're starting to shift from me to we, is how do we catalyze that choir to start singing? That's when organizations start to excel. And that's one of the things that when I'm starting to work with leadership teams, we start to understand this isn't just something we teach individuals. This is something we've got to collectively act on. mean, you think about any sports team and European football or US football or hockey or whatever that is. Those teams are are are awesome because of that choir element, because they all sing in the same tune, because they're all practicing all the time together. That's the other part of leadership that I want us to kind of focus on as we kind of take this journey. This isn't a solo sport. Brian Milner (12:07) That's such an important point. I can't agree with you more. just the concept there that I hope people kind of pick up on is, yeah, I mean, the Scrum Guide has for years talked about change agent and the Scrum Master being a change agent, but the kind of maybe indirect association from that was, you know, it's your job to take it on yourself to go and do this thing where You're right, it's too big of a job for one person to do this kind of thing by themselves. We have to have help, you have to have compatriots, you have to have someone who comes alongside you, because like you said, otherwise you're singing by yourself and everyone's looking at you like, what's that guy singing? Pete Behrens (12:48) Yeah, unless you're Satya Nadella, know, or somebody who has that capability on top of the org. And we actually see change happen, from people like Satya Nadella is kind of a rare example, I think, in our world and how he shaped Microsoft. But we actually see more change happening from the middle. You know, when we're teaching organizations and working with them, one of the things that I often Brian Milner (12:51) Yeah. Pete Behrens (13:15) I'm speaking to is the middle tier, you know, it's it's the frozen middle. It's the the between the rock and the hard place. They often feel the most pressure because it's the pressure from above, but the incapability of delivering below. But I try to help turn it around for them. And I say, you're the only one in the organization who feel the pain, but have access to the top layer for change. And and when it comes to organizational change. We actually find more change happening from the middle than we do from the top. Just because the top is so risky and they already have so much power, they don't really need or want change so much. They want to push it. But oftentimes that change happens from the middle. Brian Milner (13:54) Well, I know we've all seen the surveys and studies and things that talk about, you know, agile transformations and change movements and stuff and organizations that have identified leadership as being a kind of a ceiling or some kind of a blockage to real change taking place. So I guess what I'm hearing from you a little bit is don't let that become a blocker for us if we're not the top leadership, that doesn't need to be something that we need to look at and say, that's out of my hands. I can't do anything about it. We actually do have a role to play to that in the middle or other layers of our organization that we can affect the change through the leadership. Is that right? Pete Behrens (14:35) It's a perfect, perfect point. something we try to iterate all the time. Yes. You know, the number one thing we hear when we're working with organizations is I wish my manager could hear this, right? Because they are feeling constrained. They are feeling bound by certain rules and policies and governance and, you know, all the things that feel like our constraints. And that is true. And, you know, the only one who has access to these constraints is leaders. You know, we often describe, I call it the two games we play. You know, we get the agile and you get involved in a lot of these agile transformations. So we get the agile game played at the team layer. And maybe we get a little at the program layer, you know, if you've got some some cross team kind of coordination going on. And then we have the leaders and they play a different game, different rules, a different ruleset. And and then they've got the conflict, right? That's happening between these two layers. And I see this so often. right in the organization. Again, it's that middle tier who sees both games, has access to both games. And I think a lot of the problem we have in our agile community is we don't speak leadership. We don't speak the language leaders speak. I've been working, I worked with the organization and I talked to, know, this is like the CFO and the chief risk officer and, you know, the CIO. And I had a comment that came out and he said, Pete, For about three years, I've heard Agile blah, blah, blah. And I just didn't get it. And now I'm starting to understand the value because what we've learned how to do is speak leadership, risk, right? What is the risk in the approaches we're taking that are or aren't Agile? And what are the pros and cons of that risk? know, oftentimes our Agile evangelists. put agile on the good side and traditional on a bad side. And that's not true at all. Agile lives in kind of what I'd call a peak. Aristotle called this the golden mean, right? There's a peak. And on one side, there's a deficit of agility, and that is too much planning, too much rigidity, too much bureaucracy. But there's an excess agility. And this is where a lot of our coaches land. It's like hippie agile. Hey, man, what are you going to be done? I don't know, man. We're agile. Hang with us. hear that and they're like, I don't accept that. And so yeah, we've kind of swung right across this hillset down from deficit to excess and leaders aren't buying that. And I think that's been some of the downside of our agile community, our agile messaging. We've never broken through that ceiling of leadership. Brian Milner (17:12) Yeah, by the way, just I'm going to interject this a couple of times throughout, but if you like what you're hearing here from Pete, you can find out more from his site, agileleadershipjourney.com. Pete does a lot of classes and coaching and teaching and other things. And there's a lot that you can connect with Pete on through that site. And we'll put this in the show notes so you don't have to scramble to write this down. You can get back to this later. So I love that. that explanation, though. And it kind of resonates with me in a way, because I know one of the things I've talked about when I talk to product owners is the idea that product owners sort of serve as translators between the two worlds a little bit, right? Because they have to speak with developers who speak in very tech-speak kind of language. They have to speak to stakeholders who speak in very business-speak kind of language. Are product owners kind of that function? Are we losing the as product owners in doing that? Or is it not really a product owner thing? It's just more of an entire Scrum leadership thing. Pete Behrens (18:13) Well, yeah, take the word Scrum out. It is a leadership thing. Product owners are leaders, right? They are leading product. And again, the role of product ownership is a role of influencing others towards common goals. And I used to teach product ownership. was a certified Scrum teacher and taught product ownership, Scrum Mastership. I found product ownership to be the most challenging role ever because Brian Milner (18:16) Yeah. Pete Behrens (18:39) you're essentially optimizing for a solution that doesn't exist. So you have all these stakeholders who have all these needs and there's no possible way to meet the demand. And so the role of product ownership is how do I find the optimal across this dimension? so it kind of gets us into this world of, in business, there are often no right answers. Should we do strategy A or B? Well, it depends. You know, we're often as leaders chasing answers when there isn't one. I often talk about this as managing tension. And if we can kind of switch our mindset from there is an answer to this is a tension that will never go away and give you an example of this, like product owners struggle between tech debt and features. Well, that's something that will never go away. No matter how much we work on tech debt, no matter how much work on features, they will always be there. This is a tension that We simply need to learn how to manage. It's never a solution we can come up with. The same is true with strategy and tactics. Should a product owner be more tactical, live with the team, or should they be more strategic and sit with the stakeholders? Yes. The answer is yes. And again, this is not something a product owner will ever solve, but it is something that they can learn to manage. And you start to shift this mindset. And all of a sudden, my role as leader Brian Milner (19:50) Ha Pete Behrens (20:01) starts to change. We had one product owner speaking of that that I was working with years and years ago. And she said, Pete, I feel like a tennis ball getting whacked around the court by my stakeholders, you know, and she'd go talk to the state. I need this. Bam. You know, and she got to talk to the team. we can't do this. Bam. And another thing, bam. And she's like, just I can't survive this. And so we talked and we said, OK, let's let's think about your role different. And what she did, she ended up doing is she brought the stakeholders together and she said, OK, stakeholders, you guys can never agree. I'm forming a meeting that you must come to and you must fight each other for the feature prioritization. And if you don't come to the meeting, you're likely not to get prioritized. So that incents you to come. And number two, you got to convince your peers that that's more important than their need. And it just completely changed her association of her role from this. I'm the tennis ball to. Now I'm managing the court and they're all hitting balls back and forth at each other. And she's facilitating, you know, and that's just kind of one of those switch of mindsets where I can start to change my association, my work and get out of this, this sense of, there's an answer and I can figure it out to how do I manage this tension? Brian Milner (21:11) Yeah, 100%. Yeah. I mean, we believe in working in teams as a Scrum team. Why wouldn't we believe in working in a team of stakeholders as well? Right? Yeah, this is such great stuff. So I'll throw out another really loaded term at you because I know that whenever the term, whenever we talk about leadership, whenever we talk about agile leadership, or just leadership in general, you got to talk about culture. You got to talk about the idea of culture and changing culture and affecting culture and Pete Behrens (21:19) Yes, exactly. Brian Milner (21:38) You know, year people talk about, culture's a whole ball game, culture's everything. And other people who say, no, we focus too much on culture. It needs to be more about tactics and actually how we carry things out. And if you just do that, then the culture will follow. What's your take? Are we focused too much on culture? Is culture something that people care too much about? Or are we not focused enough on it? Pete Behrens (22:01) You know, I think as a as a word, just as like words like servant leadership or words like agile to get they get used and abused and people get tired of them. So I do agree culture as a word has is tired. But if you look underneath, what is culture representing? One of the terms we like to use is, you know, culture is like a shadow. It's simply reflecting something about us that we can't touch or change directly, but we can influence it. And people feel it like they feel the shadow of culture. They can sense it. And this is where, you know, again, we get into these tensions. You know, this culture is one of the things I use is culture's attention, not attention, but a tension like this, this fighting between sides. And, know, one of these is empowerment or alignment. You know, do we do things together like. Let's take a safe approach and everybody's in the same framework and the same process and the same RTE and the same rhythm. you we have the same rules and we use the same methods for estimating and that's alignment. But we know that taking alignment too far becomes routine and rigid and a death march and, all those negative sides of being in that heavy rhythm. But then we go the other way. Well, let's empower, let's Spotify, like everybody their own ruleset and they can just follow on principles and And then we know we take that too far and we've had this kind of wild chaos and people like, what's going on? And every team's different and we can't align. And this is like one of those elements of culture. You what we talk about is culture is that representation of that tension we're feeling. And it might be about speed and quality. You know, it might be about this empowerment alignment, but it's there. And whether we talk about it or not, it exists. And it influences. We like to use the metaphor of culture is the opposite side of the coin to leadership. And so we can choose to ignore it, but it is going to influence or it does influence us every day. I don't believe while the term is overused, I don't believe our focus on it is enough. And we've shown over and over again when we work with organizations that when leaders put a spotlight on some aspect, of that tension that's happening to your culture, they improve the system. And whether that's tension between leaders and employees, whether that's tension between quality and speed, whether that's tension between, you know, giving autonomy and freedom to doing things together, we can improve that system. And so what we try to help leaders understand is you need to make this part of your understanding and your focus, because if you don't, it will take care of you. Brian Milner (24:42) Yeah, yeah. Well, if I'm part of that, I mean, we talked about that, you know, people in the middle have kind of the biggest impact or you can have the biggest impact. That's where a lot of change takes place. If I'm in that middle and I recognize the culture of my organization is not what it should be, you know, we're not really in align with some of this stuff and we're definitely out of alignment with several of these things. What can I do? I can't make an edict across the organization, but how can I start to make that change if I'm in that middle section? Pete Behrens (25:13) Yeah, we had a leader that went through a number of our programs for a few years. you know, we have both educational programs, but we also have coaching programs and development programs that can kind of work on developing leaders. He moved to another company and for two years he sought to bring about what he knew to be a better way. Right. He saw the gaps. He saw the tension. He's like, I got it. I know this. But again, single voice. Everybody's looking at him crazy. He hires another person who's been through our programs to help him on his team as an agile coach. Now they got to. OK, now they're starting to sing together. It's a duet. And, know, from him for his perspective, simply it was these these conversation after conversation after conversation, the tenacity, you know, to to to say, give this a shot now. From that, we've been able to provide some more education to some of the HR, some of the senior leaders in this organization. And all of a sudden, the cascade, the dominoes start to fall. And they start to think, now I see what you've been saying all along. And so my message here is everybody can be a catalyst. Everybody can influence. But you're correct in the fact that it is not easy. What we try to help some of these catalysts, these one offs do is simply activate a second step, activate another voice that can help you bring about, you know, a message of change. And that's enough. And I think a lot of leaders get stuck because they like, I can't run a transformation. I can't get focused on this change of metrics or policies or governance. And you're right. You will never probably have access to some of those levers unless you move up the chain enough. But you can influence one other person. You can influence a few people. You can influence one class or, you know, bring someone in to help change our voice. So that's what we try to aim for some of these change agents. Brian Milner (27:12) Yeah, I love that. It's kind of the cascading effect, right? I mean, if you spark that one spark into something else, well, as long as that continues, that chain continues, it can spread. It's the old, if I tell two friends and they tell two friends, then this thing is going to work. Yeah, I love that. And that's a great practical thing too, right? mean, because I think a lot of people in that middle start to feel frozen and feel like, What can I do? I can't do anything. I think that's a great point. If you can just affect that cascade into one other area, one other person, one other department, then that's all it takes for it to start to get rolling. I love that. Well, this has been a great conversation. And it's never long enough. And this one, we could go on for another several hours on this one. If you really like this, I'm Pete Behrens (27:38) It's hard. Brian Milner (27:58) I'm going to encourage you again to visit Pete's site, agileleadershipjourney.com. There's a lot of resources for you there. You can get connected to Pete. And there's a lot of things you can move forward with in your agile leadership journey from Pete. So I can't thank you enough. Thanks, Pete, for taking the time out and sharing your wisdom with us. Pete Behrens (28:16) Thank you, Brian. Appreciate the conversation.

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• #134: How Leaders Can Reduce Burnout and Boost Performance with Marcus Lagré

  Is workplace stress just about long hours? Not quite. Brian and Marcus Lagré unpack the real equation behind stress—how pressure, complexity, and security interact—and why your team’s performance depends on getting the balance right. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner sits down with Marcus Lagré, product organization coach and author of The Stress Equation, to break down the science of workplace stress. They explore the differences between mental and emotional stress, how pressure and complexity impact teams, and why security in the workplace is a game-changer for performance. Marcus shares research-backed insights on interruptions, stress contagion, and how leaders can create an environment where teams thrive without burning out. References and resources mentioned in the show: Marcus Lagré The Stress Equation by Marcus Lagré Certified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum Certification Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Join the Agile Mentors Community Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected] This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Marcus Lagré is an author, speaker, and consultant with 20 years of experience in software development, from small-team Scrum to massive 50+ team LeSS transformations. Creator of The Stress Equation, he helps organizations tackle workplace stress systematically, ensuring teams thrive under pressure without burning out. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm here as I usually am, Brian Milner. And today we have with us a really special guest, Marcus LeGray is with us. Welcome in, Marcus. Marcus Lagre (00:13) Thanks, Brian, pleasure to be here. Brian Milner (00:15) We were saying before that I'm actually kind of butchering or Americanizing his last name. Marcus Lagre (00:20) Nah, Americanizing, yes, but butchering, no. I wouldn't say that. Brian Milner (00:24) So I'm gonna give you a chance to set the record straight. Why don't you tell us the actually the correct pronunciation? Because I probably can't do it. Marcus Lagre (00:31) Well, my... I would say La Gré, but that's with a Swedish southern accent and not even most Swedes do that, so... Brian Milner (00:34) Okay. OK. Do the Swedish people look on people in the South like we do here in America? Like they're kind of more laid back and slower and... That's funny. OK. Well, we have Marcus on because, first of all, Marcus is a product organization coach. He's an author. He's a speaker. Marcus Lagre (00:48) Yeah, yeah, I would I would say so I would I would say so yeah Brian Milner (01:03) And he has a really great book that we wanted to kind of dive into the topic of here. Because in this day and age, this is a really important topic, but his book is called The Stress Equation. So you can kind of see where we might be going there with that. Well, so let's dive in. Let's talk about that a little bit. And I think probably a good place to start would be, how would you define then stress, when you, if we're talking about stress and the stress equation, how do you define stress? Marcus Lagre (01:30) I usually use the definition of stress because I let's start like this. I think that most people have like a too narrow perspective of what stress is. Like most people probably see it as working long hours and you know, spending a lot of time at work, but it doesn't necessarily have to. And there's this definition of stress from the Oxford English Dictionary that I found really well that stress is the result of, of, of, emotional or mental strain due to adverse or demanding circumstances. So yeah, so there's differences there. And I think that most people, if you're not in a very toxic environment, you don't suffer from emotional stress a lot at work, but mental strain is probably what we're looking at most often. Brian Milner (02:04) Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I wouldn't discount that entirely. I think that there's probably a lot of people out there that have the emotional strain of a bad boss or manager or something like that, right? But yeah, hopefully, you know, hopefully you're right that the majority might not be, you know, dealing with that. It might be more of the mental side of this. So what is mental stress then? What is a mental strain? Marcus Lagre (02:38) Well, mental strain is usually diversified by saying like emotional strain is like the stress from being like in a toxic environment, for example, which is more common than it should be. But mental strain is more of the when you have too much of a mental load, like you're trying to solve a complex problem, like you have high cognitive load in order to solve it, or you need to Brian Milner (02:48) Hmm. Marcus Lagre (03:03) Well, it's also related to cognitive load that you have a lot of context switching. So you need to change information in your working memory quite often and a lot. And that can lead to mental strain. And the problem with mental strain, as I see it in white collar worker or knowledge workers, is that most of us are, we like mental challenges. We like puzzles, we like solving problems. So we're not great at identifying when a mental challenge becomes a mental strain for us. We're used to just pushing on. we try to just, you know, it's just something that I haven't figured out yet. If I push myself just a little harder, I'll crack it. Yeah. Brian Milner (03:42) Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. We do like puzzles. We do like challenges. I I know one of the popular things here in the US is the escape room kind of thing. I don't know if you guys have that there as well, but we actually pay people in our free time to give us puzzles and challenges that for fun, we'll go and put ourselves under some mental duress and try to figure out. So I think you're right. there is part of us that really wants to do that. Well, if that's true, then the other side of that is, shouldn't we all be under some kind of mental stress then, since work is challenging and complex and hopefully. Marcus Lagre (04:20) Well, yeah, I mean, not all stress is bad. So I usually say that the stress that we feel at work usually comes from two different sources. So this is the equation. Like the mental strain comes from the complexity that we need to, now that we need to handle. Either the complexity of the problem that we need to solve, or if we're working in, the complexity could also be like the frustration of working in an inefficient organization. That could be part of the complexity. Brian Milner (04:23) Yeah. Marcus Lagre (04:46) So I usually say that pressure is our sense of urgency. The pressure comes from our sense of urgency in order to finish the work that we're, the task that we have at hand or whatever it is that we're trying to solve. And the complexity is whatever makes it harder for us to actually finish that work. So to relate back to what you were saying, shouldn't we be under some kind of stress? Yes, we should. If we don't have any sense of urgency, we're probably not delivering at all. And if there's zero complexity in what we're doing, That should probably be an automated task long ago. We will probably suffer from severe boredom if there's zero complexity in what we're doing. Brian Milner (05:25) Yeah, I always, you know, this comes up sometimes in classes where, I think, you know, I want to find those people who are under zero pressure at work, because I've never been in that situation. I've never had any kind of boss or organization that was like, just take as long as you need. It doesn't matter. There's always some pressure and some places it's more than others and some places it's extreme. But yeah, I think you're right. There's a right amount of pressure. that can be applied. Marcus Lagre (05:48) And there's also constructive stress. I usually diversify like constructive stress is when you try to achieve something because if you're under a lot of pressure solving something very complex, there's also pleasure in actually solving it. So there's some kind of release in the end. But if you're constantly under a lot of pressure or... Brian Milner (05:51) Hmm. Marcus Lagre (06:09) I usually say that the pressure usually comes from things like how we set deadlines, how we handle our backlog. So if you have two short deadlines, then you're under negative stress or unconstructive stress, or we have an ever-expanding backlog. We can never finish everything in this backlog. have no way of saying no to things. They just keep piling on. That's unconstructive stress, but... Brian Milner (06:30) Yeah. Marcus Lagre (06:34) A sense of urgency to reach like a goal? That's more of positive kind of stress. Brian Milner (06:39) Yeah. Yeah. I I've heard, my boss, Mike Cohn talk about before how scrum has just the right amount of pressure that it's, it's not, you know, it's, it's not the kind of, when we think about commitment and stuff inside of a sprint, it's not the kind of thing of, you're going to lose your job if you don't make this sprint commitment. But it is kind of, you know, my, my word is on the line. My name is on the line. And if I don't deliver. I'm letting down my team, I'm letting down those around me. So that's way he describes it. It's kind of just the right amount of pressure that's kind of baked into the way Scrum works. I've always liked that. I've always thought that's kind of a good take on that. So we're kind of in these pressure cookers a little bit, right? We've got pressure and sometimes more than others and we do need some kind of pressure. So we have some sense of urgency in what we're doing. How does this align with our Agile Manifesto kind of ideal of working at a sustainable pace? Is the pressure going to crack us under trying to keep a sustainable pace? And what if we don't have any say over the amount of pressure we have? Marcus Lagre (07:46) Well, if you don't have any say, then I usually say that the pressure isn't a force of nature, that it usually stems from someone's decisions. And if we don't have a say in it, then we can't influence that pressure really as a team maybe. But from a leadership perspective, if you put unlimited pressure on the team, you're gonna see decreasing results anyway. It's not... constructive, you're going to burn your people, you're going to lose, worst case, lose them from the company, either because they change jobs or because they burn out and they have to go on sick leave. So and that's going to cost you in the end. But also that you're going to see either a lot more well, as I said, either a lot of people leaving or people doing quite quitting. That's that's what's going to be because once caring about your own performance becomes dangerous, people are gonna put in the bare minimum. That's the people you're gonna keep. Brian Milner (08:41) Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure there's lots of research baked into this and you've probably crossed a lot of different studies and things that have kind of jumped out at you. And to me, that's always one of the things that's the most interesting when I dive into a topic like this and go really, you know, kind of knee deep into it. what, was there any kind of research that you stumbled upon as you were preparing for this or, you know, creating this book? that really kind of surprised you or that you found extremely interesting? Any studies out there around the effects of stress that kind of shocked you even maybe? Marcus Lagre (09:18) I wouldn't say shocked, but one thing that surprised me was that there was this study that showed, because I talk in the book about complexity, and I mentioned earlier that if you need to change the information in your working memory a lot, that leads to mental strain. But there were actually studies that showed that interruptions in work does not lower the quality of the work. It does, however, increase the sense of stress. But it doesn't necessarily lower the quality of work, which was something that I was absolutely convinced it would. However, there was a correlation between how far if you got interrupted, if it was on topic, so to speak, so that you didn't have to throw everything out of your working memory, then the quality level was still on par with what you would have seen if you weren't interrupted. However, Brian Milner (09:48) Yeah. Marcus Lagre (10:06) if it was something that was diametrically different to what you were actually doing, then yes, the quality would also drop. But I actually thought there would be like a clear correlation between interruptions and lower quality of work. And it wasn't. Brian Milner (10:20) Yeah. So it's not, I mean, what I'm hearing is it's not necessarily the interruption itself. It's the content of the interruption. And if the interruption is, you know, taking you wildly off track from your thought process, that's higher stress kind of a reaction to it. And that leads to more problems. But if it's, if it's an interruption that's near in the same area of what it is you're working on and thinking about, then it's not as hard to get back to it. Less stress, less, let's kind of end result effect, right? Marcus Lagre (10:52) Yeah, there's less mental strain in that scenario. However, you do often feel like you're less efficient, that you get less joy out of what you're doing if you get constantly interrupted, and that the workload is heavier than it actually is. So there's negative sides to getting interrupted a lot, but as long as it's sort of on topic, as you say, it's not really that harmful. Brian Milner (10:54) Okay. Yeah. Well, I know you do a lot of work with organizations and with leaders and organizations. And I know one of the difficult things, difficult kind of parts of having these conversations with leadership is trying to help them to understand the importance and kind of the impact and why this is important in a business sense to them. Not just that, you know, the way I phrase it in classes, it's not just that it makes you a better person, right? which there's value in that. not negating that being a good person is bad. I'm just saying from a business sense, oftentimes leaders want more than just saying, yeah, I'm a better human by doing that, but is it better for the business? So how do you have that conversation with leaders, with organizations to say, this is actually an important thing to focus on. This makes an impact on your business. Marcus Lagre (12:07) usually the challenge is to get leaders to understand that they are also affected by this. Because a lot of the challenges I see in organizations is that I come in and I usually do like an analysis of the organizations, ask around, do interviews and analyze everything. And what I come up with is rarely news to the leadership. They have seen the same thing. The problem is that they never had the time to just sit down and figure things out because they're constantly rushing between meetings. They're constantly rushing to do various budgets, updates, stuff like this, just keeping the mill going. So I usually say that they're too operationally occupied to take a look at the strategic goals and the strategic direction that they need to be going in for the business to run smoothly over a period of time. And so I usually tell them that the most important thing that you can get yourself is like an hour, at least every week that you just sit on your rear end and just contemplate things. I usually use a different word than rear end when I tell them this, just to drive the point home. But yeah, they need to find time. where they can just like no phone, no computer, just sit down for an hour and let whatever enters your head, enter your head because otherwise you will never figure this out. And you don't have to pay people like me premium to come in and tell you things that you are actually clever enough to figure out yourself. Brian Milner (13:41) Right, right. Yeah, so that's so interesting. So it's hard to convince them that stress plays a big impact on their work. I hadn't really thought of it from that perspective, but that's a great point to make. If you can help them understand the impact it has on their work, maybe it's an easier conversation than to say the impact it has on your teams or on your employees' work. Yeah. Marcus Lagre (14:06) I have never, mean, stress is contagious and it ripples down. If you have a really stressed out management, you're gonna have stress in the rest of the organization as well, like on the floor and in your teams. That's just a given, I would say. Brian Milner (14:11) Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, so I'm following along. I think this is good. So we're talking about how you kind of explain this a little bit more to leaders and help them understand the impact. What about when you get one of those leaders who's just, and I know I've had these before where they're kind of more old school and they look at things and think, you know, you... Well, on your graph of pressure, right? They're much more leaning towards the higher pressure side to place on employees because they take that attitude of, you know, the old phrase that we all hate, work expands to fill the time allowed or whatever that thing is, right? How do you convince that person that, you know, there's an okay amount, but you're kind of really skewing it to the high end and this is now going to have an adverse effect? Marcus Lagre (15:00) yeah, yeah, Brian Milner (15:12) on what you're ultimately trying to do. Marcus Lagre (15:14) My usual angle of attack is to address the complexity of the part of the equation. I probably can't get them to understand or accept that they're applying too much pressure, but what they're actually trying to achieve is to get more output. I mean, that's the goal of their actions. And so I try to get them to understand the complexity that their teams are working under and try to get them to understand that you need to reduce this in order to free up more time and mental bandwidth for output. And that's usually a better way forward than trying to get them to accept that you only get so far with a whip. Once you've whipped one time too many, people are going to just stop caring. Brian Milner (16:02) Yeah. Yeah, you can't come back and use that tool over and over again. It's going to have kind of the opposite effect that you're hoping it will have eventually, right? Marcus Lagre (16:14) People are going to start telling you about problems, for example, because these people are usually the same people who don't want to hear about problems. Don't tell me about problems, tell me your solutions kind of attitude. And I usually get them to understand that you have absolutely no idea what the problems of this organization is, because people are afraid to tell you. Brian Milner (16:22) Yeah. Right. Yeah, that's such a huge point, I think, for leaders to kind of soak in and understand. If you have that culture, if you are generating that culture of fear in the organization of, don't come to me with problems, only come to me with solutions, then you're right. You're absolutely right. You're closing yourself off. And you're kind of establishing the norm that if there is an issue, The last thing to do is to raise it, to let people know about it, live with it, right? Just kind of exist with a status quo. If there's a problem, then you just have to learn to live with the problem. Marcus Lagre (17:09) Live with the problem or game the system so the problem isn't apparent. Brian Milner (17:13) Right, right. So back to the equation then. So your equation here, pressure times complexity over security. I don't know what we've talked much about security so far. So how does that come into play when you calculate this kind of pressure equation, stress equation? Marcus Lagre (17:25) Bye! Yeah, well, we kind of touched on it now, like with leaders who act in a way that lowers the security or the sense of security. So I define security as the freedom from fear at work. And psychological safety is one part of that. But it's also that you feel that you have... I'm sort of reluctant to use the words servant leadership anymore because there's sort of... sort of become a tainted word in some ways. People see it as a passive leadership style, which is not really, I don't quite agree with that, but security is in essence that you are able to take high pressure and high complexity if you feel that you have the management in your back, that you're taking it on as a team, that you're not alone with all of that pressure and all of that complexity, but you have people around you who you can rely on and ask for help. If you have that, then your security is higher and then you can take more pressure, you can take more complexity without burning out. Brian Milner (18:32) Yeah, yeah, that makes complete sense because if I have the kind of that sense of security that I'm not at risk, I don't feel like I'm being put in a position to fail so that I'm now in danger, but I've been given difficult problems because I have been trusted to conquer them. I've been trusted and empowered to kind of overcome them. That's such a different approach and mindset from an employee standpoint than, my gosh, I got to do this or I'm going to get fired. Marcus Lagre (19:05) Exactly, there's probably, management has probably let me know that we understand, we're handing you like a really tough thing to solve. if you need anything, if you need any resources, if you need any extra help, just ask us for it and we'll solve it. And in that situation, you're a lot more likely to... be able to get into that without burning out simply because you know that I have the management backing me up. Brian Milner (19:37) if I'm one of those employees who's under a high pressure environment, and I don't really feel like I have the power or authority to make that change, what can I do about it? Marcus Lagre (19:50) I mean, the thing that you can do is to change what I usually, one of the reasons why I wrote this book is that stress is one of the leading causes of mental illness and sick leave in our line of work, which is software. So if something is the leading cause of a problem, it's probably systemic, it's not individual. So one of the most important thing, that you can do is to identify what in the system is causing the stress in me, because ultimately stress is a subjective feeling. it manifests itself in people, but you can get the tools to identify what in the system is causing the stress in me. that can be quite a relief to not put that... I mean, put additional pressure on yourself by thinking that you're the one who's bad at your job or you're the one who don't have the correct coping mechanisms for the situation. The situation might actually be insane. Brian Milner (20:51) Yeah. Yeah, it's that subjective nature, I think, that is kind of a variable that I would throw into this equation. It's sort of like, I know one of the things I found really fascinating in kind of the earlier history of Agile and the idea of a sustainable pace was originally there was kind of talk about saying, using words like, no one should work more than 40 hours a week. But then that got changed to sustainable pace because of the realization that for some people 40 hours was too much and for other people 40 hours was not enough. And so that idea of sustainable pace was, it's individual, it's different to different people and that's part of what we got to do is know ourselves enough to know, hey, I'm kind of slipping beyond that point where I can sustain this indefinitely. Marcus Lagre (21:37) Yeah, and I think that's one of the myths that I want to bust a little bit is that, you know, it's not about 40 hours. It's not about the hours. I mean, there are some people who can work 60, 80 hours without burning out. So it's not the hours. It's something else. You know, so it's the end of the... Maybe it's the pressure that we have too much pressure. Maybe it's that we have too high complexity in combination with pressure. Maybe it's that we are in a toxic environment. So it's like how much mental energy do I need to handle the context that I'm in? That's. Brian Milner (22:13) It's almost like there needs to be kind of this balance between those three things that you've got to, one thing might go a little higher, but the others then have to drop a little bit so that it kind of equals out, right? Marcus Lagre (22:22) Yeah. That's what I, like, I always say that if you want to put high pressure on your teams, on your organization, you have to reduce the complexity because you can't do both at the same time. Those are the two variables that increases the stress. But then as we mentioned, like feeling of security is the lowering factor. So you always do well working with Brian Milner (22:38) Yeah. Marcus Lagre (22:46) the sense of security within your teams and working with your culture and making sure that toxic behavior is simply not acceptable in this organization, for example. And so that's always, you always get a reduced level of stress from that kind of work. But as I said, if you have high complexity and you put too high pressure on something, it's gonna break sooner or later. You're either gonna break your people or you're gonna break your product. because you're going to reduce the quality of the work because you have to stress through everything. And quite frankly, I don't care about your product. You're free to break it if you want to, but breaking people, that's just not okay. Brian Milner (23:18) Ha ha. Yeah, now we're back to being a good human, right? mean, these are humans. They're not AI programs, at least not yet. And they have lives. the more that you, like you're talking about, the more that you increase that pressure on them or decrease their sense of security, the less complexity they can handle. And you know, You have diminishing returns on your employees, on their productivity. Marcus Lagre (23:48) It is unsound business. Brian Milner (23:50) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, this is fascinating. I really appreciate you coming on and talking about this. Again, for anyone listening, if this topic is interesting to you, highly recommend you check out the book, The Stress Equation by Marcus Le Gray, even though that's not actually the way to say the name. it's L-A-G-R-E, just so everyone knows. I don't want you to struggle searching for it if you're looking for it. We will put the links to it in the show notes for this episode so that you don't miss out if you're trying to contact Marcus or you want to know more about the book. We'll make sure you find a way to do it. So Marcus, I really appreciate you coming on. This has been a fascinating topic and I appreciate you sharing your wisdom, your research and your knowledge on this with us. Marcus Lagre (24:31) The pleasure was all mine, Brian.

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  27:35
• #133: Trending Agile: Scrum Masters, AI, and the Future of Agile

  The Agile Alliance partners with PMI—what does it mean for Agile’s future? Plus, how AI is reshaping Scrum Master roles and why honesty (even when it stings) is the key to career growth. Brian Milner and Cort Sharp tackle these hot topics in a no-holds-barred discussion. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner and Cort Sharp dive into the recent Agile Alliance-PMI partnership and its potential impact on the Agile community. They also explore AI’s growing influence on Scrum Master roles—will it replace them or elevate their value? Finally, they tackle a tricky but crucial topic: when to speak up in the workplace, balancing honesty with career preservation. If you want to stay ahead in Agile’s evolving landscape, this is a must-listen! References and resources mentioned in the show: #32: Scrum in High School Sports with Cort Sharp #82: The Intersection of AI and Agile with Emilia Breton #129: 2025: The Year Agile Meets AI and Hyper-Personalization with Lance Dacy #132: Can Nice Guys Finish First? with Scott Dunn Mike Cohn’s Better User Stories Course Join the Agile Mentors Community Subscribe to the Agile Mentors Podcast Want to get involved? This show is designed for you, and we’d love your input. Enjoyed what you heard today? Please leave a rating and a review. It really helps, and we read every single one. Got an Agile subject you’d like us to discuss or a question that needs an answer? Share your thoughts with us at [email protected] This episode’s presenters are: Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. Cort Sharp is the Scrum Master of the producing team and the Agile Mentors Community Manager. In addition to his love for Agile, Cort is also a serious swimmer and has been coaching swimmers for five years. Auto-generated Transcript: Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome in. Welcome back, everybody. This is the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today, we're going to do something a little different. We're in this mode right now. We've kind of been open to some suggestions recently about maybe we should try some experiments and try some different things. And so today's going to be one of those little experiments. We have someone that's going to be with us, Mr. Cort Sharp. So welcome in, Cort. Cort (00:23) Hey Brian, thanks for having me on. Brian Milner (00:26) Absolutely. Cort is our community manager for the Agile Mentors community. And Cort and I do classes together a lot. He is often the producer in the classes. So we see each other a lot. We talk a lot. Cort's also a certified Scrum professional. So he's been doing this and has encountered Scrum in some kind of unusual circumstances as well. He's a high school swim coach. There's an episode that we talked about that. way back so that anyone wants to dig that out, they can go back and find that and learn a little bit more about it. But we just thought it would be good to have maybe periodically a little check in about maybe some stories that have come up in the news about Agile or things that have been flashing through social media feeds or anything like that. know, Cort and I are a little bit different age groups, a little bit, more than a little bit. And I'm sure the of things that cross court's radar may be a little bit different than the things that cross mine. And we just thought maybe it would be an interesting kind of thing to have a little discussion, the two of us, about some of these major burning issues and things that people are talking about on LinkedIn and Twitter and, I'm sorry, X, anywhere else. I'm going to kind of... Give the reins over to court here a little bit, because I know he's pulled some things that he wants to talk about, and we'll just kind of see where we go. Cort (01:40) Awesome, yeah, thanks Brian. Not just X and LinkedIn, we're also looking through Instagram, YouTube Shorts, where the cool kids hang out, I guess is. That's at least what my swimmers tell me. Brian Milner (01:50) Okay, okay I Got it I got a yeah, I you know, I had to learn a lot about an Instagram with my daughters and I still don't get it. just I mean I have fun flipping through stuff but I don't I could never like get a following there because I just don't understand how to Do all the but that's old guy talking. So Cort (02:11) It's a weird place, Brian. I don't blame you. It's totally good. But I've seen a few things come across my feed, and we've kind of had lighter versions of this conversation, whether it's in classes or just kind of on the side or something like that. So we just kind of thought, hey, let's sit down and actually go into depth about this, because I'm curious what your thoughts are on some of these things. And I don't know. Brian Milner (02:14) Yeah Cort (02:35) Hopefully I'm able to add into the conversation a little bit more than just here's a young guy yelling at a cloud instead of an old guy yelling at a cloud, right? No, I hope not. But let's come out and I'm gonna come out swinging at you. So the biggest news bite that I have found over the last couple of months or the last month-ish is that the Agile Alliance and PMI Brian Milner (02:37) Ha ha. young guy and old guy yelling at each other. That's not what anyone wants to hear. Yeah. Yeah. Cort (03:02) have entered, have announced that they're entering a partnership. We don't really know a ton about what that partnership looks like, but it is presumed that the Agile Alliance will be hosting some kind of content through PMI or PMI will be hosting some kind of content that the Agile Alliance has created. So I'm just curious, like, what are your thoughts on that? Do you think it's a good move, bad move, any kind of potential impacts that you see? It's a big one. Brian Milner (03:30) Yeah, way to start with a softball that we just, yeah, mean, it's obviously a hot button topic right now. I've heard lots, I've read lots of opinions of people on different kind of forums and discussion boards and things where people are talking about kind of, what does this mean? That kind of thing. And so here's kind of, Cort (03:34) Hahaha Brian Milner (03:57) Here's kind of what I've heard from both sides, right? The people who are kind of anti feel like this is maybe a little bit of a betrayal. And I think that the reasoning behind that kind of feels like maybe historically or somewhere maybe further into the past, the PMI may have been a little bit of an antagonist towards the Agile movement, or some people feel that way. I'm not saying this is my opinion, but this is what I've heard. Some people might feel that way. And so they feel like, would you attach your name to something like that? But I've also heard from people who are pro and have said, look, the basics of the deal are that it's not going to change anything for the Agile Alliance other than the name. It's officially the PMI Agile Alliance. But other than that, what I've heard from people who are board members that have posted Cort (04:43) Sure, yeah. Brian Milner (04:50) from the Agile Alliance have said, it's just nothing more than our name is now different. We're autonomous. We can still do the things we've always done. And we feel like the connection to this larger organization will enable us and help us. And I know the Agile Alliance has gone through some tough times, as a lot of us in the industry have, with the conferences. At least I know the conferences last year was kind of not what people have hoped, and not just the Agile Alliance conference, but other conferences have had down attendance and other things. Maybe just a sign of the times, I don't know. But personally, I kind of look at it and I got to preface this. got to, before we talk about anything else, right? Because now we're going to get into opinion. But I would just say, let me preface by saying the opinions you are about to hear. are not the official opinions of Mountain Goat Software. They are just the opinions of the individuals that you will be listening to. So this is just one guy's opinion, right? I think I would just say I get it from both sides. I understand. I see kind of the concern. From the people who are pro and they say, look, it's just the name, I don't know why anyone would freak out about that. It's just a, we're just putting letters PMI in front of our name. hear that, but I've also heard other people counter that to be like, yeah, but it would be like Greenpeace saying, you know, we're now Exxon Greenpeace, you know? And I don't think, I think that's quite, you know, a huge overstatement. I don't think that's the same thing at all. And I, you know, I recognize that the PMI has, you know, they've adapted. anyone who thinks that they're the same way that they've always been, I think is wrong. I think that they have incorporated over time more and more agile ideas into their certifications and other things. they certainly, I feel like they've recognized the agile sort of the future and they've tried to invest more heavily. I think this is a sign of that as well. They're trying to invest a little bit more into agile because they see it as, you this is the future of project management. You know. But they also see it as one of the paths. It's one way of doing project work. And it's not the only way. There are other ways that are good as well. I don't know that I disagree with that. Depends on the project. It depends on what it is you're trying to do. But we talk about this in class. If I know what it is that we're going to make, I know exactly how to make it, the customer knows what they want, and we're not changing anything along the way, then Cort (07:02) Yeah. Yeah. Brian Milner (07:16) Agile may not be the right way. But if any of those things are not true, then I think Agile is the right way. end of the world, no. I don't see it as the end of the world. I don't see it as the sky's falling. I think it is a sign of the times. I think it is sort of a benchmark kind of thing to say, wow, things have reached this point where they've joined forces. I think that's not an indication of either side bending a huge amount, but that both sides have bent and met in the middle. And that's kind of my opinion on it. The sky's not falling, but I don't really know how it will change things moving forward. They tell us it's not going to really. We'll see. Cort (07:58) I think I agree with a lot of what you're saying. And that's what I've seen as well amongst the social media spheres. Kind of a lot of discourse of, this is really bad, or, this is not as bad as you think it's going to be, or, this is actually really good. Because I think one point that I agree with a little bit more so is, in principle, at face value, This might not be what the Agile Alliance was founded on or anything that goes, or I wouldn't say anything, but it doesn't align with the foundational values of the Agile Alliance. But in the long run, I think this might be pretty beneficial for Agile as a whole, because PMI is massive. They have a huge reach, very big name recognition, and for them to acknowledge, not only acknowledge, but acknowledge in this way and bring in Agile into this space within their reach, I don't see a ton of harm that could really be brought to it purely on the basis of our reach, PMI's reach is significantly larger than the Agile alliances. So it just helps Agile grow a little bit more so and get a little further reach. Do you agree with that? you disagree? Thoughts on that? Brian Milner (09:14) Yeah, I mean, I've heard Mike say this before, where he says, you we talk about partnerships, you know, who's bringing more to the table? Is the Agile Alliance funneling more attention, eyeballs to the PMI by this Alliance, or is the Agile Alliance getting more eyeballs and more attention because of the audience of the PMI? I would think it's the Agile Alliance is getting more. Like you said, I think the PMI is a huge behemoth, pretty highly recognizable. their certifications have been out. They're kind of one of the first of those kinds of certifications that existed out there. And I just think that they're probably bringing more to the table to the Agile Alliance than the Agile Alliance is bringing to them. Cort (09:56) Yeah, yeah, the Agile Alliance is kind of getting the better end of the deal, so to speak, as far as exposure goes. Brian Milner (10:00) Yeah, but I think time will tell. I think that's really what I would say to anyone is just don't freak out too much yet. You need to just wait and see what will happen. When the moves happen, if something happens, it's like all of a sudden now the Agile Alliance can't in any way talk about how traditional waterfall is not a great way of doing things. Well, now I would raise the alarm and say, OK, well, now you see the compromise. But if that doesn't happen, if it truly is, as I've been hearing, it's just a naming, we're autonomous, I don't see the grave harm. Cort (10:33) Right, right. Right. I think one thing that's kind of overlooked or maybe just a little glazed over that people didn't pay too much attention to is they didn't announce this as a merger. They announced this as a partnership. So to me, when I hear partnership, hear two entities working independently with a common goal of whatever it may be. Brian Milner (10:54) Yep. Yep. Yeah, a little insider baseball on that because I have heard some discussions around that as well. And just what I've heard is, there is a trickiness there because the agile Alliance is a nonprofit organization. And so from a for-profit organization, you cannot acquire a nonprofit organization unless that nonprofit organization changes and becomes a for-profit entity. Cort (11:28) in for profit. Yeah. Brian Milner (11:31) I'm not a lawyer. I don't know any of that kind of insider, the legalese that's around that. But I've heard a little bit of conversation around the fact that it might have been an acquisition had they been a for-profit company. But since they were a nonprofit, it's a partnership. So that may be the case or not. I don't know. Cort (11:50) So that brings up just a question to me then. A lot of times when companies merge, they tend to merge as either an industry or a sector is kind of starting to go down, trickle down a little bit. And they merge as a method of of like bulking up, strengthening where they can, trying to... that they acquire, they merge in order to withstand the rough times. Do you think that that might be what's at play here? Where just from a business perspective, this is kind of the business smart move for both entities, both organizations, so that they can withstand, I think I saw somewhere like a 35 % reduction in middle management positions, postings or something like that, right? Brian Milner (12:31) Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. mean, I think, the, the past few years have been kind of difficult economically. please don't think I'm being political and saying that at all. I'm just, yeah, I can only state what I've, I've seen and heard from other people in the industry. And I've, you know, I've heard about people talking about less job postings, those going down. I've heard about, know, trainers and coaches and other things. you know, losing percentages of their students or their coaching engagements or other things. So I've just heard that it's been, and we've kind of experienced some of that as well, decline a little bit. I don't think it's that one of those two entities had a decline. I think they both are kind of recognizing this is a tough economic climate and strength in numbers. You know, if we can support each other and maybe that's the path forward is that we kind of combine forces and combine and conquer a little bit. So I think you're right. I think that may have forced it and it's just the opportunity presented itself. Cort (13:37) Just kind of a contextual thing where the context of kind of where we're at right now. That's really what drove it. Yeah, I can see that. could totally see that. Awesome. Well, let's jump over to our next kind of topic right now. Everyone's favorite topic right now, AI, right? We've talked about it substantially. But kind of with that whole idea of Brian Milner (13:52) Sure. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Cort (14:03) or that little note that we had there of these mid-level management positions, we're not seeing them rise in open positions. We're kind of seeing them get squeezed down a little bit. We're seeing them reduced. And a lot of that is attributed to AI, where a lot of these mid-level management positions are tasks that can be done by AI, because a lot of it is kind of this data analysis stuff and what do we move forward with? Relating it to Scrum specifically with AI being on the rise and Scrum Master roles appearing to be bringing less value as a result, because I think you've seen it, I've seen it a lot. A lot of my friends are talking about it. I've seen it a lot on social media. Actually one Instagram reel that sticks out to me right now is someone was like, hey, do you want to get into tech without having to learn how to code, be a scrum master. It's super easy. You just take a two day course and you're going to make $110,000 a year or whatever. And it's like, you know, little tongue in cheek, but at the same time, I think there's some truth to what that real was saying. Um, however, with that, I think a lot of scrum masters are being shoehorned into roles or have been shoehorned into roles of. Logging meetings. creating meetings, facilitating those meetings and then entering in the next one and saying, Hey, everyone has to show up here and, you need a story point this. I need point values for this bug before we start working on anything. and a lot of that seems to be replaced with AI or at least is able to be replaced with AI. So Scrum Masters now are in a position where they have to drive more value. where, where do you think Scrum Masters? in their role can bring more value? And do you know of any resources that are either widely available, freely available, available at a lower cost to help Scrum Masters learn how to actually bring more value to their role? Brian Milner (16:04) Yeah. Well, the first thing I'll start off in saying is, you know, one of the great things about living in today's world is there is so there's such a wealth of information that's free. You know, I can learn how to do, I can learn how to cook anything in the world by just finding the video on social media and not all of a sudden, you know, I've got everything I need to make a great dish. I may not taste the same as the person who did it, but you know, I can learn how to do pretty much anything. I can Google, you know, how to You know change out my doorbell, which is one thing I did over the holidays You know like that's the kind of thing that there's a full video showing exactly it step-by-step Here's how to do everything and and I think that you know for Us a scrum masters. There's there are some skills. I think that are gonna be More and more relevant more and more needed and I think you just have to put yourself in the frame of reference of what would AI do a good job of? this is such a answer because if my job as a scrum master is to just schedule meetings, well, then yeah, I'm in trouble because an AI can do that really easily. And you don't even need AI for that. All you just need is to have people enter when they're available. There's dozens of websites where you can do that. do that. My D &D group does that to try to find the nights we can play. It's easy to do that, and you don't need any AI for it. So if you reduce what a scrum master is down to something as simplistic as let's schedule meetings, well, then yeah, you're in danger. I think what's going to happen is that more and more, it's going to be the soft skill kind of things that are going to differentiate the Scrum Master profession. I think that AI is going to have a hard time with managing interpersonal relationships. It's going to have a hard time helping the team navigate through conflict. It's going to have a hard time picking up on details, how safe does the team feel, how well are they working together. AI can do certain things really well, but there's a reasoning that's not there now. I don't know if that's coming. I don't know if that's tomorrow, if that's 10 years from now, or a year from now, or six months. But I know that now, even though they say thinking or other things like that, it's not really thinking. It's just digging up more data. And it can process a large amount of data and give you some insights from it. That is something that it does well. but it can't intuit, you know? It doesn't have emotional intelligence. And yeah. Cort (18:47) Yeah. Yeah, think one spot or one really good definition of where AI is fantastic that I read recently is AI is absolutely incredible when there is a set of very clear specific rules. So the book that was reading that said that they use chess, example, right? Where chess has a very, as a set of very specific rules. and AI can beat any grandmaster easy. Really just like chess.com can beat any grandmaster at this point, right? Because it's able to analyze potential outcomes based on a set of rules and a scenario that it's given in. Whereas a lot of humans, we think, or a lot of human chess grandmasters, they think in a way of like, here's one specific strategy that has worked in this scenario. I'm going to go that down that route. So AI can inference, so to speak, they're going to go down this route because that's what has happened in the past. And based on that set of rules that has happened in the past, here we go. So I think you're entirely right with those softer skills where you're interacting in a space that has some guidelines, but not necessarily a set of clearly defined rules is where AI is going to struggle right now. Absolutely. Yeah, totally. Brian Milner (20:07) Yeah, I'll tell you, Cort, too, one of the things that I'm really interested in, and I've talked to you about this and some other people, I'm really interested to see how AI, especially for coding, because more and more coders are taking advantage of coding assistants. And there are some stories out there and some companies that are more and more reducing the reliance on a person to code and using more AI to do coding. Some claim that they can do it all with AI. I would be really suspicious if there's no human involved at all. But what I'm really curious about is how does it change the process? If you are using an AI coding assistant, Does that change any other part of your process? How do you verify that the code that the AI has produced is correct? Is there a pairing? Is there a peer review of that that the team does? I suspect that there's practices and things like that that are popping up all over the place that just haven't been codified yet. There hasn't been a white paper that says, here's what you do. to try to ensure that it matches well with the rest of the code or here's how you know that it matches your standards or other things. I suspect that there's plenty of those kind of things out there and I'm just kind of waiting to hear those reports. Cort (21:25) Right? Yeah. Yeah, think, gosh, was, was Mark Zuckerberg was on the Joe Rogan podcast not too long ago. and he was saying like, yeah, by the end of 2025, Facebook is already doing it or Metta is already doing this. Sorry. Metta is already doing this where they're starting to replace their mid-level programmers, their mid-level developers with AI. And Zuckerberg was saying like, it's expensive right out of the gate. Brian Milner (21:54) Yeah. Cort (21:59) Right. It's going to be a lot of time, but we see the value in this long-term. so I wonder if, if that white paper is going to come from either meta or alphabet or one of those ones, right. Brian Milner (22:09) Yeah. Well, the domino effect of this is also going to be fascinating to watch because you said that they're talking about mid-level. I've heard a lot more about junior level being replaced, Like the entry level kind of stuff. And so, okay, let's say you do that, right? And you're hanging on to your senior people who have the experience. What happens when they move on? Right? When those senior people are gone, you haven't had anyone coming up the pipeline because you replaced it with AI for the junior stuff. And you're depending on more senior, more skilled advanced people to verify, to go through and fix the issues that AI is producing. They're going to be gone. They're going to retire. You know? So I don't know how that, that will be my first question to someone like Zuckerberg about that. Cort (22:54) Right? Yeah. Yeah. Brian Milner (23:02) when they said something like that is, what's your continuity plan for moving up programmers into more senior skill level? How are you going to build that into your long-term process if you're going to replace junior and mid-level people with AI? That's going to be a train wreck that's going to happen at some point. Cort (23:27) I, cause a lot of times we talk about in courses or I've heard it a few times and I totally agree with this and subscribe to this idea that the goal of a scrub master is to work themselves out of a job. So I wonder if it's that kind of same kind of mentality that these bigger tech companies have with AI of, know, AI is going to work a developer out of a job or a developer is going to work themselves out of a job through AI being able to. code better than them, faster than them, be more precise, stuff like that. However, caveat to that, Mike was the one that said the goal of a scrum master or a good scrum master should be to work themselves out of a job, comma, I've never seen that happen. So Mike has never seen that happen, right? I don't think you've ever seen that happen. I've never seen that happen. I don't think anyone's really ever seen that happen. I don't think any scrum master has successfully done that. Brian Milner (24:10) Right. Cort (24:20) so I wonder if it's going to get to that, that kind of same point where it's like a developer will never work them themselves out of a job. It's just the cost of entry to a good developer job or to a developer job as a human. Just got up a little bit more, right? Where, where those senior positions are the only ones open. So you gotta create whatever experiences you can. Right. Brian Milner (24:42) mean, should, in reality, it should be like any other tool that people use to do a job. And it should be the kind of thing where, hey, now we have calculators, and I don't have to manually do the computations on my own. Does that mean that I don't need the reasoning and logic of knowing which computations to make? No. Someone still needs to know how to do that kind of thing. And I think that's how it shifts a little bit is. I don't know that it ever, I shouldn't say that ever. think it's, my, I'm not an AI expert, but my experience dabbling with this kind of stuff and reading articles and talking to people in the industry is that it's not there yet. It's, it's, it's good. It does a good job at, you know, being an assistant level, co-pilot level, that kind of thing, but it's not. Cort (25:29) Mm-hmm. Brian Milner (25:32) hey, let's fire our 10 developers because now we've got an AI that will do exactly what they did. It still takes reasoning and logic to know which path to go down, to ask it what to do. And I think that's just how it shifts a little bit is now there's a tool that does the more mundane part of that, but we still need the information, the logic, the reasoning to design it. Cort (25:44) Right. Right. Right. Yeah, totally. This this reminds me a lot of your conversation that you had with Lance. It's the first episode of twenty twenty five. You and Lance sat down and talked about AI and hyper hyper personalization. AI being used as a tool, which you and Lance discussed fairly thoroughly. You guys went into a little bit of depth about that. It's a tool that delivers value, but where do you think it's delivering value to, or who do you think it's delivering value to? Is it developers, the company as a whole, customers? Where do you see that value stream starting? And do you think it could eventually get to somewhere else, deliver value elsewhere? Brian Milner (26:17) Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like to me asking like, how do you, where do you see streets and roads and highways deliver value? know, like it's, there's a million places they deliver value. There's a million industries. There's a million different things that they do. And I kind of see AI, you know, as a much, much, much more advanced version of that. But just to say, they're, Does it deliver value to customers? Yes, it delivers value to customers. It might make their lives easier or make it more simple to get to what they need. Does it deliver value to the organization? Sure, it delivers to the companies because it's going to help reduce time to market and speed and maybe cost as well. Although cost, we'll see. That's kind of an interesting thing because, you know, Cort (27:26) huh. Brian Milner (27:33) You read lot of articles about how OpenAI is not profitable yet. And it's taking a huge amount of data, a huge amount of data centers, a huge amount of energy. So that runway runs out at some point. And even charging $200 a pop for their pro model a month, it's not profitable. I mean, they say that membership level is not profitable right now. Cort (27:46) Right. Right. Yeah. Right. Right. Brian Milner (27:59) So that doesn't continue forever. At some point, that money runs out. And when that does, how does it get paid for? So will it reduce costs by that point when that runway runs out and the consumers of the AI product have to pay the real cost of what it takes to run it? I don't know. Hopefully, it goes down by then. Cort (28:18) Yeah. Yeah. In that same episode with you and Lance, you talk a lot about AI as a tool, right? And it's not something that you are scared of personally because it is a tool and you view it as a tool and an aid to you being more productive. I'm just curious your thoughts on, let's take it back over to our scrum masters, right? So. someone starting out as a Scrum Master role or recently got put into a Scrum Master role, how do you think that AI can be used as a tool to aid Scrum Masters? Do you think it should take over kind of backlog prioritization so that Scrum Masters can focus a little more on those interpersonal connections? Do you think it should take over managing meetings or running meeting ceremonies so that Scrum Masters can focus on more important things? Brian Milner (29:10) I kind of, the hair on the back of my neck goes up a little bit or I cringe a little bit about the words take over. Because I'm not sure there's anything I would say that it should take over right now. I think that there are some things that it can assist with and do a better job. Like it can, you can offload the manual portion of doing that to the AI. But you know, yeah. We've talked about scheduling meetings. That's an easy thing for something like AI to do. And it does a good job. One of my favorite things that I've learned is you can dump a bunch of data into it and then ask a big open-ended question like, what are maybe some insights from this data that I'm missing? What are some key? Cort (29:37) Right. Brian Milner (29:54) takeaways that I should have from this mass of data that you sort through. And that's a really good job of interpreting that kind of thing for us. So I think it's those kind of things that, from a Scrum Master perspective, I think you can probably use it to do a lot of things like charting out velocity and tracking other trends in our velocity. Cort (30:00) Right. Brian Milner (30:15) or the trends in other data maybe that I collect for my team that I'm not aware of. I think it starts to fail a lot in the creative areas. I'll just give you a practical example from my standpoint. I spoke at couple of conferences. I try to speak at conferences on occasion. And when you do that, you have to submit papers of saying, here's what I want to talk about. I cannot use AI and go to it right now and say, hey, Cort (30:34) No, Brian Milner (30:37) I want to speak at conferences next year about AI or about Agile and Scrum kind of topics. What are some ideas? What are some things I can talk about? It's not going to give me anything that's worth anything if I ask that question. But if I already have the idea, it can help me flesh out the idea. It can help me kind of with the way I present the idea. But the idea is mine, right? Cort (30:49) Right. Brian Milner (31:03) And I kind of think that's the thing is from a Scrum Master perspective, use it for the things that would take a lot of manual time to do. But you have to know your stuff to know that you need that thing. Cort (31:12) huh. OK, so yeah, just speaking out loud here, use an AI as like, hey, I'm noodling on this idea to get a little more engagement in our daily standups. Walk me through how this would go, or something like that. Brian Milner (31:34) Yeah, I mean, there's some particulars there. you probably want to prompt it to say, you know, I want you to act as an agile expert. Ask me all the questions that you need to ask me about why my daily scrums are failing and help me figure out, you know, three next steps I could take to try to improve the daily scrum of my team. That would be the kind of prompt I would enter. and kind of hear what the question, let it ask you questions, let it refine it a little bit, and it'll give you some things to try. Now, maybe only one of those things is worthwhile, but if you have one of them that's worthwhile, it's worthwhile. Cort (32:10) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Right, totally. Cool. Let's step away from AI real quick. I got one more question for you. And this can be like a, yep, we'll wrap it up after this one. One more question for you. And this was actually from the last episode with Scott, where the whole idea of it was you need to be nice by being honest, realistic, and I put in quotation marks, mean. Just being nice by being Brian Milner (32:16) All right, then we got to wrap up. Cort (32:35) Brutally honest, I guess in a good way of putting it when So again as the younger guy in this conversation as the one who doesn't quite have as much experience in having potentially career altering conversations as I like to call them When should I bring those up when should I be that kind of mean nice guy? Is it any time that I have my my foot in the door of? the CEO or someone who has a little more pull? Is it, should I only do it when I'm prompted or is there some other time that I should be bringing up these topics that are probably important, but you know, not the nice guy way of bringing them up. Brian Milner (33:13) Yeah, we were talking about the thing that I mentioned about the scenario where the guy found himself in the elevator with the CEO. And yeah, I do think there's an important kind of thing to keep in mind there where, you know, businesses are gonna expect you to kind of follow the chain of command a little bit. so, you know, I think you've got to balance that in with this. I'm not saying that you should... hey, everything that you think might be wrong in the company, go schedule a meeting with your CEO and go run and tell them. Like that's gonna make everyone between you and the CEO really mad and your CEO really mad, right? You gotta follow your chain of command a little bit. If I have a manager, I wanna be always kind of frank and honest with my manager so that they know they can trust me, that I'm gonna tell them. Cort (33:49) Yeah, yeah. Brian Milner (34:02) the reality and there it's just how blunt are you? How much do you soften when you say those things and try to say it in a polite way rather than saying, this sucks. You have to be able to play that game a little bit. But I I think you should always be honest with the people in your immediate chain of command. Cort (34:13) Right, right. Brian Milner (34:24) you, there's no, you know, definitive line about when you overstep that and go above and beyond. You kind of have to interpret that yourself. You can't do it too often, but if there are times when you feel like something is vital and it could actually have a real negative impact on your business, then, know, occasionally maybe it is okay to then go out of your chain of command and say, I just think this is really vital. And I think the company needs to know this. So I've kind of gone out of the normal chain of command. You're going to make the chain of command mad when you do that. So you have to weigh that and say, is it worth it? Do I feel like I can defend that I went outside the chain of command in this instance? that people won't see it as I'm always going outside the chain of command, but this was important enough to do it. Cort (35:10) Sure. Right. Okay. Awesome. Well, thanks, Brian. Thanks for getting that last one in there. Yeah. Brian Milner (35:18) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, no, this has been fun. And we'll do this more often. We'll have some check-ins and try some more experience experiments. All right. Cort (35:30) Awesome. Well, thanks for having me on. Thanks for letting me ask these questions. thanks for a great conversation. I appreciate it. Yeah. Brian Milner (35:33) Yeah. Yeah. Thanks, Cort.

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