How to Drive Towards Business Agility Without Falling Into Transformation Theater - Fireside Chat with Jesper Boeg

Help me think through how this episode applies to my situation. Start by asking what I am trying to change. Separate the episode's claims from your suggestions, and say when the notes do not support a claim. Use the transcript to find passages, then check the audio before quoting. Transcript: https://yuvalyeret.com/podcast/episodes/how-to-drive-towards-business-agility-without-falling-into-transformation-theater-fireside-chat-with-jesper-boeg/transcript.md ## Published episode notes Business Agility Beyond the Theater with Jesper Boeg 🎯 Episode Overview Yuval Yeret sits down with Jesper Boeg, an experienced transformation leader. Jesper has spent nearly two decades guiding organizations from team-level agile adoption to enterprise-wide agility. Together, they explore what real business agility looks like, beyond frameworks, dogma, and agile theater. The discussion dives into the evolving role of CXOs in driving adaptability, the pitfalls of applying agile practices indiscriminately, and the nuance required to align strategy, funding, and organizational design. 💡 Highlight Quotes / Concepts “Don’t go in trying to find nails in the organization with your hammer. Go in light, try to sense, try to nudge.” “If your funding is not matching how you’re set up, you’ll never move from your old strategy to your new one.” “Consistency doesn’t mean uniform mechanics, it means shared principles and clear interfaces.” ⏱️ Chapters (00:00) Welcome and Introduction to Scaling with Agility(00:30) Meet Jesper: From team-level agile to enterprise transformation(02:00) The evolution of business agility and why it’s now a CXO problem(03:00) Defining business agility beyond rituals and frameworks(04:00) Jesper’s three elements of business agility: lead time, discovery, and strategic adaptability(09:00) Challenges of applying agile principles in the wrong places(14:00) Yuval’s story: Helping a biotech C-suite use agility to work on the company, not in it(18:00) Strategy before structure: Conways Law in action(20:00) Funding and capacity as critical levers for transformation(22:00) Lightweight interventions: Using simple boards to start the conversation(25:00) The importance of vertical slices vs. big bang transformation(30:00) AI transformation as a strategic bet: Applying product thinking internally(33:00) The danger of copy-paste scaling after early success(36:00) Principles over frameworks: Avoiding dogma and focusing on intent(40:00) Consistency, interfaces, and the challenge of defining the “API” for teams(43:00) Metrics, observability, and the risk of vanity measures(48:00) Why understanding the why behind principles matters more than tracking every number(51:00) Real product organizations vs. labeling technical solutions as “products”(53:00) Final advice: Start by defining what’s core, what’s context, and what truly matters(55:00) Closing thoughts and where to find Jesper online Jesper Boeg’s New Company: Enterprise Movement (new site launching soon) Jesper on LinkedIn: Jesper Boeg 💡 Yuval wants to help you scale without falling into the process theater trap. Start here: Scaling w/ Agility Crash Course🔗 Follow Yuval on LinkedIn: Yuval Yeret Business Agility Without Transformation Theater – https://yuvalyeret.com/blog/how-to-drive-towards-business-agility-without-falling-into-transformation-theater-fireside-chat-with-jesper-boeg ## Transcript This transcript was edited from automatic speech recognition for readability. Speaker turns may be wrong or absent, and it may contain recognition errors. Check the audio before quoting or attributing a passage. Episode: https://yuvalyeret.com/scaling-ai-podcast/how-to-drive-towards-business-agility-without-falling-into-transformation-theater-fireside-chat-with-jesper-boeg/ ## The friction around leadership Welcome to Scaling with Agility, where we explore the nuances of what does it take to skill your organization without the dogma and the theatre and achieve real outcomes. I'm Yvette Valier, and with me today is my friend Jesper. But with Jasper and I know each other from way back in the Lean Kanban Conferences day today, Jasper and I wanted to talk about What does it take to achieve meaningful? Product business agility change in your organization, you might want to call it transformation How do you achieve the outcomes that business agility promises? What does it look like? What have we seen work? What have we seen not work? Jesper, for Josie, the audience, they are not familiar with you. What brings it here? Yes, I think you only come from similar backgrounds that have been working with transformation for the past almost 20 years, I think, now. And maybe in a similar path, we're following this as it came from like a team level agenda, she becoming a department level agenda, she becoming a business unit level organizational and then moving into all the aspects of finance, leadership, organizational structures, etc. Kind of my career has moved as this has transcended like the typical a couple of teams level to becoming more of an organizational focus and now to the extent where very few organizations are not aware of this even if fewer that we would like are able to succeed with many of the principles that we'll be discussing today. I guess what have you seen change? more organizations are aware of agility, but what else have you seen change in the landscape around us? What we have to face is agileness, what leaders that are trying to apply this in their organization have to face, what choices are they struggling with, what choices are they making differently than they were making in the past? So at least for me personally, I think looking at this from the business side of the equation seems to be an agenda that's becoming more and more apparent and also moving into the CXO layers of the organization. If you cannot stay ahead of the curve, then you cannot keep up. It might be two, three, five, ten years before you're out of business. But if you see the whole world around you moving faster, being more adapted, being more dynamic. Then at the end of the day, it is a CXO problem because it's your entire strategy that's suddenly addressed. So I think that's definitely moving up. And then I think we could also probably discuss many of the more depressing facts in terms of what has not changed in terms of trying to get there. But we have obviously a bit of time today to get into both what is working, what is moving in the positive direction and what you can see maybe more organizations Installing then we would have hope to see in Twitter and Jennifer Maybe let's start with defining what does it? So business agility is a cool term. What does it mean? Does it mean you use daily scrums for your sales team? Does it mean you run springs for your talent acquisition and What's your perspective on and I'll share mine but How do you say this? I think from my perspective, when we use the word business agility, it has nothing to do with the elements that you just mentioned. And personally, like for years, I haven't cared whether a team or a group of people or whatever would use one way of approaching this or another. But I think it's a lot to do with how you face the market around you. So at least if I were to define it, I usually do it through three elements. First, if you're not seeing shorter lead times, then it becomes very, very difficult to iterate, to watch your market. So, one way or the other, you have to bring lead time down on your actual delivery. So, that's the output element. So, if your output deliveries are not short enough, it becomes very difficult to impact the market on a continuous basis. And then there's the element of finding out what is on the right thing to impact the world with, because if you're just fast, but you keep getting it wrong all the time, then there's literally very little sense in driving faster feedback. So there's also this element of discovery and feedback where I think in 2006, Adyal was all about just trying to create a minimum viable something and get it out there. The attention has now moved to all the product discovery aspects. You see, can we learn quicker about our market space so that the shorter lead times of our outputs start to make a lot more sense? And there is the third element to me that's the more strategic way where you can do the both the first two, but if you're not able to explore the changes in your market space and actually inspect and adapt on the more tactical and strategic level, then you're not truly business agile because you're not able to move into new market spaces or move with your products. Yes, I think you only come from similar backgrounds that have been working with the transformations for the past almost 20 years, I think now. And maybe in a similar path, we're following this as it came from like a team level agenda, she becoming a department level agenda, she becoming a business unit level organizational and then moving into all the aspects of finance, leadership, organizational structures, etc. Kind of my career has moved as this has transcended like the typical a couple of teams level, it should become more of an organizational focus and how to extend where they have very few Organizations are not aware of this, even if fewer that we would like are able to succeed with many of the principles that we'll be discussing today. What have you seen change? Like more organizations are aware of agility, but what else have you seen change in the landscape around us? What leaders that are trying to apply this in their realization in the active space? What voices are they struggling with? What choices are they making differently than than they were making in the box. So at least for me personally, I think that's a good thing. I think looking at this from the business side of the equation seems to be an agenda that's becoming more apparent and also moving into the CXO layers of the organization. If you cannot stay ahead of the curve, then you cannot keep up. It might be two, three, five, 10 years before you're out of business. But if you see the whole world around you moving faster, being more adapted, being more dynamic. Then at the end of the day, it is a CXO problem because it's your entire strategy that's suddenly addressed. So I think that's definitely moving up. And then I think we could also probably discuss many of the more depressing facts in terms of what has not changed in trying to get there. We have obviously a bit of time today to get into both what is working, what is moving in positive direction and what you see maybe more organizations stalling than we would have hoped to see in 2021. Maybe let's start with defining what does it do. So business agility is a cool term. What does it mean? Does it mean you use daily scrums for your sales team? Does it mean you run springs for your talent acquisition? And what's your perspective on? And I'll share mine. But how do you say that? perspective, when we use the word business agility, it has nothing to do with the elements that you just mentioned. And personally, like for years, I haven't cared whether a team or a group of people or whatever would use one way of approaching this or another. But I think it's a lot to do with how you face the market around you. So at least if I were to define it, I usually do it through three elements. First, if you're not seeing shorter lead times, then it becomes very, very difficult to iterate, to watch your market. So one way or the other, you have to bring lead time down on your actual delivery. So that's the output element. So if your output deliveries are not short enough, it becomes very difficult to impact the market on a coaching use basis. And then there's the element of finding out what is on the right thing to impact the world with, because if you're just fast, but you keep getting it wrong all the time. Then there's literally very little sense in driving faster feedback. So there's also this element of discovery and feedback where I think in 2006, Adyal was all about just trying to create a minimum viable something and get it out there. I think the attention has now moved to all the product discovery aspects. You see, can we learn quicker about our market space so that the shorter lead times of our output start to make a lot more sense. Then there is the third element to me that's the more strategic way where you can do the both the first two but if you're not able to explore the changes in your market space and actually inspect and adapt on the more tactical and strategic level that you're not truly business agile because you're not able to move into new market spaces or move with your products or follow the competitors or staying ahead of the competitors. She lets the third element you can essentially at the the more tactical level have shorter lead times and great discovery. But if you're not moving with the market, then I think business agility was still sharper. To me, it has nothing to do with framework specific roles or such. Leave time of what? To go back to my question and I agree with that a lot about the practices. But for me, the question of what do you apply it? I hear you and I'm thinking it's a wider perspective of the same ValleyStream that we've been talking about. So if we've been talking about working software, what we're talking about is it's not just working, it's gone to market, it's in the end of our customers, and then we can use that feedback loop to our products. That's one way to see business agility, I guess. When I look at it, my definition goes beyond that and says, okay, our products is one thing we need to be more agile on. But in order to be successful as a business, there are other things we might need to be more adaptive on. So for example, if I had this client where what they're doing is they're moving a lot of people are doing this is private equity and growth playbook of the day until everybody does this from licensing to subscriptions from perpetual licenses to a subscription model That does not necessarily change your product. I mean, it does change your product in some ways, but there are other changes to how you sell, how you run your finances, how you run customer success. Chair becomes a thing like Salesforce discovered some years ago, making a change from a business that is focused on perpetual sales to a business that is focused on subscriptions and ARR, Organizations have some time to go through that change, but the later you're into this wall, the faster you need to go through this change to make it. If you want to go into product-led growth, that's another type of change. If you want to adopt AI to improve your operations, that's another change for me. Being agile or business agility for me means you run an agile operating system for your business, not just for your product volutoring, but also for other things. If you're thinking about this from a lean perspective and you apply lead times and volut streams, it's for everything. And it's tempting, and I've seen people come in and say, just do it for everything. Like, run this sort of operating system for your sales for the day-to-day marketing, your postings on LinkedIn, and it's tempting to go into Monday or click up or drill or however way you manage the work and just manage people using those techniques. And there are some interesting things that happen when you do. Have you seen organizations try to apply agile to areas where it does or agile thinking or even those low metrics or flow principles that you're talking about the wrong way in the wrong places? And I think that's really, there are many elements to the thing to bring up here, very interesting ones because I think what you talk about here is the third principle dimension, being able to move or stay ahead of the markets. If you want to move into a subscription model because you think that's going to be a strategic shift there, then your ability to adapt quickly towards that new strategic direction, that's to me part of that more strategic or tactical business agility that we want to see because if you're just doing the first two and you're just staying with your old products and all your competitors are moving towards a different model because it's simply just more successful than if you cannot move make those moves then you can do all that great proud discovery, trust us as she wants and you can have shorter lead times but you're still going to be out of business because you're simply not moving with the market or staying ahead of it. And then I think your other question here is very, I think we've both seen that in many cases. So the typical one being back in the days when agile was put on everything, then of course your CXO leadership group or team, they had to do so-called agile as well. So they would suddenly be doing standards in the morning and they would have a gear type like board or whatever and would be looked at exactly the way you would look at a product team developing software and I think we probably both seen that with a very limited lifespan because it was not a very great fit to that type of work and it was kind of trying to fit around to a square hole or the opposite. So I have an interesting experience around that. I think it relates to the pattern that I've seen of what works and what doesn't work as well. I've worked with the CXOT team, they don't call themselves a CXOT team, it was a scale-up bio-tech, you know, it was the leaders, but sea level people. And they were real believers in agility. And they wanted to start to use agile techniques to help them run the company, help them focus on the right things, help them manage the flow of big things, big initiatives that they need to tackle and not take on too much. And what we found useful there is to use agility practices and principles for the work on the company, for the work of developing the company. ## What is really happening in the system Initiative like we want to think about how to restructure, we want to think about how do we onboard people much faster and more effectively than we are right now. How do we become more attractive to our partners? Different initiatives that we were working on, what didn't work well and steered them very quickly away from that, is using that to manage all of the work of one of C-suite members. The CFO doesn't need this team to manage their work. I think that's, by the way, a pattern that agile teams You need to learn as well. There's a limit to what you need. Manage at a team level, even at the level of the developers or the product team. What's important is to manage the interactions, manage the collaboration between these. So with pattern that I extract to the world of business agility, business agility is about all of the work of developing your company. Seeing your company as a product and then applying product. You don't need it for the day to day. Similar to OKRs, one of the anti-patterns that I'm seeing is everything comes in OKR. You get all of your things, everything that comes in the way you need. You don't really need that focus on developing, working on the business rather than in the city. I also think it's a matter of looking at the world as it really is. So you, I think at least I've seen a number of times where you've had consultants in and they set up like tons and tons and tons of structures. And the whole element was to try to simplify, but it's not simple in any way. It's actually gotten rather complicated. And then you kind of close your eyes to the fact that after six months, very little of that structure is now used in the way that it was assumed it would be and or maybe not at all. And then getting a bit realistic as you said, do these things? These principles make sense all over the place, or did somebody give us a hammer and now we were just trying to hammer on every single thing we could find that would just remotely fit where we thought this could be used. And I think the CXO team is just one of many examples of, let's try to get it back to what we're really trying to do instead of how many places can we apply some techniques that might have been originating from a very different context. think about Chris, the CEO of a company, they are interested in business utility, they're feeling like their company does need to make strategic moves faster, be more effective with the strategic opportunities, make bets, be able to try more bets faster, turn around time for these bets, whether those are product bets or nothing to do with product. What would we suggest to Chris or Chris is CLLO, Olivia? Where should they be careful, what are some warning signs when they talk to somebody about doing this? And I think to me at least, and I've been part of that myself, so I'm in no way innocent, but I think 15 years ago, I also just started in the wrong place to be honest. So often just having that conversation about where do you want to go? So what's your strategy? And if your strategy is to be customer centric, probably we need to talk about a different kind of strategy that's not generic across 99% of all companies because then it's really not a strategy. And if you're not able to tell me that by clearly then probably you're not able to communicate that direction to the organization, then it becomes very difficult for both your leadership teams and your government teams to actually follow where we want to go because we haven't really communicated where we want to go and why. And then again, if that's reasonably clear, then let's move on to talking about how does that match how you set up as a company. And I've had this saying for like 10 plus years, show me the way you're organized, then I'll tell you your strategy. And then some would put, no, no, we have a strategy slide, they go over here and that's Australian. No, just tell me how you're organized and I will tell you how you truly, or it's a very true way. So one way is to apply to the organizational level. Yes, and it's almost always true. So you might have a strategy saying we want to move from custom services to more standard products. And then you see people organized around single customers. And I can tell you with 99% sure that you're going to get custom services because you're organized in a way that will only drive that type of bias, kind of applying a different strategy on top of that structure. It's almost impossible because every single day you need to force it in a way that the organization is simply not designed to move into. Let's have that conversation about how you're organized and how your business should admission or your team level missions, how that matches your role strategy. And again, if that's reasonably clear, then let's talk about funding. And if I see you trying to get out of one market space and into another, but you're still investing more funding, which almost always equals capacity in the old market space, again, I will challenge you whether you're able to make that shift. If your funding is not matching how you're, how you actually set up. I think that's really what it comes down to. Before we get to using boards at a sea level or hard teams work with scrum or whatever other of things they prefer. There are so many much more important discussions we need to have because they are even remotely relevant. So let me challenge you on that for a second. One of the powers of starting with the common board at the right level for the right things and not everything is its lightweight. It's a lightweight intervention. And in the recent client that I'm working with, we were debating whether to wait until we establish what's the strategy or get the right people into the room. We can think about are we strategic versus not? And it was much easier to show them a mirror very quickly of this is what we're actually investing. So showing the actual funding for things, showing where the capacity is really going, showing there are no choices, there are no trade-offs, we're doing everything from everything, we're just dumping the new business line right on top of the other. One of the things that I've seen is how Kanban boards at the business level, it might call the business portfolio, whatever the name, even just mapping what are your goals right now, how they are not spending months on are they outcome oriented or not, although that's a fascinating exercise, whatever they are, napping those and providing a mirror starts to drive towards the conversation that you're describing. So I've seen how this nudge, what I've learned over the years is to find these nudges, these small pushes, like you do that, and it opens the door for a bigger thing. Sometimes they don't work, but sometimes, you know, an innocent question when the leadership team talks about strategic things like, it was things that actually help us make trade offs. It's right to ask that question depending on the forum, but it can be magical from what I've seen. So I guess we'll both agree that it's not one size speaks all and there are different patterns that you can try and intergees. But I think the meta pattern that I'm hearing is don't go in and try to find nails in the organization with your hammer, go in light, try to sense, try to use nudges, try to push in the right areas, try to find the constraints, I guess. Where are the problems? What is this business trying to do? Pool, Chris Met talks about feature injection, pool from the problems of your customers. What is the problem? And then let's pull from that and see if they really need it. And I think we're all biased by our experiences. So I think I'm biased by the fact that I've seen very few others, including myself, succeeds with driving these things, mainly bottom up, and then a glass ceiling that's incredibly difficult, if not impossible to penetrate. And then how you get those not just in, I think there are a couple of important questions. And it's perfectly fair, if you're in there to help out a single seat and you want them to just get to a better place, that's a perfectly fair order of business. And you should just focus on that. That's just not the business. I'm in business of trying to help organizations. However you find those nudges, I think there are some key things like are you talking to people that can really help this organization move? If you're turning to a single department lead and you're trying to move an organization, that's just gonna be a very, very difficult exercise. So first of all, I'm talking to the right people in terms of just framing the whole exercise. And then my nudge is typically just to get that permission to do somewhere between 15 and 40 interviews across the organization, and hopefully also including some questioners, especially if it's a B2B context, to get that kind of current state. And so this is what your old organization is telling you guys, you've just given me the documentation terms of your strategy and your key numbers in terms of employee customer satisfaction. And then I have these interviews that I just told some notes. And this is just what the world is telling you. And then from there you have a conversation about where do you then want to move? What type of company do you want to be? That is to be very easy to talk about the gap between your current state and the type of company that you're trying to become. And that means my notch to starting that conversation about, okay? So how do we move from one to the other? And if you're dealing with more than, let's say, 150 people, it's very difficult to make that step. It's to be much more effective to find a vertical slice of the organization where let's start in a single business unit and let's get them up and running. And it's based effect that is not going to be because you still have some interfaces to the other part of the company that's running on a different operating model for a period of time. But let's prove succession of vertical slice moves from here. So let's go back to Chris. Chris, the CEO, he wants to do something. We have a good starting point, right? because it's priests and Olivia the COO, they are the right people. So with that as a starting point, we do have some options. One option is to get into a room and discuss what's the strategy. Not try to necessarily formulate new strategy, but ask them to reflect what is their current strategy. I think what I heard you say is compared to how they're structured, how they're funded, What are they working on? Could be an interesting real eviction when you look at these two things on two sides of the room or Next to each other on a big virtual screen and then have some conversations about what are some options? What could we do to? help us align a bit more with our strategy and The other thing they could do is they could Start thinking about okay How can we be more focused? How can we start to manage this relationship between strategy and execution on a day-to-day basis without going and changing the operating model in the entire company? What does that look like? Maybe it is to start to use some more flow-oriented, outcome-oriented view of the biggest things that they want to do or are working on, at least on paper, for developing the company. Not the operational day today, but those biggest things. And then to go to the vertical slice notion, maybe as part of that exercise, and maybe over time, they see there's this thing that we really struggle with. And it might be building a new product. might be doing things across products. It might be a go-to-market technique. We're trying to move from spin-selling to value-oriented-selling or relationship-selling or to apply a PLG motion. Whatever it is, they're saying this is a real challenge or a eye transformation. Go anywhere these days without the eye transformation being the thing that they're trying. And at that point, Chris and Olivia, the team might say, okay, if we believe in this thing where we want to be focused, we want to be threatened, if we believe in customer centricity and apply to whatever we do, not broadly, but there's this thing, the eye transformation, let's take that. What does it mean to be customer centric in AI transformation? If it's a transformation for the product, it's one thing. But if it's an internal focus to AI transformation, customers are employees. So what does it look like to apply product thinking there? ## The practical shift So the vertical slice might be okay. That's the relevant value stream that's working on leveraging AI. In addition, let's apply this new thinking there. Not everywhere. Other things in the organization like Tontinue as they are, we might have just this thinking at the top level and also a very deep slice through this specific initiative that is one of our biggest, more strategic, more risky bets. And that's one of the other things that I've found work really well is to put in front of leadership some sort of metrics of where's the biggest potential for being adopted? For being agile and showing them you don't have to do this forever. If you have sure bets, if you have operational work, don't bother. If you have things where there's a lot of risk, whether it's will people inside the organization want to use AI, or will they actually feel like it's compressing labor and showing them the door? Eligoldra talked about don't ask people to cut the branch that they're sitting on. AI transformation is the latest email long sequence of things. How do we get people to actually use AI and thrive without sabotaging this experience or at least an Italian strike? The concern might be it's too expensive, right? The concern might be we can't even do that. It might be the slice that you choose to apply and it might have nothing to do with your real product. You may not even be a product company, you may be of tell and hospitality. And I think there are many interesting elements in this conversation. What is being that if you can find a true vertical slice, then it is hopefully impacting the real world problems from day one. So the problem is that you have done one successful horizontal slice where we literally took out the whole platform area and started looking at that from a product perspective. And they're talking about the internal customers as a free market and us wanting to optimize on the engagement standardization not from a point of enforcement, but trying to get people to choose the standard drugs because they're just more successful and more easy to use and will actually lower the cognitive load of all the stuff you're trying to do in the more streamlined part of the organization. But getting that vertical slice will also get your permission to do stuff that you couldn't do if you're doing a big bang transformation, anything from how you fund and find the instructions. You come to El Cam where it changes your entire financial model for how you operate across your entire company. That's a difficult thing to get permission to do from day one. But if you say we're only going to get this freedom to do things differently for these 150 people in this business unit, it's much, much easier to get permission to test these things off. same in terms of structures. We're going to organize ourselves in a different way. We're going to have the different leadership responsibilities. We're going to be much more market focused. It's difficult, and you're also risking dealing with all those things that will go wrong because there are always things that are not going as planned. So just the noise and the frustration and trying to deal with that across 2,000 people is a way more difficult exercise than if you've contained that within 150 people which is a much more realistic exercise if you want to create success early on. So I think there are many elements to it. If you can somehow address organizational transformation from a more iterative perspective, the challenge being then I think we need to be very aware. If you're truly under a great deal of pressure on your key number, then there's going to be a very, very large temptation to go faster than your change capacity truly is. And you see one thing and you want to apply it everywhere. And you don't realize how much you will slow things down by suddenly needing to, because then you're no longer talking about experimenting. You're no longer talking about trying things out. You're suddenly implementing a new operating model at once in the first goal across the company. So I think I was hoping you'll go there because this is a pattern, a failure pattern that I've seen way too often. It's successful, let's celebrate, and then copy paste. And every time I've seen it happen, it's followed by mandates. It's followed by telling people or working. If you think about crossing the cousin, as initial group, vertical slice, it's typically, if you choose right, early adopters. I mean, if you're trying to do the vertical slice, the first vertical slice with the laggards, the skeptics, good luck with you. You won't even succeed the first time, but let's say you chose the right people. They were willing to do this, meaning they were early adopters. Now it's successful. There might be some others that want to fast follow and they still want to do this, but if you're doing it all across the board at once, you don't have the capacity for it. The law of the Raspberry Gem, Jerry Weinberg's law applies and you won't have the expertise to support this. What you're saying is, okay, I don't need that expertise because it's not an experiment anymore. We have the playbook. This is the playbook. Go implement the playbook. So if you've taken something, you're telling people how to do it, and those people are now, a lot of them are skeptics. They're laggards. They're the people that want things to be fully proven, but even they want to be involved in how they do things. They don't have time. They don't have energy, that it's not their priority to tackle this change. So on one hand, you can probably see how vivid this in my head. On one hand, they don't want to be changed. They don't want to be told what to do. On the other end, they don't have time to be involved in co-creating the change. And that creates this sort of perfect storm. If you look at what's going on in the industry around us and how often people talk about this framework doesn't work, that framework doesn't work, I have the hypothesis based and list on anecdotal data from my engagements and the organizations I've seen that a lot of the time, it's those later stages of the crossing the cousin, even within organizations, but also in the wider market that are causing this frustration, that are causing this situation where the framework isn't working, people don't like, the framework isn't working, they're saying, you know, it's broken. The people that are the experts are saying, you're not doing it right. You know, it's like this argument around this take is new, rare, this take is medium. It's like we're shooting ourselves in the food when we're in a thing, transformation this way, whether it's a safe transformation, this is agility, time, months, from whatever. The only situations I've seen work is where leaders actually refuse to say this is how we're doing things. they were willing to be patient. That's so rare. And then I think it's been a long time since I've been there implementing a framework, no matter it being a scale framework like Save for a more team level like Scrum or whatever, it's been a very long time. So I think the way I've gone about it in last 10 plus years has been different. We've separated the core principles from the implementation and that's made some of these exercises easier. Every time we enter something from career development in the company or how you work as a team with certain discovery or delivery practices or the roles or whatever, a lot of that becomes less of a framework and more of the starter kit. So as long as you're staying true to these core principles that we've defined early on, then there are no way of frame is that you cannot use. There are things in place so that if we truly believe in more modern practices, then we're need some principles so that you don't go back to, okay, so let's stay hidden for 12 months and then go stealth and now after 12 months we'll enter the market, Big Bang and think suddenly we cost something major and be vastly disappointed in most of those cases. So there needs to be principles in place to stay true to like the core things we're trying to achieve but will you do things in one way or another and even you can then have one business unit falling in love with a specific framework and just from the passion of falling in love with that framework, they will probably make that work. But then another business unit, they can choose a different, either a starter kit or they can later adopt that starter kit to their frameworks. Where's the consistency, Jasper? You're creating a nightmare of consistency for the transformation of this. Yeah, that's the thing. I'm not in business to supply usable solutions for the transformation of this. I would much rather have organizations where the the people that are doing the actual work are passionate, both of their products and their way of working. I think it's just important to realize that comes from your personal preferences and your background and your history. And I have found people that could make scrum work in situations where theoretically that should be impossible, because it's just such a bad thing. But just from the passion of the work, they've gotten real value out of it. And in In other situations, you could have a perfect fix for a specific way of working, and it would never ever work because people would be against it from the very beginning. And that kind of personal preference that drives to make things work, I think that's much more important than trying to standardize those mechanics. I'm the last person to argue against focusing on principles first and being very careful with what framework you use or you want to use. I think there's an interesting conversation on what does consistency look like. I think principles are a good start, but the next level, and we're just having a conversation, let's not eat about this, where the product leader who's trying to evolve their organization to be more product oriented without making huge changes, without telling the teams what to do. We aligned pretty easily on the principles, but the next level would be, okay, so what's the interface? We're both developers way back. What's the interface? What's the API the teams do provide? I don't care what they do inside, but maybe the API is they believe in principles. Maybe it's the follow principle. There's a certain set of things, even over other things that they follow, whatever. that's for your organization. There should be clear trade-offs. There should be something that they're willing not do. But maybe there's also a set of metrics, leading indicators. Like you talked about cleat time, I struggle to find an example of a development following stream. People doing complex work that benefits from iteration and adaptation, build, measure, learn, sense respond. I struggle to find an example where focusing on lead time, flow time, cycle time, time through the loop is not important. So I don't care how you do the work, but you measure that provide transparency to what is your time through the loop, what is your time to the for a slice brought out to find the deliver a slice of your AI context that people can now start to use a slice of a new approach to how you post the job descriptions on work or what kind of questions you ask candidates that don't get them mad and that the great people would want to come for you based on their work experience rather than HR gods even before the first talent acquisition interview. How quickly do you close that loop? How many things do you have in the pipeline that you work on? Those kind of low metrics, I find are useful useful ways to bring to live principles. And there's probably a set of other indicators for the other principles that we believe in, like empowerment and organizing around outcomes, that, you know, still working on what's that set of metrics and indicators that are important, regardless of how you actually move the needle on. That's a very interesting conversation. I think I've been through quite a journey. It's also 10 years ago. I would focus quite a lot on also being able to measure these changes and I think right now I'm really much more concerned with people understanding the why behind these principles. So if we and I'm looking much more how much are these even like really discussing with the CXO or you're discussing with the product manager or you're discussing with an engineer, how much are they talking about the need to drive lead time on their experiments down. How much are they focusing on separating the memory chattering? ## What leaders should pay attention to Yeah, I know. But it's much more of an observable thing rather than a missionable thing. So it's much more of one type of conversations are we having and are we observing those types of conversation because then and low, like let's just take lead time. It's a very different, difficult thing to measure consistently. Because when do you start tracking? If you look more to the demo side of it, they'll start tracking from the point west, all the fluffy front and it's already gone and now they just need to push it out. And that's a great thing, because that means you can really, at the very last part of your delivery pipeline, actually really speed things up. But it's the whole doors, the front and it's very, very small. And you spend six months discovering what you should put in production. It's a very, very small fraction of your total lead time. And maybe then it's not interesting to look only at that point. So I think understanding the key principle and why these things are important. those are really crucial if you want these things to continue beyond the honey transformation period where everybody is involved. I think in this case it's bold. You know the why you understand the intent so that you can find the right way to implement it, to follow it, to think through it. And it's also useful to have something tangible that people latch onto without being too prescriptive. And I find that talking about outcomes or leading indicators that Josh Sidon, and Jeff Gothil, you know, talked to me, who does a lot about how much? Talking about changes to your operating model in that language, I think, is a useful listing. And that captures both what you're talking about, which is like, you know, a VPR R&D, I want to see a behavior where the R&D leaders talk about stop starting, start finishing or ask questions around should really start something and be careful with starting new things, X times a week. I want to see them talking more about that than pushing new things to the pipeline. you know, is that measurable? There are ways to measure it. You could observe sporadically, you could use the AI to record the meetings and do sentiment analysis and add probably not a bad idea. You go into your conversations and do sentiment analysis of is it the push conversation versus the pull conversation. And right now maybe it's 90% of the time of push conversation. Can we do this one more thing? Maybe we can get it to be 50. Maybe we can get it over time to something else. For me, it's great metric, even though it's not coming from G-R-O or whatever. Yeah, and I think, again, we're probably all biased from our historic stressors and failures. I think my own failures would measure too much and have data on too much. Maybe AI is actually going to be a game change. It's something that I've now put in the, let's try to make it observable rather than measurable. Maybe that can actually now become measurable again without distracting our focus from what is really the important thing going on. But at least personally, I've definitely been through a 10 year period where I've moved a lot of what I would have tried to place in the measurable bucket, which I'm now satisfied having in the observable buckets with AI. I think we have different definitions of miserable. Like if If you look at New Relic, for example, that's an observability platform, they would probably tell you that that lets you measure a lot of the things that they observe. But what you're talking about, these things that are harder, right? You can measure based on observation, you cannot measure with hard data in a system, in a work management system, in an LM. There's even a worse pattern that I think you're hinting at, that I've seen quite a bit. When it's hard, we often have options. We could choose something that is observable, measurable, soft manner, not a hard measure, which would be more indicative of our people thinking about the principles, are we creating the right of that? The started challenge of the art measure, it's not a great. We have hard measure, you could extract it from your GRA, or Gera or whatever. And a lot of people, especially when you come from engineering, especially when you come from project management, even when you come from the CFO, from finance wall, you wanted hard measures. And you choose hard measures that a lot of the time are vanity metrics or worse. And you sometimes end up investing, they might not be useful, they might be touched from the outcomes or they might be creating a cycle of and shitification of, and I think you nailed something there, which is focused on the right indicators, not how easy it is to measure them and not how accurate. And I think there's a problem in change of how at least I've failed myself in that area to where you don't consider what is the cost and what type of behavior does it drive and how much will this shift the tension from the why behind it towards the metric or the observability. And definitely, like I think back in 2000s, at least I was definitely in there trying to find out how much time people will spend in a planning meeting and talking about them where that's probably too much. And at the end of the day, maybe we should have done the conversation about why you were even in this room, because looking back, a lot of the people there, they didn't even agree on the purpose of being there. For some, it was at one end of the scale, it was about stacking up a number of story points until it made, like, sentence in terms of a certain limit, they should stay within, and being very, very precise in terms of whether they could execute that scope within the time period available to them. And in other cases, it was at the very other end of the section where it was literally just about having a direction for a not specific time frame. And probably just talking about, okay, what are we in here for? Are we in here to make sure that there's a reasonable amount of flow on whatever we start? That's probably a healthy conversation. That what does flow mean? What is the difference between having to start and stuff because we have to put things aside for two days, while we cannot work on it and start stopping nature of that work and how that's not a very pleasant way and effective way of working. How much does this translate into a focus? So we're not spreading our efforts all across the board and not really achieving any business results. But if we agree that maybe those two things are key in terms of why we find ourselves in this rule, maybe that's a conversation we need to have before we start talking about whether we just stack story points or whether we can have a bit of a new sort of approach to that conversation. So I think now we're really down in the operational details, mimicking the same behavior we sometimes see at the CXO level. Yeah, we want a product organization, but that you talk about the why behind that product organization and how that translates into business impacts and how much actual responsibility that places on you guys in terms of defining both the funding and the missions that you would like to see come out of this type of product organization, because just laboring a product organization, yes, I've seen companies literally having what they entitled product organization around 100 technical solutions where they had you gone to a customer, none of them would have recognized any of that as products, but they was definitely products from a technical perspective. And obviously, that drove a sheer shift bound of bus organizational coordination and a single team owning a product could deliver like they had sure percent of delivering vicious value on their own, but they were still defined as they were fully product organized across the board. So going back to Chris and Olivia, I guess what we're saying here, maybe as clothing thoughts is one of the first things it might be interesting for them to explore is what do they They currently consider as products, external facing and internal facing, what should the products be, which of these products are like context, like everybody has a work day. I don't know in Europe, but in the US, everybody has worked. Do we really want to compete based on our hiring and talent acquisition process? Maybe we do. And if so, customizing, improving that experience is important. If we don't, if that's not an area we want to be special in, maybe it's a product we use, it's close to off the shelf as possible and we don't do much about it. With our externally facing products, we need to have a conversation about what's the core, what's the context, where do we want to invest, how is that aligned to our strategy? What is that about our strategy? Where's the mapping? And start from there. So, and I think you've mentioned very good points there, because if you don't start the conversation around, who are you actually servicing? And is that important to you? And can we create a structure around that where eight out of 10 times you can actually impact that value without having to coordinate with six other business units or teams around you? Then you're already starting this from a good place, because that will naturally drive a dialogue around product segmentation that I find a lot of companies. They just skip that. They looked at Spotify or something else. They, okay, we're just going to copy their way of segmenting their products. And maybe you should have driven it by a very different way. For them, it might be a customer journey touch point and for you, it might be a use of segmentation. But if you're not even having that dialogue around trade off, then it becomes a just let's mechanically structure our companies around something that we saw somewhere. I don't think that's a good way to go about it. All right. We've given creates an Olivia a lot to think about. If people want to learn more follow what you're doing, what you're off to, Jasper, where should they go? Yeah, as some my another been independent for the past 10 years, but this February I joined a company called Enterprise Movement where we're just setting that up to try to be able to do other stuff we've tried to discuss today at a bigger scale. So, Enterprise Movement is now my new home, but then obviously I still got my LinkedIn profile, etc. But communicating from a bit of a broader context now and not just the first one main show. Now you need to take your own medicine. That's actually quite easy to talk about other companies' strategy and their missions and their products and whatever. And now you certainly have to do that. And you cannot set yourself aside from that conversation and analyze it from the outside. And then all enterprise lumen is trying to drink its own champagne and think through some of these questions around how to apply business agility to the organization. So we might have a chat about it some other time with you or others on the team. Thank you, Jasper. I hope this was useful, everybody. Thank you for listening to this episode of Sailing with Agility for Jasper. I'm you, Val. See you the next time. ## Source boundary These are the published show notes from the podcast feed. They are a starting point for discussion, not a verbatim record of the conversation. The transcript is machine-generated and may contain errors or unlabeled speakers. Check the audio before quoting anyone.