Mastering Courage and Conviction: Small Acts, Big Impact in Agile Leadership

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/mastering-courage-and-conviction-small-acts-big-impact-in-agile-leadership/transcript.md ## Published episode notes In this roundtable edition of Mastering Agility/Scaling with Agility Gang, hosts Yuval Yeret, Rich Visotcky, and Jim Sammons unpack the role of courage and conviction in agile leadership. They share real-world stories, from reorganising an Israeli cyber-security scale-up to confronting “invisible electric fences” in large enterprises, and demonstrate how small, repeatable acts of bravery compound into systemic change. Practical frameworks, such as the Hypothesis Prioritisation Canvas, Appreciative Inquiry, and Critical Uncertainties, illustrate how leaders can replace process theatre with principled, context-driven experiments. “Sometimes the bravest move is simply admitting you don’t know, and turning that into a testable hypothesis.” , Yuval “You can spot a timid leader by the number of fences they’re sitting on; have an opinion and move the needle.” , Jim “Policies you wrote to solve yesterday’s problems shouldn’t shackle tomorrow’s possibilities.” , Rich (00:28) Exploring Leadership and Courage (02:09) Empowered Teams and Small Acts of Courage (05:57) Transparency and Decision Making (07:04) Balancing Courage and Conviction (09:40) Practical Leadership Tips (15:04) Decision Making Frameworks (18:31) Testing and Validating Decisions (28:22) The Importance of Choice in Leadership (29:00) Learning from Target’s Data Breach (30:38) Testing Ideas in Smaller Timeframes (32:08) Real-World Examples of Courage in Leadership (38:07) Overcoming Invisible Barriers (48:41) Practical Techniques for Leadership Development (50:33) Final Thoughts on Leadership and Agility * Hypothesis Prioritisation Canvas – Sense & Respond Press * Evidence-Based Management Guide – Scrum.org * Liberating Structures (Critical Uncertainties, Ecocycle, Appreciative Interviews) * Follow Rich on LinkedIn * Follow Jim on LinkedIn Get started on your nuanced scaling journey in Yuval’s free Scaling w/ Agility Crash Course Follow Yuval on Linkedin Read the write-up: https://yuvalyeret.com/blog/courage-and-conviction-small-acts-big-impact-in-agile-leadership ## 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/mastering-courage-and-conviction-small-acts-big-impact-in-agile-leadership/ ## The friction around leadership Welcome to episode two of the top of the Pops agility podcast mashup. It's the Mastering Agility and Scaling with Jodility gang again. I'm Yuval with me, our Rich Vysotsky and Jim Simmons. The gang is back together. What are we going to talk about today, folks? Oh, you know, last time we were wrapping up with a conversation about courage, safety, and leadership. And I got to tell you, I've been thinking about that one over and over again. After I listened to our podcast, our recording, just other conversations that I've had with other leaders throughout the time between with you all as well. And it got me thinking of like, like that that courage can be really hard. There's lots of different pressure that leaders face when they're in organizations. And I should also be clear first, when I'm in leader, I mean somebody who is in a place to take action, to help others, to lead, like, and have them, others follow them, not just a, I'm your manager. So I'm your leader. I mean, like a true leader, somebody who's really helping move things forward. And in that way, with all this competing priorities, their teams, their management, their customers, et cetera, finding that courage, I think, could be kind of hard. So I was kind of curious, just in your all's thought, what does it take to start getting that courage? Like what are like little everyday acts of courage that that leaders can exhibit to just move things ahead a little bit without like trying to be like I'm here to stand up for everything but just those those little pieces that start to move the needle. I don't know. You've all, Jim, either of you want to kick that one off? Yeah, I'll give you an example. So I worked with the Cyber Security Company when they were let's call it the scale up. At the time these days they're you know a Wall Street traded company they're very successful. They were about a hundred people at the time and they were in an organization that was very disciplined, very professional, some of the best people from you know how it is in cyber security and Israel, some of the best people from the army technology units find themselves in these organizations. These people knew what they were doing, but they started to see that as they were scaling things, we're starting to move too slow. They were starting to be ballnecks, because these leaders, they were great at what they were doing, but they couldn't spread that far. And we had conversations around what could we do, And we started talking about the idea of creating empowered teams where these teams could focus on something and have a concrete goal and be cross-functional, time called, we call these future teams. That required a big act of courage to go into that, to say, okay, we're gonna slice through the organization, change the team structure, whether it's a virtual change or an actual change. That was a bit too much for that organization. They might have had the courage, but they didn't have the conviction that this made sense. So we started to look for smaller chunks, smaller bytes out of the app. And what we did was we said, okay, there's this one product that we want to work on. Even that product, we're not really gonna change towards, the typical recommendation that people like us make, we didn't change it into cross-functional teams, and we didn't use Scrum out of the box, but the smallest act was, let's manage the work in that product stream using a con-lun board. That's not a huge act of courage initially, right? But as we know, even looking at things on the board than starting to see flow require some courage to look in the mirror. I mean, standing on the scale requires courage in some situations. And the follow-up without even working that hard on my behalf, from the VP in charge of that group, was that they started asking questions around, should we really start this thing? Why not finish these features that we are working on instead of starting new things? So that was for me a beautiful a beautiful act of the kind of questions that putting a small nudge like a conan board in front of people and Over time, of course, they built more conviction It spread like wildfire more and more people started to use these techniques and eventually they built the confidence to change into those stream aligned teams, but they build a confidence over time. We didn't require them to make big changes at the beginning. You were sitting here talking about the understanding of just creating more transparency with Kanban board. Anytime I think that we start to make something more present for people, more accessible to them, more visible, more or out there. That takes courage, right? Because it's it, you might not like what you're seeing, whether you like the number that's on the scale or not. You might struggle to understand what to do with it, right? It might take a different act of courage. But there was another piece that you mentioned that I thought was really cool. Curge had courage but not conviction, right? Courage that they could go do the thing, but they didn't know, they'd have conviction that it would work. And so that also takes an active courage, I'd say too, right, that understanding of we don't know what's going to happen, and that's scary. But just trying to get through it anyway can be important. Jim, what do you think about that? Yeah, when you've all asked, I've just been organized my thoughts and all that. I think a lot of people make leadership out to be more than it is. They make it out to be some lofty thing that takes a lot of time, a lot of experience, a lot of a certain job title, a certain whatever. And I just don't see it that way. It sounds cliche to say, oh, you know, we have to unlock leadership at all levels in an organization. But when I joined probably one of the most lower case, a agile, software firms ever, it was required viewing to watch a YouTube video called Lollipop Leadership. And I've since integrated that to my own efforts and how I build teams. And the point of that, and I urge you to all go watch it, it's like 10 minutes well spent, but it's basically every day you're given the option and the opportunity likely to be a leader. And when it comes to like practical tips, I think a few things to keep in mind is to don't create a series or a way of being for the outcome of you being a leader. Do the things that leaders do, and it will happen. I can almost guarantee it. And one of those things, so the way I sum that up in a soundbite that I say all the time is, be someone that people want to follow and look around and I bet you'll see some people following you. And that could be thought leadership, that could be organizational or what I call positional leadership, maybe if you start to direct, guide, lead, manage the work of others, you're already doing the job that maybe your boss wants to give you anyway. Have an opinion. Like I struggle to follow leaders that don't have an opinion that sit on the fence. I mean, I remember asking one boss years ago, like does your ass hurt? He's like, what do you mean? I go because you're sitting on a fence, you're sitting on like eight fences right now on all these different decisions. Like, should we go with vendor B or vendor C? Should we move our headquarters to this part of town that part of town. Should we do this? Should we hire this for some like, dude, you're make a decision. Any decision. So let's connect the dots. You're talking about the courage to make a decision. Rich talked about conviction. How do you have, there's an interesting interplay between courage and conviction. How do we solve for that? How How do we solve for the situation where you need to have courage? Sometimes it's the courage to acknowledge that you don't know. That's a big part of our story. Our narrative, right? Is that a lot of the time we don't necessarily know. How do we make progress in an environment where we don't know? Can we talk maybe about examples of how do we impact it? What do we do? on the fence, we don't have conviction about something. We don't want to apply natural leadership of, this is the way, this is how we're going to do it, but we also don't want to be stuck. I'll give you one quick story, and I have hundreds of these, unfortunately, right? But the leader that I asked if is Assert, we were talking about potentially moving the headquarters of our company about 30 miles away to one of a few different sites. And I was on the leadership team, so I got to see more than most people, but still a lot of the process was opaque to me. And this was gonna mean everybody, almost everybody had a different commute, a longer commute, it was gonna cost the company a lot. It was gonna have a very real intangible impact on 40 people. And the opaqueness of how we were making the decision created the delay, which then created a perceived lack of leadership from many of us of those people. And what I said is, I don't know how you're making this decision. Can you share it? So I think the courage and conviction of making a decision is not at odds with how you make a decision. And I think good leaders can describe how and why they're making a decision. And yes, there are those benevolent dictator types that just make decisions on high in a bubble and all that stuff and you never understand why. But I personally followed people much easier that say, here's the decision we're all trying to make. Here are the criteria that we're using. Here is my opinion, our opinion, the experts opinion on these things. So it feels like this is a decision. And I'm going to be the one who makes the final decision, but I want you all to be a part of it, to understand how I'm making it. But I'm going to make it. I'm gonna make it, you know, like giving a timeline, setting expectations and then delivering on those. So I don't think I have ever faulted a leader for making the wrong decision when said decision was made At least mostly clearly and with good intentions I mean you your story is really interesting too because when I think about making decisions right and getting that conviction And the conviction part to me also comes with a bit of validation, right? Of, okay, well, I don't know which one. I gotta do something and find out, right? Including being the person that says, I'm gonna choose not to do anything here, right? Which is a different kind of decision. I mean, not always the one you wanna take. But that, more often than not, I think the types of decisions that leaders make are a a lot smaller than the one that you brought up. Because you're talking about moving a headquarters. That's big. There's a huge cost to it. You can't just go and say, well, let's move our headquarters and try it out for two or three months and see how it goes. And if it's not working, we'll move back. Because of the investment that you're making and the time that it would take to recoup that, unless you really want to throw a ton of money around it. But the concept of trying to go a little bit further, and if you are working with these smaller decisions, to go and see everything you mentioned still applies. Here's the criteria that we're looking at. Here's who we've talked to. Here are the things that we're considering measuring. Here's all of the stuff that we'll understand, whether it's a good decision or not, or what we'll look for afterwards. And yeah, and based off of that, it feels like, I love that word, feels like this is the right decision because we don't know for certain, and maybe calling that out. ## What is really happening in the system We don't know, but we've got to try. We got to do something here because wherever we're at isn't tenable anymore. So I'm gonna make that decision and here we go. And then see how do we continue to validate that. I think the more that you do that, especially if they are smaller things, you start to build up that sense of getting some more conviction and understanding how to validate it, ideally sooner rather than later. As you're thinking through these, I'm going back to one of the frameworks that we discussed recently in the sense and respond world. The hypothesis prioritization canvas, where a tool for leaders that are trying to muster up the courage to do something even though they don't have conviction is to think through what's going on here. So moving an office, what's the potential here, what's the perceived value, what's the risk, what could happen, what's the uncertainty. We could even go into desirability, viability, feasibility, and you know, in the side. Is it something that's, I don't know, valuable enough for us because of, is it cost savings? Is it opening a new market? Okay, we believe it's high value. And to your point, Jim, this should be communicated. should be clarity on what's the intent? What's the outcome we're looking for? What's the business impact? We believe, I'm going back to an hypothesis, we believe that if we move from, I don't know, Columbus to Mason, we would be able to grow business dramatically with a certain consumer good company that's just across the street. Okay, there's the value. You know, what's the cost? They're not neuromatically different costs for the office. This is our ability, our team. How can we de-risk that? How can we learn on it? What do we want to do? Is there high risk? Maybe let's test it somehow and this is where it gets interesting. How do you actually test? What's that's the truth curve for these sort of things. And maybe you need to be honest about, sometimes you'll be honest about the fact that, we can't really test this sort of thing. When my family moved from Israel to the US 10 years ago, we could say that for us high perceived value, but it's risky, would we be able to find a good spot? of would the family be, we can all see business. We could say, let's just wait and do one month in the US or a year in the US, a year in Europe, a year in New Zealand, whatever, and de-risk it. But it doesn't make sense to do that. Sometimes because there's so much risk with not that much value, the decision should be to discard, to say, yeah, let's not do it. and communicate that that decision. Sometimes it would be, let's just ship and measure. Let's just go, let's just move the office, move the family, whatever it is. Let's measure what's the impact and maybe there's a fall back, maybe there's a way to pivot at some point. Let's keep our options open. And in the, one of the things leaders have to get okay with when it comes to making decisions is, You will, in many cases, know that you've made a bad decision very fast. But you often don't know you've made a good decision for a long time. And sometimes you may find out in 72 hours, oh, that's a bad decision. Let's say, let's use my example of moving company offices. So let's say they make this announcement in three key employees quit, three out of, I don't know, let's say 40 at the time. You could see that's a bad decision, but it depends on your success criteria. Like, yeah, that sucks. Maybe that is going to impact us. But if the reason we're doing that is to make a good real estate investment to position ourselves next to our future generation of clients instead of our current during a client to do all these other things, maybe on an equation scale, that's still not a bad decision. even though it might feel like one. But the long term, like all those outcomes and impacts, you got a measure. You don't likely know if you made a good decision, which means it's so critical in how you make the decision, how you test what, you know, in doing that forethought upfront and I hate to do this, but I'm gonna reference another book. Okay, I have a client, they have a book club. They read this book. It's called bulletproof decision making, I think, or maybe it's bulletproof problem solving. Anyway, it talks about creating a decision tree, and the author tells a really applicable story to both kind of my example, and then something Rich and I were talking about yesterday, which is, well, it's not exactly what Rich and I were talking about, but the thing was him and his family all decided they want to move. Husband, wife, two kids, they said, we want to move. So they made it, they did what good trained consulting decision makers do is they made a list of criteria. And what they found though is of all the things, all the places they wanted to evaluate, many of the things on their list that we're going to, that they were going to go test and confirm as part of a hypothesis and experimentation and all that stuff were so similar, it didn't even matter to spend time doing it. So they prune that he calls that pruning your decision tree. And then they were left with five criteria that they wanted to actually weigh the destinations against. And then they got that down to three destinations that met those five criteria and then they visited them and they made a decision. Now, could they have decided that moving to like, I don't know, Columbus, Ohio was a bad issue. But I bet those those two children and both spouses are going to be like, well, we made the best decision we can. Like if we had to undo it, we may have or do it over again, we may have made the same decision again. You know, you also, some other interesting things of trying to find those pieces, right? Like here are a few locations. Here's what we could be doing, et cetera. And we keep going back to the same example of moving headquarters because it's a big like risky kind of thing that we know that there's an investment to it. We don't know exactly what the returns will be. We hope they're going to be good. You know, it could also lead to some interesting experiments. And I think the experiments that came to mind, you've all, as you were showing that canvas, is like, wow, there could be a lot of risk here. What do I test? Maybe one of the things we determine is moving our headquarters, moving dozens, hundreds, of thousands of jobs, isn't what we need to do. What we need to do is actually like these eyes, or, you know, like shrink down our headquarters, right? course doesn't really need to be more than a post office box. And we're now in a point where we can say, you know, we we're on a lot of different locations and a lot of people wherever they are, and we have to test different markets out all the time. So what does that get us? You know, and like, and that's a whole other kind of leadership position. So, you know, moving away from this whole thing of I've got to create this space for a lot of people physically to I have to create a lot of space for these people to do their best emotionally wherever that could be. And maybe to generalize it a bit. One level up. It's as a leader having the courage and I think it does, I've seen it require courage to move away from the solution. We are going to move an office to why are we doing this, what's the outcome that we're trying to achieve and what are some other options. It's both the courage and the patience. All of this process requires some patience and sometimes it won't be worth it. Sometimes it will. And I guess what we're finding, what we're talking about is how product thinking, the same things we're supposed to do when we're building products, are useful as leaders when we're thinking about our company as the product. The office is a product, the office whether it's virtual or physical, it's a big part of the employee experience. Managing, developing, curating the employee experience is something that we want leaders to, I mean leaders own that. that what we want is for leaders to manage that using maybe a product operating system. By doing something, sensing and responding, by looking for can we actually, is it worthwhile to test this? Or is it something we can just decide and move on with it? You don't have to test everything. But identify the things that it's worth testing and what's the most efficient way to test them. Moving offices, one example, moving to a new technology, moving from a product model to big focused on specific projects for customers and vice versa. Moving to a product-led growth motion. There are so many examples of things that you won't think of as classic product development, but require or come with even more risk than many of the features and products that we're building, and the techniques that we're talking about, focusing on outcomes, looking for what are the leading indicators, what's the hypothesis, what should we test if it all can be useful? Well, back then I was not even a fraction of the person I am today when it comes to product thinking, agility, hypotheses, all that stuff. But what I would love to go back and tell myself is, I remember vividly back then in the city we were in, we could have rented co-working space. So let's take eight of those employees, go pay for a week or two of hot-descing in the destinations, if code, and then talk to them and be like, how'd that feel? What was the traffic like? They're good lunch spot. Like it didn't have to be a multi-million dollar decision. We could have easily created some things. we could have asked clients, we're thinking about coming over here, how will that change your perception of us? How likely are you to come to an in-person meeting versus us coming to you? You know, all these other things. And I agree that this is a big example. So let me just offer a real tiny one is, or not tiny, but much smaller on the order of magnitude scale is one of the types of decision I think that leaders make all the time is what to do and what not to do. And this courage, like when we were all just talking in WhatsApp about this concept of courage, many people that I know are organizationally leaders and are organizationally managers do not feel that they can say no to something. And I know all three of us, we do a lot of work with like product discovery and portfolio stuff and you know, playing the orchestra more than just one instrument. And I think, so how do you two see leadership and courage and conviction apply to saying no or saying yes in general? You know, the funny right before you mention that, I was saying that a lot of this comes down to choice, right? We will choose to do something. And what we might choose is to ignore our impulse to say no, even though we think it's the right thing, because we feel pressure to say yes. That happens a lot of places all the time. And how how do we start you know making that either a more data-driven decision? So it's a less emotional or politically driven one Right to to perhaps lead the way I think could be a good thing And give people encourage them the opportunity to create some choice Right, so yeah, you've got something you just put in the our chat here to fade It's the hand of cards have been dealt choices how we play the hand and you your other quote actually kind of made me think of that too right of choice when you were talking before about I can know if I made a bad decision right away but I can't I don't always know if I made the right one I worked with a great product owner once who was he was he was a great leader in the security space for a big insurance company right and it was interesting and what I call him a leader is because of the way he got involved and made choices He constantly referred back to not becoming the next target. ## The practical shift And if you don't know what I'm talking about, right back in 2013, target had a huge data breach that cost them lots of money. I think tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, they eventually revamped a lot of their systems. That's why it got actually kind of hard to use your target red card for a while, things like that. And because they didn't want their customers to think like it's unsafe to spend your money here, It's unsafe to swipe a credit card, because we can't protect your information. And he said, you don't know the cost of a data breach until it happens. You could do all this work and you might not have anything happen. That could either be because of your work or just because you weren't a target, but you never really know. But you have a choice. We can choose to ignore it and think that maybe we'll get lucky and not be the one who goes. And get hacked or we can choose to try something, to do something, to make our systems a little bit more secure for, to make sure that our customers feel more confident and safe in doing work with us. And that's the outcome that they're going for. Is that make sure our customers want to continue engaging with us because they feel safe here. And it doesn't matter what that cost is. If it makes sure their business continues to go. I thought that was really cool. And so, you know, we can think about, that's a big choice. It could be a big choice, but it also could be a small one. And when you've all had the canvas up a minute ago, something we also try to talk about is getting people to think in smaller timeframes, right, to test out some of these choices earlier. Jim, your idea of going and, you know, running a co-working space for a week is good. But like, you know, you can think of if you had a month to test this idea out, what would you do? Well, what if you only had a week to test that? What could you do instead? What if you only had a day? Maybe you were on a survey instead of actually putting people into these co-working spaces, like things like survey your customers, survey your employees, talk about different spots. There can be lots of different little ways to get to it. So finding that choice is huge in order to go and get over some of these issues and start having the courage to do something. the more that we can nudge leaders as leaders to make a choice. Say like you have a choice and I'm going to put in your hands and I'm here to guide you with it too. And I'm not going to hear your throat out if something goes wrong because you had a choice and we learn from that and what we do next. That's like that we need from our higher sliver leadership so that other leaders in the organization you know, that, that are just, you know, working with small groups of people can start making those choices and actually feel a little bit more confident about them. Jamie, you got a story. What else? What else is going on with this choice and boldness? Choice, choice. So I've talked on our podcast a lot about how much I love London. So the scene is I'm on the London Underground and I'm with my mother, my nephew, my partner, and my phone's dying. And so I whip out my laptop and I try and plug into it to steal some juice and to charge my phone and all this stuff. And another, a nice gentleman sitting across from me said, Hey, I have a power brick. Would you like to? Or like, because he could hear me complaining to my nephew that my phone was dying. I'm like, that would be amazing. So he reached in his bag. He pulled it out. And when I opened my laptop, like many people in tech, I have a MacBook with completely obliterated with stickers. And he's like, Hey, can I ask, what do you do? And I just gave him the two second answer. And I go, what about you? He's like, I'm a product manager at a company called ASOS here in the UK. And I'm like, oh, I'm familiar with you. And he goes, can I ask your opinion on some nights ago? And he goes, so I'm working on this new thing, this new campaign, this all this stuff and all these crazy zenials and millennials and all this. Like, we just can't figure this shit out. Like, what do they want and all this stuff? And he goes, so what would your advice to me be? And I go, and literally, like you could not have architected it any better, the voice came over the thing, you know, next stop, pick a daily circus. I go, where do you think in the city, there's a lot of the type of people that you want to sell to? Is it hard to find him? And I kind of like gave him the old wink and nod over my shoulder and he's like, well, yeah, he's like, but what you just want me to go up and talk to him? I'm like, could you? Well, I'm sure there's a way to do that in a process. And all this, I'm like, are you telling me you're going to get in trouble if you go to work tomorrow and say, hey, by the way, I stopped five 18 year olds at Piccadilly while they were shopping and asked them what their impression of this shirt is or this mobile app or whatever. He's like, no, and I go, could it be good? And he's like, dude, thank you. That is an awesome idea. I'm like, again, like this is not rocket science, but he was, I could see it in his face. He was nervous about what, but there's, there's got to be permissions. I have to go get there's got to be a way to do that and like, well, what, what, if I annoy one of them and I go, you know, I go viral for asking a question, like, really though, really man, like, come on, man, like you really going to go viral for asking some teenager what they think of a t-shirt. Probably not. The upside is huge, the risk and downside really. Now, is that bold? I don't think that's bold. It depends. It depends on the context, right? If you're working in financial services and you're thinking of going, I don't know, to Bloomberg or the simpler organization and... Well, ask some of the traders what they think about and you potential... Yeah, like as a financial product. It was the something really smelly if you go and do that. No, which you don't talk to in Bloomberg. You talk to him at the bar. After the training. That is probably something you should be very careful of. And you could understand why when you talk to product managers in such organizations, they're careful about these things. Well, they're signed up with zoo in the things that they're allowed and not allowed to do into disclose and what questions can they even ask. We need to understand, that's the reality. Well, hold on, let's also be clear. First, don't break the law. Right, I mean, I think that's maybe a hint of what you're talking about here. If you're doing something that can get you or your company into legal trouble, maybe you should pick a different experiment. Maybe there's something else you can go do. If it's something that like somebody will be mad in your company about going and talking to these people, you know, that's a totally different game. Like, I'm not going to make everyone happy all the time. But yeah, if you're going to do something that's an actual like, you know, policy issue, there's regulations around that, something like that, you know, or you need to approach it in a different kind of way. If it's not and it's impressions, we can't like, you know, I couldn't talk to those people or I'm not allowed to talk to this. So let me challenge you. Let me challenge you. So in such an imaginary organization, if I'm a product leader, I've seen situations where product leaders have such conversations that the business side, and yes, it's an us and them, and I'm not inventing it because that's the reality of a lot of these organizations. There are people that want to own and be a gateway, as we call it, to the customer conversations. They don't want other people to go talk to customers because that challenges their authority. They start to be worried of people. It's the same people that tell you, this is my book of work, this is what I I want you to do these are the features I want you to build, and I'm not even not willing or interested to talk about outcomes and to be open to experimentation. So it requires, we go back to courage. It's the right move, I agree with you, Rich. But it requires a certain additional level of courage in a lot of the enterprise environments where people do this. And I'm, again, of course, I'm not saying anybody should create risk or be, you know, put themselves at risk or put anyone else at risk. But there is a lot of, I don't know what the official term is for it. I don't know what you guys call it, but I just call them artificial guardrails or invisible barriers, right? Like we constrain ourselves in our own head. There's nothing actually constraining us. And to your point, Yval, I was working in a big utility company years ago and having a similar conversation like I did with the guy in the tube, with the product manager. And I said, but is there any way we can ask the customers what they actually want? And their answer was, I think there is. Let me go find out what it is. And here's the funny end of this story. I'll give you the super, super CliffsNotes version is, there was a group of customers, 3,500 to be exact, that the company paid money to, to provide focus groups, early feedback, beta testing and all that. And they paid them in the form of a credit on their bill. But it's real money, it was very real money. And there was a whole mechanism around how to engage with them and how to put a survey together them, how to how to invite them into campus and all that stuff. The very people who needed to use them had no idea that any of that even existed. And that was the thing I was most proud of, not the thing we were working on that day, but the fact that by me asking one question in one refinement meeting, I enabled a dozen product owners and product managers on one floor to know that they even had that capability. And A similar story, consumer product company, and you've all I know you've worked with a big consumer product company, and I don't know if you've ever had an experience like this, but this story was around, they were making products that you consumed, right? You ate, drank, etc. And I said, how do you test this? Like I always wanted to be like paid to be a pizza tester, or a barbecue tester, or a coffee tester, whatever. Yeah, and I had to assume maybe all three pizza, barbecue, no, that would not same time. Not at the same time. ## What leaders should pay attention to And I said, well, how do you do this? And they said, Oh, let us show you. Here's how we do it. And they have test kitchens in one way mirrors and all this stuff. But guess what I saw? They brought in the same short bus of the same 40 people, the average age was 75 to give them feedback on products going to market. I said, well, that's cool. But giving a bunch of senior citizens, like my grandparents, a day pass at the home to come give you feedback, like, how good is that and how indicative it depends if you're, if you're doing food, if you're doing pizza for senior homes, maybe. Sure, but you're really assuming a lot of positive I'm kidding, but I guess First of all invisible electric fences that's the term I heard Reinerts and use for these things that we assume You know are there and are afraid of and there are a lot of those and I guess one of the things that the the techniques that we talk about, whether it's the product canvas or the hypothesis or just asking those weird questions that you're asking, Jim, which are great. Those are probing for, is that, you know, what's that electronic invisible fence that you're thinking about and can we test whether it's really there or not? Can we actually look for it? Maybe it's not even there. Maybe it is there and we need to do something about it. Maybe it is there and we need to figure out how to work around it. But let's have those conversations. Let's bring transparency so that we can we can sense and respond how can we even test. Creating an environment where you know one thing on your portfolio as an organization is making the assumption that we cannot test our stuff. And that's one meta thing that it would be good for an organization to work through. Is it a real assumption that we cannot test? Can we get people to test more? What's the leading indicator that would drive people to test more things? Maybe it's, you know, we build a flavor cemetery like Ben and Jerry's have or the wall of failures that, you know, certain consumer goods companies have at their headquarters. And we make the assumption that when we celebrate failure, or at least signify failure, people would feel okay with it. I think just one other, as I think through all of those choices and choosing, this has potential to become arbitrary, to become fluffy. I go back to when we started talking about portfolio earlier, one move that I want to see more organizations make and maybe we can talk about another time is it's not your IT portfolio. It can be, start with that, start with the IT portfolio of your investments in this product or the other product. Okay, but in the organizations where I've seen the portfolio, be the portfolio of working on your business, we want to achieve this outcome of how our internal customers are employees that they experience or are external customers, that's what we're trying to change. And technology is part of it, but it's, you know, it's a collaboration across the business. Starting to look at this portfolio gets more of these choices and options and the conversation around courage and conviction to the right level in the organization. One One of the interesting things that I always struggle with as a coach is how do I create the surface area to have these conversations. And it's great to be able to have conversations along the way, on the subway, in the halls, but especially these days where people are not warming the halls that often. It's harder and harder to get surface area. you sometimes need to introduce something like let's manage our choices as a portfolio. Let's manage these things so that when we talk about these things it's an opportunity to ask ourselves some of these questions, to see how we react, to see what courage we have or not. What do we do when we have courage without conviction? Do we really test? Do we make decisions? Do we talk about the why for these sort of things? And for me that's what it means to to bring the agile mindset that we believe in, the agility that we believe in. I know you're beyond that in organizations. I know you guys are both trainers and we've all talked about liberating structures. Have I think in a couple leadership classes, I've taken the concept of plausible uncertainties and on the two axes I've put leadership traits. like think about conviction and courage, timid, bold, whatever. What would that look? Yeah, it's critical uncertainties, thanks, Rich. I always butcher the official names. I know how to do them, I just always get the names wrong. So critical uncertainties. And there could be value there in saying like, what would it look like to work to be a timid but opinionated leader? or a timid but decisive leader. So could those things be in conflict? Yeah, could they exist in the same person? I think they could. And when the eminent Barry and Christian led the critical uncertainties at HQ a number of years ago, they paired it with what's called a gallery walk. So you basically assigned each of the four quadrants, a movie poster or album cover type thing to describe it. private and then we walked around and looked at everybody's and it was not leadership values or boldness or courage in that case, but it was a really effective thing. So I know we like to give people tangible things to do and that critical uncertainties might be a good way to look at yourself or help others look at themselves around these ideas. And I was just telling someone yesterday about the empathy map activity in the leadership class. And basically I had an existing client come to me and say, we think we'd like you to come in and teach this leadership class. Like Rich does and Rich taught me, really, let's talk about that. Let's understand what you want to accomplish from that. And really, what I told that person is the people you want to come to this class don't I need that class, which is taking money out of my own pocket, right? But it's just not right for them. And I said, but there's some activities in there that we can do. And then the class they actually needed was kind of a mixture of an evidence-based management class and a little bit of like product discovery type stuff. But what do you think? Like, are there activities like that that you've either used in teaching workshops are just through consulting that have helped people like think about themselves almost in the third person. Eco cycle comes to mind immediately for me. Eco cycle. Uh, the other luring share that came to my mind was appreciative interviews. Oh, yeah. It's a good one. So, uh, for anyone who was listening in, who doesn't know it, the general concept is, um, you're, you're interviewing somebody about a time, right? Like you're asking them, tell me about a time when you experienced a great team. Tell me about a time when you got through a challenging situation, you know, whatever that could be. Um, and you, you let them tell their story, five, 10 minutes, whatever. And, and while they're doing that, you're asking them questions, right? Uh, and like, tell me more, what else happened? Who was there? Um, never trying to, you know, to give your opinion. I'm like, wow, that must, that, that was really hard. Don't, uh, you don't want to influence just to ask more. And then you flip the script, right? Like you tell a story about a time when, and they interview you. Then you can meet up with other people, and you tell the story that you heard to that other group. And you listen in, and you start looking for all those cool patterns and similarities, right? And you start to find those little things of like, here's something that we can do in the future. When we're in a different but maybe similar situation, we are once again faced with a challenging decision we have to make. Or when we're trying to create a new team or whatever that might be to think of the things that help us get to that better state. So I think that would be a really cool thing to get into. We can talk about EcoCycle some other time. We'll leave a link in the show notes. I think this is a good place to stop. I'm going to wrap it up a little bit. Quite a bit of courage, examples of courage and conviction. A lot of tools that we'll point to as well. Rich, did you have one last thought? Just as a reminder to all the leaders here that are listening in. The policies, procedures, the way that you do things today helped or all came out of the problems that you were dealing with yesterday or the year before. And what you do tomorrow doesn't have to be the same, right? It could, your same policies can help you move forward. But sometimes it really, you know, goes to take a moment to think what is the problem that we're trying to solve? What is the thing that we're trying to go and do? and maybe that will help you find the courage to initiate whatever conversation, take whatever technique that we're talking about here and go and do it as we go and talk more. So keep that in mind as you approach your own conversations. That's an awesome close for me that brings it back to your developing your organization. If you're not continuously developing your organization to be the organization, the company, the team, whatever it is that it needs to be tomorrow, you're doing a disservice to your job. In the words of the lensei, you're cheating, your company out of a salary, if your definition of done or standard work policy, fax paper is not visible anymore. Let's pause here. A lot to think about, a lot to reflect. Thank you for listening to this episode of Mastering Agility and Scaling with the Agility Podcast for Rich and Jim. I'm Yuval. See you 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.