Get Agile Podcast

“You need to make a distinction between which direction you’re going and what you’re going to do as a first step,” says Viktor Grgic, Certified LeSS Trainer.

In this episode of the Get Agile podcast Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita talks with Viktor about his approach to LeSS transformations. He shares his experience in finding people responsible for organizational structure, with whom he starts conversations on the identification of the problems to solve, not the symptoms to address. Victor explains how he educates decision-makers on the root causes of the current situation and helps companies identify the starting groups. He shows how the feature team adoption map helps define the first steps in the LeSS adoption, and how the team self-designing workshops are used to define new company structure. Companies finish the workshop with both clear goal in mind and the first steps to take, or where they want to be in one year.

Viktor emphasizes why owning the change by the group is critical to the success of the transformation, and why the most difficult part of the adoption happens after the workshops.

You can learn more about Viktor at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vgrgic/
His talk from the AgileByExample 2023 conference in Warsaw, Poland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wht5CbGFE9A

Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita meets with Pete Behrens, a Leadership Coach and Founder of the Agile Leadership Journey (ALJ), a community devoted to improving leaders and their organizations. Together they discuss how the Agile Leadership Journey provides its members with a pragmatic approach to leadership and how leaders can think, behave, and make better decisions using different models from ALJ.

“There’s no better or worse, there’s more awareness and choice,” says Pete, explaining the Leadership Agility model. He describes three main stages of self-awareness as a leader: Expert, Achiever, and Catalyst. Together, Tomasz and Pete look at each stage's main characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses, analyzing how these leaders behave, make decisions, or create a strategy. Pete explains what hollow leadership is and how leaders shape culture. He also clarifies how reflections help leaders grow and how they can get feedback from peers, using systemic approaches such as 360 reviews, or informal feedback sessions.

Finally, they discuss leaders' behaviors during stress and where the firefighting culture might be coming from.

Two books mentioned by Pete:

• Managing for Excellence https://www.amazon.com/Managing-Excellence-Performance-Contemporary-Organizations/dp/0471127248
• Leadership Agility https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Agility-Mastery-Anticipating-Initiating/dp/0787979139/

Learn more about Agile Leadership Jurney at https://www.agileleadershipjourney.com/ and find Pete's profile at https://linkedin.com/in/petebehrens

Get Agile podcast:https://procognita.com/GetAgile

“Leadership is a state of mind, so everyone is a leader,” says Zuzi Sohova, Certified Scrum Trainer in her conversation with Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita. Together they discuss the role of a leader in modern organizations and how they need to change from the position of power to the position of influence.

Zuzi shares her story of becoming Scrum Master, what was her greatest challenge, and the biggest change she needed to make. She tells how coaching helped her on her path and how she now works with executives to help them find their dreams. They also discuss how confidence and courage are necessary for leaders to try new things, and how different types of leaders work with their teams.

You can learn more about Zuzi at https://procognita.com/company/team/trainers/zuzi-sochova

Find Zuzi’s books at:

• The Great ScrumMaster: https://www.amazon.com/Great-ScrumMaster-ScrumMasterWay-Addison-Wesley-Signature/dp/013465711X/

• The Agile Leader: https://www.amazon.com/Agile-Leader-Leveraging-Power-Influence/dp/0136660428/

You can read about ORSC at https://crrglobal.com/about/orsc/

How often your organization fails to deliver on the promise? How many deadlines were not met, or the goals not achieved?

"The biggest responsibility of leadership is to ensure that promises keep on working on time," says Angel Diaz-Maroto, Certified Enterprise Coach, and Certified Scrum Trainer. During his recent visit to Warsaw, Poland, he joined Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita to discuss the elements of reliable promises. Together, they look at building promises in a dynamic, agile environment, and how to create these on task, output, and outcome levels.

Angel explains how reliable promises build trust, which creates a culture of responsibility that leads to responding to customers' needs and delivering results. He shares his thoughts on how promises work with the OKR method. Building on that, they discuss how different people react to challenging and stressful targets, and what can be the consequences of creating an unrealistic goal. Finally, Angel explains how the leader can move the organization from one that fails to deliver on promises to a company that creates (and deliver on) realistic goals.

You can learn more about Angel at https://procognita.com/company/team/trainers/angel-diaz-maroto 

Two books by Fred Kofman mentioned during the conversation:

• Conscious Business https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Business-Build-Through-Values-ebook/dp/B0034184XM
• The Meaning Revolution https://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Revolution-Power-Transcendent-Leadership/dp/1524760730 

Bob Dunham Generative Leadership website https://generateleadership.com/home/ 

Natalia Cordova and other members of the DM Agile Coaching team can be found at https://www.dmagilecoaching.com/our-team/ 

“Time is your most valuable currency,” says Peter Stevens, co-author of the “Personal Agility” book. “How you choose to spend this currency says a lot about what you care about.” In this episode of the Get Agile Podcast, Peter joins Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita to discover the patterns behind Personal Agility.

Peter explains how to discover things that really matter and how to navigate between them. He shows why it’s not a process to follow, but a set of patterns, and what are the six powerful questions to ask during the “celebrate and choose” event. They also discuss what is the role of the celebration partner, and how they can help with Personal Agility.

Last but not least, they look at how to extend Personal Agility beyond a single person to the team o organizational level, how to create alignment between stakeholders, and how to improve company effectiveness by reducing time spend on endless meetings.

You can learn more about “Personal Agility: Unlocking Purpose, Alignment and Transformation” book at https://personalagilityinstitute.org/join-the-book-launch/

And find its authors at:

• Peter B. Stevens https://linkedin.com/in/peterstev https://saat-network.ch
• Maria Materelli https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariamatarelli/ https://www.formulaink.com/

The Agile movement led to the creation of customer-focused, independent teams. In many cases, however “independence” means “we don’t need to talk to each other” and “don’t touch our code” rather than “we’re not blocked by another team”.

During the LeSS Conference in Warsaw, Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita interviewed Bas Vodde, co-creator of LeSS. They discuss the consequences of defining the product from the customer perspective versus the technology perspective, and how broader product definition impacts both the organizational structure and the need for collaboration between teams. They look at how private code limit cooperation and learning, how to maximize individual and team learning, why it’s important from the company perspective, and how developers can start building the habit of continuous knowledge creation.

Learn more about LeSS at https://less.works/, and about Bas at https://less.works/profiles/bas-vodde.
The mentioned book “Debugging the development process” can be found at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Debugging-Development-Process-Practical-Strategies/dp/1556156502

“Agile has crossed the chasm,” said Lyssa Adkins during the conversation with Tomasz Wykowski in Dublin. It was almost five years ago so they’re returning to this conversation to define Agile’s landscape and see how it evolved over the last few years. Lyssa, the co-founder of Agile Coaching Institute, currently focuses on helping leaders understand the changes happening around them. Listen to their conversation to learn why she avoids working with the leadership team from the agile perspective, why she doesn’t do what she’s often asked for, and what she does instead. 

Tomasz and Lyssa also discuss how Agile has evolved over the years, and how the nature of the change has changed as well. They’re looking for potential new areas to apply patterns created in software development and how it impacts what Agile Coaches do and focus on.

More resources:

• “Agile has crossed the chasm. What does it mean for Agile Coaches?” article https://procognita.com/post/agile-has-crossed-the-chasm-what-does-it-mean-for-agile-coaches-413
• Lyssa Adkins’s website: http://lyssaadkins.com/
• “Coaching Agile Teams” book written by Lyssa: https://www.amazon.com/Coaching-Agile-Teams-ScrumMasters-Addison-Wesley-ebook/dp/B003QP47YG/ref=sr_1_1
• “Lead Together” book narrated by Lyssa https://www.amazon.com/Lead-Together-Intentional-Scaling-Business/dp/B093KC19DQ/ref=sr_1_1
• “What It Takes to Lead Through an Era of Exponential Change” article from HBR https://hbr.org/2020/10/what-it-takes-to-lead-through-an-era-of-exponential-change 

Learn more about the Get Agile podcast at https://procognita.com/GetAgile

The war in Ukraine often leads to frustration and feeling of powerlessness. This special episode of the Get Agile podcast was recorded less than 48h after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita discusses with Christopher Avery how the Responsibility Process can be applied to address anxiety caused by a conflict between what we want and what we have. Listen to their conversation to learn how to avoid laying blame, justifying, or feeling guilt and understand what you want to take full Responsibility instead.

You can learn more about the Responsibility Process at https://responsibility.com/. The poster can be downloaded from https://responsibility.com/the-responsibility-process-poster/ and the book is available at https://responsibility.com/the-responsibility-process/

Menlo Innovations has created a unique culture of teamwork, collaboration, communication, and relationship. This led to specific practices, such as the whole company working only in pairs, having one stand-up for the 50-60 people that last 13 minutes, high-tech anthropologist observing users, visual planning, and extreme interviewing. But in March 2020 everything has changed, as the whole company was moved to the virtual world. 

In this interview, Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita talks with Richard Sheridan, CEO of Menlo Innovations on how the company succeeded in the pandemic world. Join them to learn about experiments Menlonian did, how they adapted their practices to the new reality, what worked, and what didn’t. 

Learn more about Joy at Menlo https://menloinnovations.com/our-way. You can visit Menlo virtually at https://menlo.cc/factorytour.  

Books about Menlo Innovations:

• Joy, Inc.: https://menlo-innovations.myshopify.com/collections/all/products/joy-inc 
• Chief Joy Officer: https://menlo-innovations.myshopify.com/collections/all/products/chief-joy-officer
• A Friday Filled with Joy: https://menlo-innovations.myshopify.com/collections/all/products/a-friday-filled-with-joy

Get Agile podcast: https://procognita.com/GetAgile 

Many managers hold assumptions that stop their companies from changing the way they operate. Pandemic, climate change, and other recent disruptions have challenged these assumptions, making supply chains fragile, introducing chaos in stable environments, and forcing companies to question their core business practices. Tomasz Wykowski from ProCognita discusses with Robin Dymond, Certified Scrum Trainer how the Agile movement can help non-software firms, including construction and oil & gas companies, go through the profound change - how to create more adaptive and more resilient organizations, how and where to start, how to reach leaders from these companies, and how to build trust with them.

Additional resources:

• Learn more about Robin Dymond and his work at Innovel website: www.innovel.net 
• New UN report: Step up climate change adaptation efforts, or face huge disruption https://phys.org/news/2021-11-climate-efforts-huge-disruption.html 
• Extreme Weather Cost U.S. Taxpayers $99 Billion Last Year, and It Is Getting Worse https://www.americanprogress.org/article/extreme-weather-cost-u-s-taxpayers-99-billion-last-year-getting-worse/ 
• Climate change: Disruption, risk and opportunity https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589791819300027
• Climate Disruption Is Now Locked In. The Next Moves Will Be Crucial. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/climate/climate-change-future.html

Learn more about Get Agile podcast at https://procognita.com/GetAgile