A lot of organizations say they’ve “gone Agile,” but still struggle with missed deadlines, unclear priorities, and teams that feel busy without delivering better outcomes. In this episode, Scott Dunn joins Brian Milner to unpack why Agile ROI is so often misunderstood and what leaders should actually be measuring instead.
Overview
What does a successful Agile transformation actually look like? Too often, organizations adopt Scrum or Agile practices because everyone else is doing it, without first defining the business outcomes they hope to achieve. The result is predictable: teams follow the motions of Agile while leadership struggles to see measurable value.
In this conversation, Brian Milner and Scott Dunn explore why ROI conversations around Agile frequently go off track and how leaders can reconnect Agile practices to meaningful business goals like faster delivery, improved customer satisfaction, stronger collaboration, and better adaptability. They discuss the hidden cost of operationalizing Agile too early, why coaching and leadership alignment still matter, and how the rise of AI makes strong Agile fundamentals more important, not less.
References and resources mentioned in the show:
Scott Dunn
#104: Mastering Product Ownership with Mike Cohn
#132: Can Nice Guys Finish First? with Scott Dunn
Do the Proven Benefits of Agile Training Justify the Costs? by Mike Cohn
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This episode’s presenters are:
Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.
Scott Dunn is a Certified Enterprise Coach and Scrum Trainer with over 20 years of experience coaching and training companies like NASA, EMC/Dell Technologies, Yahoo!, Technicolor, and eBay to transition to an agile approach using Scrum.
Auto-generated Transcript:
Brian Milner (00:00) Welcome back Agile Mentors. We're here for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm here again, Brian Milner, and we have back with us, as I like to say, the one and only Scott Dunn. Thanks for being here, Scott.
Scott (00:12) Always a pleasure, always a good time. Thanks, Brian
Brian Milner (00:15) ⁓ If you haven't caught our recent episode with Scott, we did not long ago. ⁓ Scott is a CST. He is a trainer and coach like myself. ⁓ His company is Rocket 9 Solutions. And we decided to have Scott ⁓ in today because we wanted to talk about something that often gets asked of us. And that is about the ROI of Agile. ⁓
In today's world, I think a lot of companies are trying to make the choice about where they're spending their money. And I see, I don't know Scott, if you see the same thing, but I see sort of this either or kind of thing of people looking at it saying, well, do I invest in something like agile training or trying to make a transformation to agile? do I, is it really more important for me to just, you know, do a sort of AI stuff and try to get my teams converted over to AI. So.
⁓ I'll start us off with kind of a big open question. Why is ROI such a different topic when leaders talk about Agile?
Scott (01:20) Right. So I think what I've seen as a pattern is that, and this is normal for any sort of trend that we might've seen and certainly in IT, something's very big, know, the big name companies are using it. We're going to do it too. And so we're going to go agile. And essentially there's times I remember having conversations with leaders like, are you going agile? And then some way that they could try to feel comfortable with, said, well, cause everyone else is doing it. So they didn't understand the value proposition of agile. So I think this is a very relevant ⁓ topic, but I would add to that folks who, know,
did go agile. And usually when we're in the training classes, we ask them like, where are you at with that? The common refrain, just for leaders who are listening, common refrain is that we would hear would be, we're doing agile, but we're doing it wrong. Or we're doing waddle or fragile or all, know, scrum or fall and all that stuff you would hear. So it wasn't going well. And so partly it wasn't going well. would say that we don't get the results we would expect. So we should talk about what are the results we expect. But secondarily, the problem is because we can't really tell what good looks like or not.
at some point within a few years of this agile adoption, like, Hey, I think we're good. Let's operationalize it. Right. And they just kind of say that this is where we're at is as far as it goes. And it's almost like saying, if you're a coach for NBA team, like, yep, I think we got defense down. don't need to spend any more time on that. Right. As if nothing else is going to change the next year and other teams and players and how their strategic work works. always trying to get better. ⁓ but once you operationalize quote unquote, ⁓ doing that, you're going to be stuck. But I would actually say,
you're actually probably going to roll back downhill. Because when they say operationalize, hey, we'll get rid of the scrum masters. We're to get rid of the agile coaches. Or I'll put this one scrum master over 17 teams. That's my current record. One scrum master, 17 teams. Yeah. But again, that only is not going to hold steady. You're kind of eroding. You're pulling out the metal bars that are holding up the scaffolding. And it will fall back because you lose your ability to really know where the teams are at.
getting in the way of them getting what you want. mean, those are some of the powerful things. those are some of the trends I'm seeing on the whole agile adoption of where it's at and why I still think it's a relevant conversation. Last piece I'll add that we've mentioned in the previous podcast, which by the way, Brian, I think that previous podcast we did was just amazing. It's one of best I've ever heard. But the fact that everyone's pushing into AI, like you said, I agree, AI is incredible. It's powerful. Everyone should be doing something with it and have a plan for that. But
Brian Milner (03:29) Hahaha.
Scott (03:39) But AI is complex. AI has unknowns and guess which approach is really good for complex unknown areas? I don't know. I'm going to say Scrum. So our ability to still Scrum into let's figure it out. Because when I talk to companies what they're doing with AI, they don't know. And they don't know how start. They don't know how to take incremental and iterative approach to at least figure these things out, do something, inspect into that and get results. Or as some people said, if you weren't doing agile well, you're not going to do AI well. If your process are kind of messy now,
you're just going to make that mess worse. It's the same as like scaling. If you can't scale crappy processes. So I feel like AI people, and I'm seeing this because the leadership response of frustration is I don't know why they're not moving forward with AI. We all gave them all copilot licenses, but there's no guidance. There's no feedback loops. There's no goal. There's no measure. All the stuff that that scrum would give you immediately. Like what are the top priorities? Why are those the priorities with the sprint goal and the product goal?
Okay, what do we think we actually get done in two weeks? And then test and see. But if I'm a leader listening to this, wouldn't you love to say, hey, what do you guys do with AI? And they said, we're doing this user story, this user story, and we'll be able to show you what we learned and what we built with that in the sprint review in four days. I'll take that any day over. We're doing stuff. We're taking a look. We're playing around with it. When are you going to be done playing around with it? We have no expectations of them and your teams suffer for that lack of that vision.
Brian Milner (05:00) Yeah, I agree. and I think ROI, mean, it's sort of a, it's maybe a harder thing when it comes to Agile because first of all, I think we have to set the expectation of what is it that you see as a return on investment and what is it that you're hoping to get from Agile as a return on investment. There's a lot of different benefits and
It's important to quantify, I think, a little bit from the outset. I know you and I both have been involved with kind of the path to agility thing. And one of the things that they do there is try to establish from the outset, what's our business objective of doing this? Why are we going through this transformation in the first place? What do we hope to achieve from it? And I think that's really, really smart because a lot of times, like you say, people can't really quantify it they look at it and say, well, because everyone else is doing it.
And that's not a reason, right? That's not a good reason for a business to do anything. ⁓ We should be able to articulate, we're trying to increase the speed of our time to market. We're trying to increase the customer satisfaction level. ⁓ There's a lot of them that can fall within that gap. And if you don't articulate from the start of what it is that you think is the biggest, most important thing,
as to why you're doing this, then how could you even hope to measure the return on investment?
Scott (06:34) Absolutely and think about it people are trying to all you know row in the same direction, but they're not ⁓ And we tried to actually had done the success lighter exercise, which is one of the exercises in the on the mountain goat site I've never doing that with the leadership group and and basically what's the goal where we're trying to help was it looked like to win and It's all in different directions ⁓ And someone said it just looks like the Bellagio fountain. Everything's going everywhere is what it looks like So if I'm looking at it, I would just encourage people
For me, Agile is means to an end. The goal isn't to be agile. Our measurement is how many teams are using Scrum. If they're not doing it well and not getting the results the company benefits, how's that a win? So that's also probably why the company's pretty quick to say, I don't think we need these Scrum Master anymore because they don't know how they're helping and we're not good about the metrics. So if the Scrum Master is seen as like the organizational change agent, they should, we're trying to change it towards, like you said, Brian, towards these goals. Every time I've done these exercises with the leaders about what the goals are.
I turned into a game. said, I want to meet just with the senior leadership. Tell me what the goals are. And we can do that voting exercise like you're talking about and describe it. I said, the fun part is we're going to take this to your teams in our next session with everybody there and have them guess first. And you'll be surprised at the gap because they're like, no, no, no, this is the vision. Everyone knows that. Like, we'll see. They have been wrong every time. Every time we've done that. Now, the wonderful thing is I had this happen just at end of last year. CTO came by.
And was saying, you know, we're talking about this. goes, yeah, no, everyone knows the goals now. It's this, this, and this. And he'll even kind of quiz them, but that exercise helped galvanize all the things we're doing with agile are towards these goals, better customer satisfaction, improved productivity, whatever that is. But now it becomes kind of a rally cry. He got it. And you're kind of giving leadership a tool to have that clarion called like, this is why we're doing agile. Could it change next quarter? Sure. And we'll read up on that. But I do feel like be clear about what the value proposition of agile is. The other one I like a lot, a lot of students are like,
is the competing values framework, where we're trying to shift the culture here towards what? Well, towards more innovation, or towards more collaboration, or towards more results, or better control of your process. Because if you're unpredictable, well, your process isn't repeatable and consistent. We should fix that. And now with that goal, people can look at like, what are we doing with Agile that could help hit those goals? Not just, hey, I think we should do Kanban. No, I think we should do Scrum. And then it turns into a fist fight on the playground. Because they don't know how that approach, Kanban, safe,
You know, we talk about story points earlier, should we, shouldn't we, even things like, you know, hackathon, mobbing, pairing, all these other things. Well, will those hit us, you know, help us toward the goal? If not, we're just arguing. We'd like to use mobbing. Well, that sounds dumb. You shouldn't use it. Leadership says you shouldn't use it. Okay. But instead of you say we're trying mobbing, why? Because we still have knowledge silos. We don't have enough people that know stuff to work on. So therefore our predictability is thrown off. Well, you help connect that practice to the why. And now that can, we can get some support and we can sell it. You know what I mean?
Brian Milner (09:18) Absolutely.
Yeah, no, I think absolutely. I think that's kind of what we see that symptom in a lot of areas in the profession today because, know, like there was a company I worked with that came on board and ⁓ the very first thing that they were planning to do before they had any training on anything else was they were going to get everyone trained on the basics of safe. They had not had any agile training, any scrum training. No one knew what a scrum master was.
but they were going to tell them about a release train engineers. And yeah. And, and, and, you know, it was, it was one of those things where I couldn't really stop it because it had already started. But after it finished, it was like, okay, well, now that you've heard that, put it out of your head. Like just let's, let's start back a step because, and please, if you're listening to this, I'm not bashing on safe at any way. I'm not saying that safe isn't, isn't effective and doesn't do a good job in certain scenarios.
Scott (09:57) my.
Brian Milner (10:23) But what I am saying is it's the wrong place to start. ⁓ If you're going to scale something up, don't start with, you need to start, have something to scale. And that's kind of the problem is that there was nothing to scale. So, you know, if you're talking about return on investment, that's a hard one to kind of justify to say, well, what's the return on investment of getting that training first thing? I don't know. I mean, I really don't know that it is going to give you much of a return on investment. ⁓
Scott (10:52) I
was worried about that.
Brian Milner (10:52) I mean,
I almost feel like, you know, if I'm a leader and I'm coming at this, I agree. I'm going to start with what is it that I hope to achieve and what's our business outcome for this? It's not to be agile. It's to, you know, increase our time to market or decrease our time to market or whatever, right? It's one of those kinds of things. And I want to be clear to the organization. Our company objective is to decrease the time to market. We are going to be learning this agile thing because we feel like it's the method to decrease our time to market.
And now everyone, just in that simple sentence, now everyone understands, okay, our objective is decrease time to market. And now you've even set up the kind of cultural aspect of this in a much stronger way because now I'm learning these principles of transparency, inspection, adaptation, and I'm learning them in light of not just practicing those, but saying,
Scott (11:31) Yes.
Yes.
Brian Milner (11:52) how can I use these to decrease our time to market? And yeah, no, no, no, that's it. That's it.
Scott (11:55) Yeah, and I think go go ahead i'm interrupting All
right, definitely don't want to get on the wrong side of mr. Milner boy, then that's the last podcast nice seeing everyone i'll never be on again I interrupted brian so um For the leaders listening, this is really really significant I think you probably agree that the people closest to the work know the work the best and ways to improve it yet They typically don't feel empowered if you have a clear, you know goal for what we're trying to do You're giving them a true north a line of sight to say oh I can help get i've got some ideas that would help
Brian Milner (12:02) No, no.
Never, never.
Scott (12:25) do that to your point, improve quality, shorten feedback time, et cetera. And I would add AI into that, like how can they leverage AI towards these goals? Right now they don't know what to hook it to. So they just treat it like another Google and you're really, really missing a huge, huge value. And I would say in the same way, leaders go first. So the leaders listening to this, there might be a chance to say, well, we're already agile, Scott, Brian, I don't think this is a chance that I'm going to get much support.
Brian Milner (12:35) Hmm.
Scott (12:48) Hey, look at it as a, we're going to revisit our agile practices in light of AI. It's a great opportunity to do just that. But the truth is to your point, Brian, if I don't have those feedback cycles, if I don't have transparency, if I'm not inspecting, adapting those basic principles of what makes Scrum and agile really effective, your AI is going to really struggle because you don't have feedback loops. You don't have visibility of what people are doing. You probably have a metric of how many copilot license you're using and that's it, but you're not seeing any results. Now, one thing I know about leaders, you want to see results.
Right? So I get it that you're frustrated, but you don't know how to reach in. It's a bit of a black box, empowering your teams and revisiting agile and scrum. And you can just start with saying, Hey everyone, I like your feedback. How we're doing with, with scrum and agile. If you look at the early days and Salesforce, and they're a major success. One thing they did really well was that these feedback loops actually getting feedback from the people on the agile adoption, not a retrospect on the sprint, but we're doing these larger feedback loops. do think? And they were getting feedback like, this is stupid. I don't know if we're using a cell spreadsheets, the tracks, all this stuff, right?
but it's real feedback just like you'd want from your customers. So it might be an opportunity to revisit the assessment, see what people are really thinking, make sure they're safe, make it anonymous or whatever it is, because usually the team's like, they don't really care, and I don't want to put my name on this and get in trouble, all that. Make sure you get honest feedback from there. Have a coach, reach out the mountain goat. You could do a private class where you can kind of reassess or read baseline. Maybe you have new people that haven't been trained, but look for that opportunity. But back to that point, really getting those mechanics down, Brian, that people understand.
why it's important that we're transparent, why it's important we do small chunks of valuable work that the leaders can see and say, yes, that's cool, I like that. Not a user story that was, I heard this recently, user story, I had this meeting. I'm gonna leave it like, what do I care? Why am I in a Sprint review and you're showing me user stories about meetings that you're in? So revisit those because I do think it really is what Scrum gives you and that I love from the beginning is it shifted your teams to be business value focused instead of just
Brian Milner (14:27) Thanks.
Scott (14:43) measuring busyness. How busy was I? Really busy, 90 % busy. Not like did I or did I not get this thing done that I can show you. And if I'm a leader, I do still care about that. And I think these times are moving so fast, it's more important than ever. And I encourage you to do a baseline, revisit some of that, ⁓ things that you're bringing up, Brian.
Brian Milner (15:01) Yeah. I mean, if I'm, if I'm that leader and I'm trying to dollars and since this thing out, I think what I'd be doing is I try to take the costs, right? What, what, kind of training or what kind of a coaching budget might we set up for something like this? ⁓ what's, what's the potential benefit of doing something like this and really kind of be specific about it. What is it you're hoping to achieve? Like I said,
Scott (15:18) Mm-hmm.
Brian Milner (15:29) Are you decreasing your time to market? Well, what would it mean for you to have a release every three months versus every six months? Right? What would it mean for you to get value into your customer's hands, you know, in twice the time or half the time, sorry, that it takes you to do that now? What impact would that have on your bottom line? ⁓ Spreadsheet that out.
Scott (15:49) Yeah. Those are good. think
that's a fair expectation. That's a fair expectation to say, team, I'd like to find ways to, you know, this is why we're doing agile and watch them come up with all sorts of ideas to do that. And I've been, I've been a mate, there's a company recently, and this is a crazy thing. They make, they make water meters. You think this is like old, old, old school, right? And just from using an agile approach, it already shrunk, what was essentially an original estimate of between two to three years, which they thought was to be closer to three. It had gotten shrunk down at the last cycle I'd solved between six to eight.
months. Why? Because they're doing iterative feedback loops on the requirements. Think about this is the spec we want, marketing's talked to customer, here's what we want. And that take however many months, they throw it over to your design folks, your architects, and they look at it for a couple of months like, nope, can't do all these things. They kick it back. You can see why they're just turning instead of, hey, this is some initial feedback. What do you think? We're going to go get some more. And they're just iterating through input and immediately getting feedback back what's doing this. So yeah, they're shipping faster.
customers are happy, they're clarifying problems that they would have run into downstream in a very simple sense. if leaders can be that clear about that. Other thing I would just say, for leaders who are like, I don't know, I I don't even know what a scrum master does. I thought we already did this. We brought in these coaches. I don't even know what a coach does. So I couldn't tell if they're doing their job or not. ⁓ They kept them on psychological safety and holding hands and singing kumbaya and getting naked or whatever, but they're right. they can't, I get it if you don't know what a coach does, but here's what I would say.
If you're going to do this agile adoption and you're trying to say like, what does it look like to maybe revisit that? Come back to those core foundational pieces of what am I trying to accomplish? What kind of feedback loops would get that in the basic, basic sense, those coaches? Let's take a look at example of people that are best in their world. I'm sure you all have good engineers at your company is doing great. Let's take the best in the world. Let's take, let's take professional sports, NBA, NFL, pick your favorite. Do they still have coaches? Absolutely. They do. Why?
not because everyone else is doing it. They're doing it because the coach gives value. I tell you what, that coach is in the hot seat. If they don't get results measurably within a few years, that's a short life cycle. Everyone knows that. Highest paid person in any academic institution in general over the nation is your head football coach. It's not the guys with the PhDs. And this is an academic institution. Why do you pay the coach more than your professors? Because it brings in revenue. So it's bottom line, but the bottom line is consider this. If you would get a scrum master,
Brian Milner (18:01) Yeah.
Scott (18:13) And think about that overhead. And this is you, what people said, it's overhead. They're not individual contributors. But if that Scrum Master makes that team of 10, just 10 % better, they just paid for themselves. And think about that, Brian. Think about how little, think about the results you've seen from Agile. 10 % is nothing. 20 or 30 % was my baseline. Like that's the minimum we'd see. But I've seen 2x, 3x, even 5x.
ROI on the cost of that Scrum Master. But sometimes it's the first time a leader will say, well, let's just get rid of that because I don't really know what they do. And then they're forgetting about ROI.
Brian Milner (18:46) Yeah, I think that that's a great analogy to make and it's really relevant to this conversation because why do we think that the professional sports world has such a seemingly easy time in trying to understand the effectiveness of the coaches, right? Because I think part of that is the win loss of the team is directly connected
to those coaches and those coaches are very aware of what the win-loss record is. each, I'm in the US football, I know in the rest of the world it's American football, ⁓ but that's something I grew up playing and like the different sections, even on the defense, you don't just have like the defense, you have the defense ranking, but you also have like the line.
You have the linebackers, you have the secondary, and like in the professional sports, you're very well aware of how that ranking is and the effectiveness of the different units within the defense. And we don't seem to have that same clarity in the business world. seem to, you know, I'll be honest. I think sometimes we get too big of a pass. I think sometimes the coaches aren't really
judged in that same strict way to say, what is the impact that your unit is having? What is the impact that it's having on our business? And maybe that comes back a little bit, Scott, to what we were saying about that we're not really even being clear about what impact we intend for the coach to have. So if we can't understand what the win-loss record is that we're going to be judging them by, then yeah, it's just nebulous. And we just think, well, I don't know, maybe they're doing OK.
Then again, how do I know that we're getting a return on the salary of that coach or whatever is, because I can't articulate what a win is.
Scott (20:53) That's a great point. So, and I'm, I'm glad you, that metaphor, kind of extended it into those other types of coaches. I think we missed that because I mentioned to you earlier about value stream analysis. You, mentioned safe. And again, I'm not, I'm not a safe hater. understand people's feedback on it, but I've done safe implementations. I've done less implementation. Those are like the hypothetical is like cats and dogs getting along right. But the whole point is those are different aspects. So for me, for my team, I feel like I like it when I have coaches that specialize.
on the product side or a technical coach like Paul, who does the certified scrum developer classes. Like there's a coach for the technical practices and there's coaches for leaders. I'm sure when you're doing it, you're more often like on the enterprise coach side or for the certified enterprise coach. So consider that for those who are, know, if you're looking at agile adoption and like, just, we just had scrum masters, that might be great to revisit some of that. It also might be good to kind of take a look at the assessments that are out there and there's, plenty. like a lot of them, but measure yourself. And if you're working with the scrum master thing,
Hey, I see that we're low in this area. What would it look like to move the needle there? Because sometimes it might, the ROI might be like, I just like to see better collaboration. I get frustrated when hear these two groups dropped the ball and now they're busy blaming each other instead of moving forward somehow, right? Or on innovation and the product side, like those experiments I mentioned in the CSPO class. So I think there's opportunities to target that coaching. And then to your point, let's be clear how we measure it. mean, if I was on a team, I would love it if they came and say, hey, our goal is to shrink our cycle time by 30%.
Right? Some of is challenging, but realistic. Well, now I'm buying into everything we're doing. How does that help us shrink the cycle time? If I'm, if I'm a developer, consider this classically, I look at the user store in front of me and I can't help but try to make it the best possible, totally fault tolerant, totally scalable, right? It's modular. It's the most beautiful thing you ever seen. It took three times longer than what we really needed, but I gold plated it. Right. But if you said, and said, we're trying to shrink cycle time, I'm going look and see, you know what? know the goal string cycle time. I can wait on these other enhancements till later. They didn't really ask for them.
I'll put it in the backlog. Right now, let me just get this core MVP version of it done and kick it over. Well, now I'm working in alignment. But for those who don't have that clear goal of how we're using agile towards what goals, whether that's business goals, as you mentioned, or cultural change I've mentioned, ⁓ it's like bowling, but you can't see the pins. So I don't know. I heard some noise. just think I hit something. And it doesn't take much work. Those sessions that sit with leadership, and I'd love to hear your stories about how you've sat with them. It really can be just one to four hours. It can be a half day seminar.
Brian Milner (23:09) Yeah.
Scott (23:19) The feedback I possibly could get from the C level is, I've never seen the alignment like this. I've never seen the clarity like this. Everyone's on the same page. And now they're all that energy, all the energy your people have is towards your goal that you want them to be on, right? So I think it's really powerful.
Brian Milner (23:32) Yeah.
Yeah, no, I agree. So for the leaders out there listening that made it to this part with us, here's kind of my challenge to you is where did you start? ⁓ When, if you've already implemented this into your organization or you feel like you've already implemented it, or like Scott said earlier, if you're looking at it thinking, well, we're fragile, scrum or fall, like whatever, right? If that's kind of your feeling about it, well, where did you start with that?
How did it actually get implemented? And if you haven't started, what I kind of propose to you is ⁓ before you do anything else, I think what might be even most effective is to have a leadership session, right? Bring in an enterprise coach, bring in somebody who's, know, mountain goat, we do this. I know Scott, your company does this as well. And, you know, it's something where you could sit down for, like you said, half a day or so.
and just start to map out, what is it that we hope to achieve with this? Now we set the boundary lines before we start doing training for Scrum Masters or product owners or anything else. Everyone's on the same page about here's what winning looks like.
Scott (24:43) Yes, and to that point i'm gonna hop on that metaphor on the same page Mike's book that if you if you reach out to them and talk about this with them on chip that book you put together short read really really good breaks it down super simple super clear ⁓ on a different line ⁓ and mike actually gave me feedback on he was the first person I asked for feedback on on my book that's behind me but the book I wrote was a was like a fictional story if you feel like you're wondering what this change looks like to go through emotionally and you feel like I so i'll just be honest ⁓
don't know about you, Brian, the number of times I felt imposter syndrome, like who am I to lead this conversation? Who am I to have clarity on where we're going with this? So for my own team, like who am I to decide this is the true north and where we're going? I remember that when we did the everybody it's AI or nothing, I knew there's different opinions. I knew everyone's up. I've got to give that clarity and call it inside. Like you could feel that knot in the stomach. They're going to think I'm a fraud, I'm a sham. What do I know? If you're wondering what it looks like to try to lead that type of change and really be in it and part of it.
Brian Milner (25:15) yeah.
Scott (25:39) ⁓ What I was writing in my book was a fictional tale kind of Patrick Lincione that to walk you through that experience of what looks like the suddenly thrust into you're supposed to lead this whole agile thing like I I know software development I don't know that and it does reference what you mentioned Brian about The goals and using path to agility also references the cultural things but it tells stories around what does it look like to what coaches do What does it look like to to get coached yourself? So when you talk about that off-site Brian, I think the biggest thing I would encourage people to try out is
start that conversation where you're getting feedback and someone's holding the mirror to you. Cause my friends, there's a powerful story I heard a year or two ago when the senior leader, I want to say it's over 600 people, maybe it's just 400, but he was talking with like one of the, person that heads up all the scrum masters and he was talking about the feedback and like, no, everyone seems okay. I haven't heard any negative feedback. And she was just so calm. She said, you know, everyone's afraid of you, right? So my friends who are listening to this, if you're a leader,
Who's your mirror? Because everyone in the organization is gonna say, yes, that's a great idea. Love that idea. You bet we're gonna do that. And they're walking around like, I don't know why we're doing this. But no one, if I care about my job security at all, I'm not gonna be really brutally honest with you. But isn't that what you would like? Is someone to be brutally honest with you and tell you, I think that's not gonna work out. Or I think you're misunderstanding a core piece this or whatever it is. Who's in your corner to support you? And that coaching or that leadership all site session that Brian's talking about could be exactly what you need because you may not be aware of how you're coming across. The number of times I'll talk with leaders.
One quick story on this just to say ⁓ how blatant it can be. We got called in by a leader saying we've got problems. We're not delivering. We say we're gonna do these things. We're not getting them done, right? Common story for it. We have a coach work with them, meets with the teams, does an assessment, gets feedback. Now he's in front of all the other senior leaders together. Let's hear the feedback from your analysis coach of what the problems are here. What's wrong with the teams? And he says, actually, ⁓ the problem is that someone keeps interrupting the team and changing the priorities on them. He says, huh, who is it?
guess who it was. The very leader that called us in was the cause of the problems. think about how unaware you are that you're in front of your peers as a leader and don't realize you just totally pulling yourself. And I don't mean that to like shame the person I'm saying my friends, it's so easy to not be aware of what's really going on in the trenches with your teams, how you're perceived, maybe the vision's not as clear as you thought it was. I commonly see that. Maybe they don't understand. Maybe they don't feel like they have a voice because all me in meetings like
Brian Milner (27:35) Yeah, yeah.
Scott (28:03) The leader's like, okay, everyone, we're doing X. I met with Brian Milner. He's incredible. And now we've got the vision. So what does everyone think about that? And someone's like, well, I think it might be an issue because of X. Well, that's not really your area. You don't need to worry about that. Anyone else? Well, I think this is a problem because our competitors are doing Y. You know, that's really above your pay grade. Wouldn't you agree? All right, anyone else? And then you inadvertently shut everyone down, helping them see the vision, but you really just reinforce, it's not really okay to disagree with me. Those are examples ⁓ that like the leader has a blind spot.
And when you're trying to move forward with agile adoption, think it really is important that you know where it's going. You're open to feedback. You have someone in your corner who's also aware what's happening. That's just good for you period. It's good for the teams, but now you're there for the real progress it makes to affirm the steps we're taking and not just affirm, you know, change theater. We're just doing agile to check the box, which is a lot of what we see. But as a leader, you'd be like, no, I'm aware of what it really looks like and what we're trying to do. And I've communicated that and then iterate through that. But I'm really glad you brought that offsite.
Encourage people that every time we've done that the feedbacks been great. I'm sure it's been the same for you Brian It's not a lot of time and it's not a lot of cost but might be exactly what you need to jumpstart that and again AI we ain't got no time You ain't got no time to figure this stuff out and figure out where you're gonna move forth AI and your transformation what it looks like to do software development now when This guy's this is a recent story that developer can do the work of eight to ten valid solid code, know, they've reviewed it. It's good so
what do we do now, but we're not in front of that change. I think it's partly we didn't have agile down well, we didn't have feedback loops or transparency. So your idea that just doing that session, I think is really, really great.
Brian Milner (29:37) Yeah, and it's a small investment ⁓ when you think about the entirety of the business. I know having leaders in a place for several hours has got a big bill just from those salaries, relatively, comparatively to what you stand to gain, it's a small amount. And the other side of it is if it doesn't go well, you haven't invested six months, you've invested an afternoon.
And you have a pretty clear picture that this is gonna work or this is not gonna work. ⁓ I do wanna address one thing, because when you talked about kind of imposter syndrome and stuff out there, I completely agree. And I know there's probably leaders listening to it thinking, well, why me? Why would I be the person to do this? Maybe that's someone else in the organization or someone else can step up. And ⁓ here's kind of the secret.
Scott (30:10) Yeah.
Brian Milner (30:34) Everyone feels that way, right? There's not a person who doesn't feel like, what makes me qualified to do that? ⁓ At least at one point, right? Until they just started to inhabit it and live it. So here's my 10 cent psychiatric ⁓ little piece of advice to anyone out there. ⁓ Whether you think of, and I'm a firm believer in this, whether,
you're a religious person or whether you believe and it's kind of like the fate has led you to this point or whatever. Whatever the thing is, I believe strongly you have been put in the position that you are in for a reason. The career path that you have had has led you to this point for a reason and you are the person who's there. So what I would say is if you have that feeling of an imposter syndrome of,
why would it be me and why shouldn't it be someone else and then maybe I'm not qualified. My question to you is who else would do it? Right? If it's not you, who, who? And the question, the answer is there's not anyone because you are the person who's there. So that's what I'd say. And I get it. I know I'm going a little bit off topic here, but ⁓ I think that's an important point to say for leaders is that, you know, you are in this position for a purpose and
Scott (31:34) Yeah, boy, boy.
No, no, no, no.
Brian Milner (31:56) People are looking to you and this is your opportunity, I think, to make that impact and say, yes, it's my time. I'm here. Everything I've learned, every experience I've had prior to this has led me to this point. I'm going to bring all that to bear and I'm going to do the best job I can based on everything I know. you know, as I said, you're here for a reason.
Scott (32:19) Love it, Brian. One, sincerely, I really like the ego there. For some of the people I've had conversations with, this is some of meaningful stuff. So I'm gonna throw in my pitch on top of that, if you don't mind, piggyback. If you're in a leadership position, you have authority and influence in a way that can dramatically affect the work life for the people that are under your care. And I'm gonna say care, because we spend more time at work than anywhere else. Most of the people, if you look at statistically over IT,
Brian Milner (32:29) Yeah. Yeah.
Scott (32:48) IT has some of the most hated positions of any job you can have. Think of the pressure, constant deadlines, unclear requirements. We don't get positive feedback. We get negative feedback like all the time. If you have business and IT like at loggerheads, so all this pressure and all this stress. And now we know even the physical impacts of those things. been, I've worked with companies where people literally got hospitalized because of the stress and the problems of this. So if I'm a leader, it matters how you do this. It matters how you show up. And it is not just about.
making sure everyone's busy and working on right things. And that's what I felt when I was a manager, everyone busy working. It does matter. can we make this a place where people enjoy coming to work? Can we make a place because of that they bring their very best? That they feel like they're bringing their own strengths to bear, that they're finding fulfillment in their work, that they're learning and growing, you know, that they feel connected to others. Gallups were polls, so like, you have a best friend at work? You know, is what you're doing clear. So those things measurably really matter. The happiness index, Harvard wrote on that. There's a book on that. So you as a leader,
have a mask, you're the rudder. You can steer and change directions in powerful ways. So I encourage you step up, but I'm gonna add on to what you're saying, Brian, for your own sake, is work meaningful to you? Do you feel your voice matters? Do you feel like you're bringing your best? Do feel like you're there for a reason? And you can see that the difference you're making, because I work with leaders who don't, they don't feel like they're having an impact. They don't understand how to do that. It's almost like you're in this, it's that classic thing of the scientific experiment about the learned helplessness with a dog.
who gets shocked and after a while it's not electrified anymore but the dog won't leave the cage, it's afraid of getting shocked. If you're in a spot where I just keep getting deadlines, I keep getting feedback from stakeholders, they're not happy with what we're doing and you don't know how to do it, it's an incredibly disempowering feeling like I don't know and I don't like going to work. You know, and write down, I'll just go somewhere else. I mean, Brian, you've been around, it's not gonna be different where the next place you go, right? That's what I've seen either. But you can make a difference and in the end, if you bring the results that your stakeholders want, they don't care how you did it.
Brian Milner (34:35) Yeah. Right, right.
Scott (34:43) Scrum, save, they don't care. You can implement it. And this is the truth of it. And I'm not doing just because I'm in this space and like I'm trying to, you know, pitch something and sell something. I'm not. saying honestly, it's the fact that felt like we made a difference there and I would get feedback like, can't believe how things have changed in here. I've been in my, you know, this space my entire career. I've never seen anything like that. I've never seen people so happy. I've never seen a ship early. I've never seen the quality of this good consistently over and over, not every time, right? Cause they don't always do everything that they should and all that stuff. kind of get it.
So it might be that I'm just throwing out action items for folks here because I just did this. I went back when I got off a client call and thought, why am I not fired up and motivated? What is this? Because I love that feeling like I'm so excited for them what we're going to do. And so I went back and I revisited ⁓ Iki Guy. So Vic Bonacci on our team has done great work for us, but he's big on Iki Guy. I think he's even done a video out there. But it's a little bit like the hedgehog concept. What am I passionate about? What can I make money from being my very best? And it was so good to revisit that. I'm like,
stay true to who you are, express it that way. And for those who are listening, it could be a personality type test. You could go revisit your strength finder, because everyone's like, I took the strength finder. What were your strengths? I don't know. One began with C. I don't know. You didn't use it. You don't know. Revisit strength finder, revisit, take a look at Iki guy for fun, or the hedgehog concept, or Myers-Briggs, whatever that is. But find who you are and what that looks like to show up authentically. And what's the gap between where you are
Brian Milner (35:55) Hahaha
Scott (36:07) and where you need to be to feel like I know how to move forward. And it could be that session you're talking about, Brian. It could be revisiting the agile basics. Most leaders never got training, which I think is still, how do you lead change if you don't understand what it, I can't go out and coach a hockey team. I don't know how to lead a hockey team. I don't know. You got to put those skates on. It's about all I know. So if you're, maybe you revisit the training, maybe you can use AI to say, here's my role. I'm trying to do X, give me some ideas. Cause that's what I was doing with AI. I described myself and my team and the work we're doing.
but you'll at least get some feedback or reach out and make a call because that investment you make, whether it's a thousand dollars for training or getting, you know, a thousand dollars for the coaching, the multiplier, the results we've seen over in Oregon is really significant. And if you bring your very best, if you bring your authentic self, which people can tell if you're showing up that way or not. And if you're able to do things like, gosh, I don't know what that is, explain that to me or help me understand why that matters. You show that you're a learner right alongside with them. You're in there with them. Like, I know I feel overwhelmed with AI too, but here's a podcast I was listening to.
go first, do something. It's a bit like showing up and being brave. You'll be amazed how people really that appeals to them. They show up. And if they feel like you're the kind of leader who can be real with them and lead them, even though you're not the expert. And I do believe in that book, Rookie Smarts. You don't have to know it, but you don't need to be an AI expert to lead it. In fact, you're better off not saying, I don't know about this. Can someone explain why that matters on this tool versus that one? They're going to be like, wow, this leader is someone who can learn from us too, because they're the technologists. You show up that way, your people will go through the fire for you.
They will follow you if you leave the company. They wanna keep working with you. Because the number of times I've asked people who all had a leader like that, my friends, it's maybe one out of 10. Their entire career, the highest I've seen is two out of 10, right? In the sampling. So people haven't had a leader like that. But if you can show up that way and think about the excitement of your own journey, I love it that you got onto that branch. I think it might be the biggest needle mover for it all. Because now you're the kind of leader who can step in and look at what are we, why are we doing agile? How do we do there?
Brian Milner (37:32) Yeah.
Scott (37:58) and be there in the mud with them learning alongside and figuring that stuff out to get, not just get results for the company, obviously, but the people have a better place to work that are kind of under your care and how they show up. And you get the wins, like they stay longer, you every measurable you could use, they don't steal from the company, they don't sue you after they leave. But there's something that's really, really significant that they don't get very often in their career. I think it's really powerful.
Brian Milner (38:13) Yeah.
Yeah. And I know this podcast is going a little bit longer than our normal ⁓ link, but as you were talking about this, it just made me think about this one thing. Maybe this is good way to wrap up. don't know. ⁓ there's a company I worked with recently. ⁓ So a little shout out to them. I won't say their name because I preserve their privacy, but they have ⁓ a ⁓ company value that ⁓ is to be data-driven.
Scott (38:24) Yes.
Brian Milner (38:48) where reasonable. And I've loved this because, you know, as I've heard them explain this, what they say is, yeah, we want to be data driven, you know, where it's reasonable, because there's places where it's hard to quantify things. And their example that they always throw out for this is, what's the ROI of hugging your mom? You know, like they said, you can't really quantify that ROI. And they
Scott (39:11) That's great.
Brian Milner (39:18) they use as an example to say, there are some things that we can't really quantify, but you know, you just know there is a return on that investment. I just can't really put it into data. I'm gonna try to use data wherever possible, cause that's what should drive us. But when you find those things where you say, no, I just kind of, you know, we all recognize we're all in agreement. That's valuable. That's something we should go forward with. So when we're talking about like the ROI of Agile,
I think there's gonna be a mix of those moments. think there's definitely things we can point to data-wise and say, here's the bottom line effect that this is having. But I think there are also benefits like hugging your mom that are gonna be involved with this as well that you kind of look at and say, well, how can I point to the dollar value of feeling better about coming to work? But I do. I think I'm a better person. I think that our company is a better company as a result of it.
Scott (40:09) You know it.
Yeah, no, I love that. I think it's awesome.
Brian Milner (40:17) Yeah. All right. Well, Scott, thank you so much for coming. I appreciate you ⁓ coming on and ⁓ this is, it's always the same way with Scott. I started in thinking, I don't know, do we have really enough to say on this topic? And then you get into it like, wow, we really have some really good stuff to say on this topic. So I appreciate you coming out, Scott.
Scott (40:34) We should do this again. Yeah,
always a pleasure, Brian. Thank you so much for making the space. Love the work that you're doing. You guys are great.
Brian Milner (40:42) Thanks.