Agile World

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Hello and welcome to the XTech Podcast by Fox Agency. I’m your host, Debbie Forster, MBE. I’m the CEO at the Tech Talent Charter and an advocate and campaigner for diversity, inclusion and innovation in the tech industry.

So today I’m thrilled to be joined by the president of Agile World, Karl Smith. Karl, welcome.

Hello. Thank you for inviting me on.

So Karl, what we like to do, I love to understand how people got into tech. There’s some very straight linear paths, those of us who are born proto geeks, others take those windy paths. Do you mind talking me through, how did you end up here within tech?

Completely accidentally. I come from a time, I was born in the ’60s and I know tech existed then, but within very confined environments, I believe that was mainly military, there was computing and some scientific in universities. But my involvement in tech really came in probably in the ’80s when I taught myself how to program because I was interested in it and I never thought it would be a job. When you start out with why are you doing that? I’d always get people saying, “Why are you doing that?” I go, “Well, it interests me.” And they go, “Oh right, okay.” But my actual work, what I trained to be, was a designer because I look at things and I try and understand them and the design process… I keep on being told by people, the design process was invented in the ’90s or the noughties and I’m going, “No, I mean the earliest record I found the design process is the 14th century and that was Leonardo.”

So how we as humans create new things is either innovation, building upon something that we’ve seen or invention, which is moments of Eureka. And I’m fascinated by both of those. The level of Eureka in my life is very low, like most normal human beings. But I do a huge amount of innovation and like Leonardo who looked at nature, I look at everything and wonder how it might work in different circumstances. So I think when I was about 11, I started painting in oils. I got my pocket money and I’d buy a tube of oil paint and over a period of weeks, I’d get enough to be able to paint something.

It sounds a little bit scary, but I was creating images at one point using a typewriter. I worked out, I was very good at coordinate thinking and thinking ahead in coordinates. And it was just playing with different pieces. I mean, a typewriter is a piece of technology.

Yes, exactly.

It’s just not very well understood in our current terms except as a keyboard. So I was just interested in playing with things. I was painting in oils and then mixing them with gouache, which is like a water-based paint. I actually went for my foundation course interview and got in based around the stuff I’d done at home, not the stuff I’d done at school.

That’s telling. I do think a lot of people who found their way into tech didn’t do it via school, it’s other pathways. Was there a moment or a point at which you were doing one thing and then found yourself… So if you accidentally ended up here, was there a point where you think you went from purely design and suddenly it was what we now call today tech?

Yes. There was actually. In my first job, I was walking down the corridor and I sort of heard a conversation, it was actually a bit of shouting, about a problem that they were trying to solve. And apparently the room was meant to have been locked because it was a military project and I didn’t know that at the time. So someone was shouting about, “Why can’t you people work this out?” And I kind of listened. I was being a bit nosy. I mean, it was my first job. I was working for the EMI group and at that point in the early ’90s, late ’80s, EMI group was massive. It owned the Royal Ordnance and that’s actually who the project was for. And through the door I shouted, “Try this and this and this.” And they-

So you were doing help desk before there was a help desk?

Well, it just seemed obvious to me. I mean, one of the things I’m really good at is pattern analysis. I don’t need a computer to do pattern analysis. I can do it in my head. And I think that’s probably one of my superpowers from being dyslexic. And I solved their problem and they said, “Oh, you come in here and explain that.” And they’re going, “Well…” And what it was was a piece of information architecture. And a lot of people, depending upon which nation you’re in, people think information architecture is user experience. It used to be called that in the US it used to be called information architecture and that’s kind of how I fell into user experience because actually, as I said, I did information architecture. And actually, true information architecture is data architecture. So it was a data architecture project for NATO.

Wow.

To show you how old it was, the actual output format was to be microfiche.

There’s a word, ladies and gentlemen, we don’t hear every day in a podcast. Those of you of a certain age may need to be Googling the term to figure out what that was. Rest assured they’re not [inaudible 00:05:45] around, but they were real things. So I mean it’s one of the things that I love about your career, Karl. In moving through this, you have got into things before the hype curve. You have got in areas before they were named as areas, et cetera.

Yeah.

I think you and I share a certain skepticism of hype around different things, which is again why I was looking forward to this interview because you are the president of Agile World. When I was looking across, talk about things that have had hype around it, Agile just turned 21. So in some countries, it can now buy its own alcoholic. It can buy itself a beer. You’ve been through that whole journey. When we talk about Agile, God that went from being a brand new hot idea to, you can’t swing a cat without hearing Agile used [inaudible 00:06:36] As an expert in the area, what do you love about it? What do you hate about it these days?

So what I love is doing it with a small team of people who get it because actually it’s phenomenal. When I first heard about Agile, I thought, “Oh right, this is another load of garbage. This can’t possibly be true.” One of the things about tech in general is everyone’s highly opinionated for good reason because they know something. And so getting people to work in a team is actually really, really difficult in technology. The team player motif that is in lots of areas of business just didn’t play very well in technology. Even having the same direction, you’d get 50 million different solutions that were all right. They were all right for different various reasons and different sets of values, but they were still correct. And it meant that having a conversation, doing a project or anything was just chaos. And I remember doing project work before Prince, which is where you had to make up your own project methodology. Prince came along and it gave you a formalized process. Prince Two came along and everyone gave up on project management.

No, again, there are some people in the car now are noting to self, “Google Prince, Prince Two.” So let’s think about the youngsters in the room who didn’t know that. So when we say Agile, who people who got [inaudible 00:07:58] what was the breakthrough? What do you think, if we boiled away all the hype, all the rubbish, all the standups and the retros and everything else, what’s it and what do we sometimes lose sight of? What do we mean by it?

So I think the it of Agile is community and everyone shouts about their rights, but they’re not willing to give rights to other people. I think one of my favorite statements, I can’t remember where I originally heard, “We have two ears and one mouth. So we’re meant to listen twice as much as we speak.” And I think that’s kind of an epitome for Agile is actually to listen to learn. And when you don’t understand to ask questions, instead of forcing your personal agenda because you think you’re right. You might be right, but actually in context of a lot of very smart people in the room, your right may not be the right solution.

I think that was one of the astonishing things I found in Agile is that you could get people to listen in a way that they had never really done before because they were so used to bulldozing. There was a big problem in tech with the smartest person in the room thinking and you’re going, “If we add the IQ together of everyone that’s in this room, we could basically storm any political party or power that exists.” But none of these people care.

Or they care about their little kingdom, their little expertise.

Yeah.

Because it’s cross-disciplinary, isn’t it, as well?

Yeah.

This is not just engineers. I mean, are there ways in which you see it going wrong? Because there was that breakthrough, wasn’t it? There was that move from Waterfall into Agile that was groundbreaking, that did really transform some projects. But then like anything, the hype comes in. Where do you see it? So you said when you love it when you walk in, there’s a smaller team and they get it. What does that look and feel like? Then what’s the opposite of that? Where do you go in and people are just running on the hype and running it into the ground?

So the small team thing is a lot about personalities and skills. The problem, I think, that’s coming to Agile is a commoditization of skills. The notion that you can just template a team, which is just nonsense. Within any team, you’ll have two or three amazing people in their skill sets who are usually terrible communicators, who literally can’t talk to any other human and that’s fine, you don’t need them to. So having a standup, to them is kind of punching them in the face. It’s a horrible experience for them and they don’t want to do it. So I think the real thing about Agile is to listen and find out how people want to work. Because Agile is not a religion. You don’t have to apply everything in an absolute sense to be effective in working, you do need to understand the super structure around Agile.

So why do you have standups? Because you want to manage daily risk and opportunities. It’s not a report, it’s not a reporting function, it’s actually a communication function. I’ve stood in standups and found that two people are working on the same thing and doing it differently, which is going to cause a major issue later. And instead of saying, “You two, stop it.” You say, “You two, speak to each other.” You step away from it, you don’t… So one of the things that I see a lot of is scrum masters trying to manage people. Why? They’re all adults. They managed to get the office, they got dressed all without your help.

Well, you have to look. Maybe Karl, there’s some people that you look and say, “Didn’t even get dressed properly coming into work.”

I’ve worked in digital agencies where flip-flops are the de rigeur and I’ve worked in consultancies where you watch out in case you get hit with a side of someone’s tie, it will slice you. Those affectations are interesting because they tell you about the culture, but they don’t tell you about the capability. It’s about giving people space and not managing people. I think if I was to actually apply one simple description around Agile, Agile is about not managing projects.

Okay, no, that’s groundbreaking. And a few managers clutch their heart and a few scrum masters are frantically deleting this from their listening list. And help me, because what I bring into this, if I’m running a tech business, if I’m running a tech team and I’m not a native-born Agile, help me expand on that. What is it? What isn’t it? What should I be looking for, what should I be avoiding if I’m working with people who are my Agile? And I love that you talk about as a religion. I’ve met some agile evangelists and high priests, right? Who are full of the Ten Commandments of what-

Scary.

… you can and can’t do. So help me out, if I’m coming in, particularly as a newbie, to manage this and to get the best out of Agile for my business, my product, what is it and what isn’t it?

So Agile is an encapsulated experience. And the reason I say that is because you can’t run it the same way you run anything else. Now I just said that it’s a non-project management capability, but you work within an environment that’s all managed. So if you want to kill Agile, put a bunch of managers in it because actually that’s the biggest anti-patent there is. Agile is not a managed process. It’s a space that allows for a bit of chaos, because actually even within the current managed environments in an organization, it’s all chaos. It’s just that it’s got a very stringent set of constraints. Coming into it, the first thing I’d say is why do you want to use Agile? Because it’s really not an easy thing to do. Because your friend down the road is using it, it doesn’t mean to say that you are capable or actually need it.

It’s kind of like, “I’ve got all these tools on the wall, why would I choose Agile instead of Sigma Six?” People say, “Well, Sigma Six is a process management and definition tool.” Well, actually it’s not. It’s a bit more complex than that. And Agile is not a project delivery capability, it’s a continuous innovation and responsive system for customers and they’re not really what people think they are. At least not in the [inaudible 00:14:32] that delivers value. So the first thing is why would you want to use it? Second, are you up for the change in status that comes with using Agile? And people are going, “What do you mean? I’m the managing director.” Well, there’s this concept called servant leadership and everyone’ll go, “Oh yeah, I’m a servant leader.” I go, “Are you?”

But someone fetched me my coffee quickly.

Exactly. “So I’m the servant leader. What does everyone want for their coffee?” “Yeah, but you are the managing director.” “Yeah, I know. But at the moment you’ve already got all the information you need from me. The greatest job that I can do is buy you all a coffee.” That inversion of the pyramid is a bit of a shock to people. I have been that person that’s been changed in the role, but I changed myself because I wanted to give people an Agile working environment and what I became was the fount of knowledge because I knew how everything worked. I understood the context that people didn’t understand. I wasn’t the product owner of the individual products or features, but I understood the ecosystem and that’s really what executives become. They become ecosystem managers.

So secondly, are you ready for change? And then the last thing is, can you stop micromanaging? Can you step away from the grindstone and see what the amazing people you’ve hired could actually do for your organization if you allowed them? And this is the problem we have in many organizations is people have been crippled over the years, from the wild, happy, bright face people they were when they came from university or college or when they first joined and now they’re like, “Oh, I can’t do that. If I step across the line, they’ll buzz me.”

And actually we’re now saying for organizations to be effective, we need them to be innovative. Well, innovation as a way of thinking is counterintuitive in most organizations because it breaches governance. So you can’t ask people to do something they’re not allowed to do. So this is the kind of last piece. Will you create a bubble in your organization that will allow innovation? That means that current governance won’t work in it. You’re going to upset a lot of people by doing Agile, but if you want any chance at all of success, you have to do it with adjusted governance.

All right, then let me ask you something else. If I’m a company and I’m sitting there patting myself on the back of, “Yeah, we’ve been Agile for 10 years.” Give me some questions or something to provoke some thought to understand if I’m really maximizing, getting the most from Agile, what should I be asking myself?

A lot of people focus on Agile instead of what the company does. So your organization’s been Agile for 10 years. Have you resolved the top 10 customer complaints? No, they’ve still got the same complaints? Well, then you’re not Agile. Agile is about getting your requirements from the customers and fulfilling their needs.

Good. All right. So we’ve now sent some people frantically going back, notes to do, et cetera. I love to, when we have someone on the show, then say, “Oh, apart from just your area of expertise, let’s look at the horizon.” All right, horizon facing. If I’m looking at the horizon with you, what’s worrying, frustrating, getting under your skin that’s going on?

So big business Agile is a masterful… I’m trying not to swear. It’s just the greatest con that I’ve seen in my lifetime. It doesn’t work. So going back to why Agile? Agile was a response to bureaucracy, that we couldn’t get things done because we had to fill out 15 pieces of paper before we could write a line of code or we could do anything. And you’re going, that’s governance. So now you’ve got adjusted governance and you’re free, except you’re not. You now have a bunch of people who are coming in and creating Agile metrics and we go, “Well, who cares?” Agile metrics does not help our shareholders achieve a better financial outcome or our customers achieve their tasks. This narrow focus on Agile is completely wrong. Agile is the hammer to get the job done. It’s not-

We don’t have analytics for the hammer, for the carpet.

No, it’s-

We’re looking at the house that gets built.

I think they’re vanity metrics. “How many Agile teams do we have?” Who cares? I mean, honestly, it’s like how many people are wearing red today? It’s a pointless metric. A lot of people talk about DORA metrics and I’m going, well that’s really fascinating, but I really don’t care how many lines of codes get shifted. I could write a line of code that’s garbage and I hit my target. So did we answer the problems that customers have and that the business has, is the true metric of success.

Now a lot of people talk about speed with Agile. Agile makes things faster. Actually Agile doesn’t make anything faster, it just gets rid of waste. So people are focused on… They see the value outcome of, “Wow, they really delivered that quick to market.” They got rid of all of the unfocused activities at the beginning of the project. They got rid of all of the unnecessary changes during the project. They moved away from a project mentality into a continuous delivery mentality. So they didn’t deliver a product. They delivered 19 features in an existing product and released them on a constant flow. They completely changed how work was done in order to get immediate value.

They did something called economic reordering or economic ordering. And they said the most important feature is the one that gives us money first off. Well no, what they said was the most important feature was the one that doesn’t upset our customers, that gives them extra capability so that when they’re looking to do something that they’re being complaining about for the last five years, it’s resolved. Economic ordering isn’t just about money, it’s about delivering capability at the right points.

Then beyond Agile, if we look at the world of tech, we’ll start on the bad news and then we’ll look at the good news. Is there anything that when you look at on the horizon for tech that is worrying or frustrating you, hype or otherwise?

So I really think that I’m going to mention Agile again briefly. Agile has caused a lot of problems in organizations because it’s being used as a battering ram to change stuff that has got nothing to do with Agile or classify as an actual experience. So let’s spend half a billion dollars on a new piece of technology that allows us to do order management within technology from the business as part of our Agile transformation. Okay, well that makes sense. Actually, no it doesn’t because actually in Agile you don’t have order management. So what you do is you get rid of the order management system completely and you embed the business people in the delivery mechanism, which is the teams that do the delivery. So they no longer have to say, “I need 50 widgets, get on with it.” They go, “This is what we’re trying to achieve.” And the tech people go, “Well, how do we do that? What does it look like?” And they work together.

It goes back to your first premise. So knowing the why, it’s cutting through the hype, it’s cutting through the terms and really looking at, what are the outputs we want? And it’s the business and the people. I think what was powerful as well at the top is when I was meeting these evangelists, these high priests of Agile-

I probably know them.

Well, or even worse, I’ve got in some managers who come in and they explain to me about the scrum master and this and the product, those are role titles. That’s not people and that’s not understanding people’s capabilities, their ways of working, those sorts of things. And again, tech is as only as good as it’s people and processes are only as good as they serve the people, not the other way around. Being a bit more controversial, are there any other big things happening in tech that are… I think in hype, you and I, as I said at the start of the piece, is we’ve been in this space long enough to watch the next big thing, the next great thing. And some of them do go on to become great things. Are there any things that you are feeling a bit of Emperor’s new clothes, you’re not so sure about?

Well obviously, the main one is the Metaverse. It’s just so much hype. I mean, the hype is for investors and large venture capitalists to put money into it and everyone else is going, “Are you bonkers? There’s nothing there.” You look at and you go, “Well, what ecosystems are we building?” And people go, “Oh, we’re doing this.” So you’re saying you’re creating a new set of front doors and people look at you like, “Yes, but you can walk through it and you can do this.” And I’m going, “Yeah, but what am I doing? I’m going and buying stuff. Yeah? I can already do that without spending $100 million on it.”

And let’s be honest, they’re very expensive front doors as well. These are not just anybody’s front doors. These are gold-plated, quite expensive doorknobs that we are getting to go in those doors.

I think there’s a place for it. But I remember going up to St. Andrew’s University and supporting their PhD program back in, I think it was 2014. And this guy had created a true Metaverse. He had created a room full of projectors that allowed you to walk through a digital landscape, but you could physically walk. You didn’t have to wear a headset. As you moved, it vectored you in the landscape and moved all of the imagery. And I just, “That’s astonishing.” And I think the kits that he used for it cost about 8,000 pounds and the software was obviously his proprietary. But still, I can see people wanting to use that for fun. I’m not quite there with people using it for commerce. We’d need a more fundamental change in our society before that. And I know we’ve had one with COVID, but COVID has simply just got bricks and mortar companies to realize that they should be online, hasn’t really changed their perceptions of digital. They still think it’s a channel instead of… So I describe most organizations as technology companies that sell something.

But it is that, and I think that if I’m a listener and I’m looking within my company, it’s always asking myself. Because I think the difference between the hype and the great breakthroughs is it very quickly demonstrates this is the business value, this is the value for users. There’s a really clear why, as opposed to, if we go back to your earlier metaphor, “Here’s my hammer. Look it’s a hammer. I’ve got a brand and a theme and a thingamabob. I’ve made a fantastic new thingabob. Don’t know who’s going to use it. Don’t know what it’s going to used for. Don’t know if it’s safe to be used, but my God, for a low price of 9.99, I will sell you my thingabob.” And everybody runs around, “Buy me a thingabob.” Am I getting just too cynical in my old age, Karl?

No, I think it’s not cynicism, it’s critical thinking. I look at it and think, “I would love for it to be real.” Not because I think the companies that are doing it are the right people to do it, but because we all like Ready Player One. But if you go back to the beginning of film and listen to the underlying rationale, it’s kind of quite destructive as an underlying rationale. We’re not there yet. We’re not to the point where our world is so destroyed that we don’t want to be in it anymore. Our world’s quite beautiful really, regardless of the number of people trying to destroy it. We’re not in that environment where we have little or no choice and a digital landscape is better than the real landscape.

And there’s a lot of reason we want to keep people motivated to have a really beautiful, real landscape. Because I don’t want to [inaudible 00:26:20] the terrible cynical, looking at the horizon. If you going to give me advice on something to look at that’s actually coming through, that is quite exciting, that people maybe are missing, what should I be looking at and thinking [inaudible 00:26:31] actually unpack my company and think, “Ooh, there’s an idea I could use.”

So I think there’s a new thinking around data that originated from a number of different sources. So it came from Big Data, it came from blockchain, came from a number of different technologies. But the idea is that we as individuals should own our own data and that should be portable. Now if we think about how we run our world at the moment, our data is actually subjugated to a number of different companies that we allow to have it. But actually, the real value points, our credit, as it were, is actually our data. What we like, where we shop, the time that we have available for work, the time that we have available for entertainment, all of that data is us. So it’s kind of like digital avatars, the digital sense of ourselves. And there’s also a whole thing around obscurification because I think at the moment everything’s transparent, which is really quite scary.

I genuinely don’t use my own date of birth online, not because I’m trying to hook up, but because it’s a piece of banking data. Why would you give out banking data to complete stranger companies? I think what we need is layered control and portability around our data. Honestly, I have no idea why I have to use my real name. Call me Bob, call me Red Square. In a digital sense, as long as Red Square equates back to real identity information, that’s really all that matters. And until we can make that leap from this very GUI type thinking around data where everything has to look like it is.

It’s also the same problem we have with AI. Why are we trying to get machines to think humans? It’s biased and quite messy the way humans actually think. I mean, what’s the intent behind AI? Why are we doing it? If we’re trying to give machines the ability to think, what is it we think that they can do that we can’t do? They don’t have the ability to have that complex transient thought process that we do and to draw data from so many sources as we do. Because actually you have to plug those data sources in. And often we don’t even know where we get our data from. So I think there’s a bunch of things there, but I think data portability is the biggest commercial thing that’s coming up.

Is any sector, is anyone doing that I should be looking at that are starting to unlock that and use that in interesting ways yet? Or is it still just too new to see it work?

So the biggest area of data portability will be banking and commerce because it’s all about security as well. I think that banks tend to only change when they have to. But the way that the world has deregulated banking, there’s lots of banks out there that don’t care about whether or not you’ve got bricks and mortar building or how you function. They’ll create one product and one service and they’ll wipe the floor with everyone.

Banking as a service, it’s coming.

Yeah. So the first person that replaces a credit card with a portable data unit, that allows me to bank without having to give my real name, except in the underlying data for national security or whatever, but I shouldn’t have to give it to a shoe shop. I shouldn’t have to give my date of birth to a shoe shop, to someone I don’t know that works behind a counter or to their online system that may or may not have been hacked. I shouldn’t have to give my email system my true location at any moment in time, so that my house can be robbed by a really smart engineer selling that data. Do you see what I-

Absolutely.

We are creating a lot of problems because of our… I think it’s actually what we’re trying to do is propagate ourselves into the digital realm, instead of using digital properly, which is to say that actually digital is a unique experience and should be a unique thing. I shouldn’t be making an avatar of myself. I should be making an avatar of my data.

Fantastic. Okay, so we’re throwing down a gauntlet, Karl, you and I, on anyone who’s making breakthroughs on that, we want to hear about it because I think-

Yeah.

… I do think, and the more I’ve talked to others about this idea is there’s real potential there. It’s kind of a win-win, whichever side of the desk or the sales counter that you’re looking at, that this could be. So that’s something for us to look at. So a little less meta, a little bit more data portability will be what we’re looking for. Fantastic. Karl, listen, you and I could probably talk for hours and probably will. We’ll probably bring you back again soon. But I just want to thank you so much for joining me today, so much on this episode and looking forward to hearing more about what you’re doing in future.

Thank you very much for inviting me.

Thank you for listening. If you’re a tech innovator and would like to appear as a guest on the show, email us now at XTech@fox.agency. And finally, thank you to the team of experts at Fox Agency who make this podcast happen. I’m Debbie Forster and you’ve been listening to the XTech podcast.

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