Definitely, Maybe Agile
Definitely, Maybe Agile
Ep. 135: Leadership and Change with Melissa Boggs
In this episode, Peter Maddison and David Sharrock are joined by Melissa Boggs, a leadership coach, consultant, and keynote speaker for Agile 2024. They discuss Melissa's experience as the co-CEO and chief scrum master of Scrum Alliance during the challenging times of the COVID-19 pandemic. The conversation dives into the topics of employee experience design, non-hierarchical organizations, and the importance of co-creating buy-in for organizational change.
Key Takeaways:
- Delegating authority and distributing power within an organization requires providing context, setting boundaries, and preparing employees for decision-making responsibilities.
- Leaders often avoid change due to a fear of losing authority, power, or performance. Coaching and empathy are essential to help leaders move from a state of caution to curiosity and eventually courage.
- Co-creating buy-in through collaboration and involving employees in decision-making processes leads to organic, natural buy-in and better solutions, as opposed to top-down directives.
Discount Information: Melissa provided a discount code for listeners interested in attending Agile 2024 in Dallas, where she will be the closing keynote speaker. The code "A24-podcast" will give you $100 off your registration- https://www.agilealliance.org/agile2024/
We love to hear your feedback! If you have questions or would like to suggest a topic, please feel free to contact us at feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com.
Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and David Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello, it's nice to see everybody here today.
Dave:Peter, good to see you and we're very excited. I've got a long time collaborator, great friend, and we'll learn a bit more about him, but keynote speaker for Agile 2024 here, Melissa Boggs. So I was just saying it's really good to see Peter, who I hang out with many times when I'm in Toronto and when we're doing these podcasts and we go back quite a way and then having Melissa, who, again, we have a long history of working together, moving in the same circles and definitely sort of watching one another's careers and so on and always just loving getting together when we get the chance. Melissa, do you want to give a more academic, informal intro? Whatever it might be? How do you introduce yourself to the?
Melissa:people you work with. Oh, academic, formal, I don't think I'm capable of that, but I'll give you my no. As you said, I am. I'm a keynote speaker, I'm a leadership coach part-time, sometimes consultant but I do a lot of work in the employee experience space. I do a lot of work in the non-hierarchical organization space, and what I am probably most widely remembered for, I guess, is the way to say it, was spending two years as the co-CEO and chief scrum master of Scrum Alliance, which was the most challenging and rewarding two years of my life to date, years that we've worked together and you've taken on some very challenging roles, also at very challenging times, because, of course, that kind of hit over when the whole world changed direction as well.
Dave:so can you talk a little bit about what are the? What are the things that you saw? You know, with the amount of change that's going on at that point in an organization that's very, very public at least those of us in the agile community where but everybody knows who the Scrum Alliance is so, being a co-leader of the Scrum Alliance through that time, what kind of what are the memories or what are the things you learned from that?
Melissa:It was, again, most challenging and most rewarding simultaneously. So, for context, I came into the organization in January of 2019, literally after the first of the year and so over the course of 2019, the organization went through a major internal change where we changed the structure of the organization. We changed how we were leading, changed everything basically about the internal workings of the org. It was very difficult, but also, by the end of that year, I think most of us maybe not all, but most would say that we had become like a very tight knit organization because we had been through so much and had walked through so much and really understood what our values were and really lived into them on a daily basis. Specifically remember actually being at the business agility conference when the WHO announced that we were you know, officially in a pandemic, and that's just one of those moments that most of us will never forget.
Melissa:And we were actually only two weeks out from that year's global scrum gathering and had to get on zoom that evening and cancel it with our team. So that was obviously incredibly crushing. And, yeah, just maneuvering through 2020 with a group of folks who had already been through quite a bit at work, but man, they really rallied. They rallied around each other, they rallied around the community and it was truly like everyone says this but truly it was a privilege to kind of watch how this group of people handled a crisis like this and still tried to help keep the community afloat. And yeah, and then through you know the end of 2020, and then I went on to other things at the beginning of 2021.
Peter:Exciting stuff. I mean, it's always difficult guiding an organization through those kind of major changes, and it sounds like you had, a couple of years back to back, a lot to deal with, so I wonder how different it would have been if you'd been there in times Right.
Melissa:I have the same wonder. I do, but I don't know that I would. I was going to say I don't know I would change it. Of course I would change the tragedy and trauma that everyone in the world went through, but I certainly feel like, if you have to go through it, I don't think I would have changed where I was and who I was with, because it absolutely made me a different person.
Dave:It changed my perspective on fear and on courage and on the things that mattered and like when we do or do not take big steps, which has led to a lot of the work that I do now and so on. Your, you, now.
Dave:You now talk a lot about employee experience design on you know when you're talking to people and, as you're describing everything that's going, you know the change that you experienced there and since then as well. I'm sure what I find interesting is most of us as leaders going through that sort of change automatically think it's our responsibility as leaders. We've got to step up, we've got to lead the way, we've got to do something. And yet the way you're describing it and the fact that you've got this moniker of employee experience or employee experience design tells me there's something slightly different that your expectations are when you're seeing those sorts of changes. Can you talk a little bit about you know as a leader in that, in those changes, how you see things which are maybe different to what we may traditionally expect a leader to be thinking?
Melissa:Sure, I think the biggest difference is that I've always seen the leadership role as not necessarily being a hierarchical role, but rather just a difference in you know, in your role and how you're perceiving the situation.
Melissa:But you know there are some things that in that role you have to make decisions about, and then there are other things that you really should be making those decisions in co-creation with the organization, with the people who actually have to deal with the consequences of that decision.
Melissa:And you know, again, I focus a lot, even in my coaching. I work with organizations who want to be less hierarchical, who want to distribute their authority, distribute their power and it takes a lot the work are the ones who are most likely to have the best ideas on how to do that. And two, because you have buy-in like you and not like, oh I have to go get buy-in, but rather like organic, natural buy-in because we did this all together. So, yeah, I just I mean, I don't think I'm certainly not the only one who subscribes to those leadership principles, but I will say that it's not easy and I think a lot of folks can subscribe to it, but then, when faced with something challenging or out of the norm, kind of stay in this cautious state and just do you know what is like common or traditional to do, which was like just make the decision.
Peter:How does that so? How does that leadership function, as you're, as you're looking at in the way the leaders behave, interact with the employee. Experience in your language, like, how do you tell that it's working?
Melissa:Sure, I mean again because there's a lot more investment from the employees. They're a lot more engaged in what's going on rather than just waiting to be told what to do. And so you start to see people taking initiative. You start to see people stepping up, if you will, and in ways that they maybe wouldn't always. And that takes effort too on the leader's part, because people are conditioned to just look to the most senior person to tell them what to do, and it's uncomfortable when at first, when they don't, and they're like wait, just tell me what to do, that's what you're, that's your job. I think that what I see often when leaders are trying to distribute their power and their authority is that they sort of just throw it. And in my own leadership I was very guilty of this. In the first like six months at Scrum Alliance, I was like, oh, I'm going to be different than every other leader here. Go make decisions, did not equip them did not give them information.
Melissa:Did not like prepare them in any way. So my like constant phrase with leaders if they need context and they need boundaries, and depending on what the decision is, you know the level of experience of that person, like that context will be different, those boundaries will be will be different, but we can't just like put them in a leaf and push them out into the ocean.
Dave:You have to prepare them in order to do that that also has a natural consequence of the leader coming back three months later and saying, see, I knew it wouldn't work and grabbing all of that power and authority back because the decisions that are made aren't within the boundaries and the context. That was never made clear, right. So 100.
Melissa:I call it boomerang delegation, yeah, um, and so a lot of the work I do one-on-one with leaders is around a lot around delegation. It's a lot around distributing authority and that context in those boundaries and being very deliberate, yeah, because otherwise, yeah it. It just it sets everyone up to fail, including the leader, because no one wants to have to take that back. It doesn't feel good, and so setting everyone up for it not to land back in your lap is aced.
Dave:And I just wanted to pull out as you were chatting away about buy-in and the difference between co-creating buy-in so that's an emergent property versus that we have a plan and now I have to take that out and socialize it and sell it around to get buy-in, and that difference is such a real difference and part of the reason I'm thinking that I've just come from a workshop yesterday where we're defining a brand new sort of budgeting project sort of funding process and what was really interesting is, yes, we've all seen those before, we know what they're going to look like, but by co-creating it, by the end of that workshop you've got a lot of engaged people.
Dave:You've got the people who are closest to that process, having outsized influence, which is unusual. They're lower down if you think of it as a hierarchy. They're lower down in the hierarchy but they've got loads of experience to share and they're now everybody's listening when they're talking about things and they're the ones calling it out and saying well, this is where it's not working today and everybody in the room is listening to that and the buy-in levels were just off the charts. It's just such a different experience getting that emergent, co-created buy-in. I think it's a warm fuzzy straight out, it's just great, isn't it?
Dave:When you're working doing that whole employee experience conversation. Is there something like an easy place to start for that delegation of power and authority? Well, I mean, there are so many things that can be the one and obviously, if you take the big gnarly thing, that really is where people want to go, probably not setting things up for success.
Melissa:Sure, I mean honestly, the first thing I do with a leader when I'm first engaging with them on one-on-one coaching is I have them go through their entire calendar, their to-do list. They probably have six of them, right? I want you to go in Jira and Trello and your handy dandy notebook that's on your, you know, on your desk, and go through your calendar and I literally I do this in mirror with them, but I say I want you to put every single thing down. And the first thing that they have they get from that it's just this recognition of how much is actually on their plate. And I can talk all day about employee engagement and co-creation of buy-in, but until that leader like feels the pain themselves of like I am holding all of it, you know, and and to be fair, if someone comes to work with me, they probably already are at some degree of like I know something needs to change. So I'm lucky in that way, but I actually have them like put it all down. And then we go through a series of exercises that starts to reveal to them like I don't have to say it, it just starts to reveal to them what do they have on their plates, what should they be.
Melissa:You know, bringing in other people, we do like a racy of sorts, but it's not like you would think. It's actually like a target, like a concentric circles, and when you have to go and put all of the post-its under responsible and it literally, like from a visual standpoint, looks like you're buried. I'm like, if you are the one that's in the middle of that target and all of these post-its are on top of you, how can you possibly do any of it? Well, you know, and so this isn't necessarily around like co-creation of change, which is, I think, what you were getting at, but I think it starts with like just a recognition of that leader that I can't do this all myself. And then you start to go okay, so then what needs to change? Who needs to be involved in that change? And are you ready to let go of that, because there's so much like tactical and logistical work to do, but really like there's a lot of like internal heart work to do in order to get anywhere with any kind of change with leaders?
Peter:We quite often see in initiatives that we get involved in that, of course we run into these leaders and they're not willing to undergo that change and sometimes it's simply that where you're coming from into that conversation that helps.
Peter:So but, as you say, if you're introduced to it from a perspective where they've reached out, they want the one-on-one coaching. They're already open to the coaching. Um, it's it's much harder when they get sent to told, like if their boss says, well, you've got to go get coached, and they're like, well, I don't want to be here, and they're sitting there with their arms folded and they want nothing to do with this conversation. So getting them uh to over that sort of uh the hurdle, say, actually, I can help you, is often a founder, an initial challenge with some of those pieces, and it can hold everything up. If the person at the top isn't willing to change, then all the rest of the things you want to do are unlikely to succeed, because you need that guidance at the top. I've seen far too many of those where it all goes wrong as soon as it goes up a level.
Melissa:Absolutely. And I'll say too that resistance to change I'm going to give some credit here to Zach Boniker, who's a good friend of mine. He talks a lot about how it's not resistance to change, it is avoidance of loss. A lot about how it's not resistance to change, it is avoidance of loss. And so in that situation, with that particular leader who's resisting change, like there's something that they're afraid of losing, whether it's authority or power or leverage or performance, like their own performance there's something there that they're afraid of losing or afraid of doing wrong.
Melissa:I talk a lot in a couple of my different keynotes about this moment I had at Scrum Alliance where I Essentially like it was sort of a mirror to myself when my best coaches were essentially going like just do this and just do that and they weren't doing it with any like judgment, but but the things that they were asking me to do in that moment were so much harder for me than it would have seemed from the outside and I had been guilty of that, of like not having empathy, not having enough empathy for someone who has to go home and sleep at night after just doing whatever that was. And so you know, in that case that leader that comes to mind. It's got their arms crossed. I'm like something is harder for them than we realize and like how do we either figure out what that is and feel it with them or go? Maybe this isn't the right thing right now. Like I'm very much about not forcing coaching on someone. Like I'm not going to take that job, frankly, yeah, it's, it's so, um.
Dave:I think in many cases we expect leaders to come in and behave in in a perfectly aligned to the situation that they find themselves in, and and we fail to remember that we get to be leaders because of the experiences that we go through and we have to go through those experiences and sometimes we're leading. Often leaders are leading through those experiences, exactly to your point. So they don't necessarily have the experience to be able to behave. The way is perhaps thought as the correct way or is expected of them, because they're still experiencing it and they're still learning and they're still right at that moment gaining that experience. And it can be it's, it's a it's uh. I always say that.
Dave:The phrase I kind of come to mind to try and help empathize and and understand the position of leaders is leaders have leaders that they're working with, and so it isn't this pinnacle. There's somebody above them that they're trying to please. They're trying to meet the expectations that maybe aren't well articulated. All of the things that we say about the leaders that we're working with. Well, they're in the same position, they're just in a different place.
Melissa:Absolutely Even. You know, in my role as CEO, I had a board of directors and you know, especially with like a board, they kind of can fade into the background and people forget they exist sometimes. So you know, we would certainly get folks well, you're the CEO, make the decision Like I don't have that kind of authority. It is not endless. So yeah, back to the loss, avoidance. Like there's this level of caution that we all experience, and I think you experience it even more when you're responsible for other people and so you're afraid of, you know, making the wrong decision, you're afraid of losing even. Just what is that phrase? Like losing face, like respect or authority, when you're making decisions on behalf of other people and so that puts us in this place of like paralysis or being frozen, and even if that leader is putting up a really good front, you know, and they're like no, I just don't want to.
Melissa:Somewhere in there there is likely some amount of fear or ego that is driving that loss, avoidance and driving, and we've been conditioned that way. I talk about this a lot in the keynote that I'm giving at Agile 2024. Of course, we're going to stay in this place of caution when, as children, we were told like, no, don't climb on that, You're going to get hurt. Or you know, don't do this, You're you're going to get hurt, Like we've been taught that risk is bad and failure is bad. And so there's this place I think we all come from, until you've been through some of those fires and you've been able to move into these other kind of stages that we're just going to be stuck in unless we recognize it.
Peter:It's interesting looking at the, as I say, because a lot of the time what they're afraid of losing is directly tied to something that's then tied back to those incentives or whatever you're looking for, thing that's then tied back to those incentives or whatever you're looking for. So whether you're they see that losing that work or not doing those pieces means that that affects their status. They're not going to look busy enough to their boss, they're not going to see that they're doing the right thing, so they're not going to be able to, they're not going to. They're going to feel like, well, I can't now behave the same way that I was before. So intrinsically it's tied very much to who they are. If they've got that work and then now they're sort of well, you're taking that away from me, you want me to stop doing that. That's not going to work. I can't do that.
Dave:It's a peculiar thing because, as you're saying that, peter, I'm just thinking of my favorite moments. In the areas where I'm a leader or where I'm expected to be a leader, my favorite moments is when you turn up and something got done without any involvement and you're just sitting there and you have a huge grin on your face and you're like, yes, like that was brilliant and it's a problem arises, gets solved, wonderful, you know, comes together, whole team comes together, and you're just sitting there, going and I had no idea about it. No involvement, I didn't have to, I wasn't the last port of call to make sure something was done. In a certain way, they're the moments that you just walk home and you go that was fantastic, that was the best day, and yet we're so reluctant to put that in position. So that happens all the time.
Melissa:Again, caution. I think the way that I help leaders at least move in the right direction is. I have in that keynote. I'm gonna give away a little bit of it now, a little bit of a preview. I talked about like the four stages. Right, we can't expect someone to go from cautious all the way to like let's turn everything upside down and, frankly, in agile transformations I think we do expect that. I think we're getting better at realizing that's not realistic. But if I think back to like 10 years ago, we just thought we were going to come in and like we have hero capes on and all these leaders are going to be like I was nervous but no, let's just do it all.
Melissa:It doesn't work that way.
Melissa:We don't get there that way.
Melissa:And I think the very first thing that you can do is get someone to start asking questions, whether it's asking them of themselves, with like I was you know, the exercises I was talking about in Miro asking them of other people and just getting curious.
Melissa:Like if you can get from cautious to curious, even if they're not making moves yet they're just asking questions, then it takes us out of that. I'm not like a brain science expert, but like it takes us out of like the lizard brain right, and it starts to get us into more of like a thinking brain and not a fear brain, and there's, you know, lots of different ways to do that. If you can get to the curious, then sometimes you can also get them to courageous and they can get themselves to courageous, and I think we have to think about it that way and again, not we talk about like incremental work all the time, iterative and incremental work, but we don't talk about like in iterative and incremental behavior and like iterative and incremental mindset, like you have to step through it and sometimes just getting one little step is enough for right now. Sometimes you have to go all the way to the end and, like you know, turn it upside down eventually.
Peter:And because I mean and everybody goes through that journey differently is the other piece that often gets made as a mistake. So sometimes you're looking at it as hey look, we've had all these success, but then realize that, well, not everybody actually made it through and some people are still on that journey and they can pull everybody else back if you're not. So it's really understanding, like, where are individuals at? Are we engaging enough, though? Have we dealt with all of those? That loss avoidance, which is occurring not just at the leadership level, but all the levels below, like it's everybody's potentially feeling that because they're all changing, and I have a diagram I use regarding that from one of the cyclos around the different stages of uh, of change, and how it's like we, we ignore the change all the way through to we finally accept it, but it's like we'll ignore it, we'll resist it, we'll grudgingly accept it before we actually accept it, and our job as coaches is to lower that curve is to make that easier to go.
Melissa:Yeah, and make it visible. I feel like half the time my job is just to help people see things and then they can decide what to do with it yeah, and they and they know how to deal with it when it's.
Dave:But it's sometimes you, you're in front of it so many times you can't see it. It's like, yeah, I always find we never have to go find something. I'm invariably staring right at it as I'm sitting there going. I cannot find this. This is driving me and I have to kind of sit down and go okay, it's probably like this far away. How do I just stop looking past it to look at it and actually understand that it's there? Melissa, we, we keep kind of zipping around on this and I'm loving the conversation. It's just so much fun just catching up and and, uh, you know, sharing some of the things that we've all seen, or or specifically that you've seen, and so on, the keynote conference which conference is it? Um, let's uh, because if it's agile 2024, right it is.
Melissa:I'm actually also, uh, I'm actually also closing keynote for mile high agile um, which is may 15th, um, but also yeah, I don't 2024 in dallas, uh, in july, and I am the closing keynote, which is literally a dream come true. I'm not afraid to say that, like, I've been speaking for a long time I've even been keynoting for several years now but it's kind of a coming home, you know it's like how many of the agile conferences I mean you've been to quite a few, I should think.
Dave:I mean they're, they're the I remember rightly, remember rightly the largest single agile community event.
Melissa:They absolutely are. Yep, the Scrum gatherings are right behind, I'm sure, but yeah, largest community event. I've been going for six years now and I've had the privilege of actually being a track chair for the past two for the Audacious salon, um, but this was a bit of a surprise, I have to say, and I'm very, very excited so yeah, it's uh, I mean it's a brilliant from from the agile community side.
Dave:It's the, you know, one of those key conferences that even to get a chance to speak at it is great, to be a part of. It is is always a blast. But to actually keynote, I think it's, and I know the community there will be really excited about it. So yeah, and that's in Dallas, you said in July, right?
Melissa:Dallas in July and I believe, to my knowledge and I have Googled this many, many times and we all know that Google is the end all and be all I'm the only keynote speaker right now that Google is aware of that roller skates in the keynote.
Dave:So you're roller skating onto the stage around. I don't know if you want to share a little bit about it, or if it's, we should keep it quiet. It's, I think it's your, your option. Just a bit about what you're thinking.
Melissa:No, I'm happy to share. I will say I don't actually skate on like I don't start on my skates because stairs and carpet, like it all would not be great, but yeah, I. So the premise is from cautious to courageous. So some of those steps I was referring to earlier and at the end of the day, this is about actual concrete takeaways between those steps Like it drives me absolutely bananas, especially in the tech world, when leaders will get up and be like unleash your creativity and unleash your innovation. And we don't talk about the fact that, like you can't just do that. It's not like, oh, my innovation is in my back pocket, let me just pull it out and like throw it. There are things you have to do to put yourself in like a mental and emotional place to unleash your big idea. Or if you're a leader, you know to initiate change in your organization. Or if you're a high schooler, you know to go out into the world and do big things.
Melissa:And I started my skate journey three and a half years ago. Now I have been roller skating three times a week for about three and a half years and as I was going through that journey, I learned how to roller dance. So I do in the talk, I do gate choreography, and it's intended to do two things One, illustrate the takeaways that I'm talking about, and two this is kind of a byproduct, but I love it Often like we're so excited about a keynote and the speaker is just sort of plowing through it for an hour and by the time you get to like moment 30, you're like man, they said something really cool at minute 10 and I have no idea what it was, because I haven't been able to process. And so what this does is that I speak for a little while and then I do some choreography and it gives you a minute to like take in what we just talked about to watch the choreography, to watch it visualized in front of you, what we just talked about and to sort of process along the way, which has been like a very cool byproduct. So I take you through these lessons from the roller rink.
Melissa:Like some of these things are very relatable to people because you know they skated when they were a kid, but they're also just super relatable to life and as I was like learning and going through my skate journey, my agile journey, was sort of in the back of my mind the whole time and I was like man, there's so much about this that, like we're experiencing at work, so it's turned into this like very cool nostalgic music, roller skating, that most people have some sort of connection to and like, how do you get from? Likes it, how do you get from hey, I have this really cool idea or this change to. I'm ready to upend the entire system. Like everything needs to change. Like, how do you move through those places in your mind and in your heart? So we will see on stage at agile 2024 I'm looking forward to it.
Dave:It's going to be. I mean, it's uh, when you're talking about keynotes where you've got tons of ideas, like they're so packed with information, but you're you're also not sure you've got tons of ideas, like they're so packed with information, but you're also not sure you've picked everything up by the end of it. And I think that we all understand those kind of especially for those. We all run workshops, right, so we all know when there's those pauses and you're fighting with. Am I going to speak into this pause or is this pause really useful? And maybe I should shut up for another 30 seconds or 60 seconds and keep it quiet so people can process in their own minds. I think it's a great piece. There Sounds awesome.
Melissa:I'm very excited I do, for your listeners, have a discount code. Is this a time to share that now? Sure, if you are interested in coming to see roller skating on stage at a conference and you want to register for Agile 2024, you can get $100 off and the code is A24-podcast. That will get you $100 off of your registration.
Dave:So, thank you very much that's going to be and, if anybody's not been to the Agile 20X conferences, absolutely tremendous, like the community there, so many people to learn from, keynotes included, of course. But can you take a minute to talk about the audacious salon, partially because I'd love to know a little bit more about it. But no, I mean it's, it's, it's a name that that says a lot but also doesn't say a lot, especially if you're not quite aware of it. So can you share a bit about that?
Melissa:I would love to uh, this is my second year being a co-track chair of the audacious salon. Um, the audacious salon is our place to really get courageous and audacious, um, with the things that we talk about, and so I am nothing if not consistent. I will not be rolling around the salon in skates, don't ask. But the salon was really sort of reinvented last year and we wanted it to be a place for these very like edgy conversations that you might not have in like a regular session, and we wanted it to be really about the participants. So, instead of having a whole bunch of talks for, you know, people are standing on at the front talking, which is also wonderful we wanted to get people actually having conversations in the room, and so we created essentially centering around liberating structures.
Melissa:So most of the sessions are interactive. They are things like fish bowls and World Cafe, things like that. We also have my favorite, the daily debate, and it is high school debate style, high school debate style, debating on these topics. And so across the salon this year we have seven different formats and we have three themes. So every talk is a combination, or every session is a combination of theme one plus this format, theme two, this format, etc. And so it's going to be a lot of fun and a lot of them tie together.
Melissa:You can learn a lot. And then at the end of the week, on Thursday, we have what's called emergent talks and we have some of our most talented, trusted facilitators who we have asked to go to or at least get the information from every session in their theme theme and then come and bring sort of the wrap-up of that theme for the week and also still get people involved, still get them talking through what they learned that week. It's a lot of fun. Last year was the first time we did these emergent talks and they were phenomenal and again our most talented facilitators.
Melissa:Dave is one of them Peter.
Dave:No pressure, now that you've built that whole, yeah.
Melissa:No, pressure no.
Dave:I'm so excited about that. I think it's such a fantastic track as well because we need to talk about that audacious sort of courageous conversations. I just I love that theme.
Melissa:Oh, and I should just pitch really quick. So our three themes this year are Agile and the roles of Agile are having an identity crisis. Agile has become exactly what big business needs. These are all supposed to be very, you know, antagonistic, and the psychological cost of becoming Agile and that might be as an org or just as an individual is very high. And so all of the format fishbowls, world cafes, debates, emergent talks all of these things are centering around these three statements. Also new this year I'm very excited is these two new sessions. One is drawing together, so there are entire sessions where folks are going to be drawing out these ideas. And then we have fun sessions that we have given these facilitators almost no boundaries and said here's your theme, just make it fun. We're going to have improv, we're going to have fashion shows, we're going to have Mad Libs like it's going to be hilarious and those are definitely intended to kind of bring some levity, you know, bring some fun to these very tough topics.
Peter:Yes, powerpoint, karaoke or something. Yes, I love it.
Melissa:Any day, bring it on. You know what we do that at night anyway, yeah, exactly. Yeah, sounds awesome, it's going to be a good week.
Dave:So I was going to say we normally wrap. This has been such a wide ranging conversation and I could pretty much just keep going, but we've all got you know things to do, as it were, and we've got to. We got to kind of kind of bringing things to a close. So there's three of us. We normally pick out three things to draw attention to, so let's one each right. So, peter, can I throw the baton to you? What's one thing that you picked up from the conversation?
Peter:uh, that the keynote at Agile 2024 sounds like it's going to be really fun, so I think I'll be there. See, I'll pick the easy one, so that I can pass on.
Dave:I was just going to say, and, of course, anybody interested who's listening? There is a code which we'll add in there, if I remember rightly, a24-podcast.
Melissa:You got it $100 off registration Brilliant.
Dave:Melissa.
Melissa:Man, I was going to make you go next.
Dave:Okay, I'm very happy, so I'll jump in to a bit more time. But there are sort of two things I'm going to wrap up in one, because I always try and over deliver or do too much. However you want to think about it, but I'm really struck with the employee experience bit, and the example that I'm going to use to pull that in is that buy-in like co-creating buy-in, not pitching for buy-in I just felt that really resonated. It was a great kind of kickoff to our conversation. It really works well.
Melissa:I was struck by your story, or thought around like showing up in something already being done, and especially because you said I didn't need to be the last port of call, like I didn't need to be the approval. It just happened. And I think a lot of us are okay with everything except that last part. Right, but the caution in us like makes us still want to be that last approval. And when we can get to that place where we have the systems in place, where folks are prepared to make those kinds of decisions without us, then we're not the bottleneck anymore. At the end of the day, that's the best part. And, yeah, you get to cheer them on and be excited for them rather than being like, yes, that is fine, thank you for your work. So that one sat with me really well.
Peter:So it's wonderful to have you, melissa, and we will wrap it up there for today. And so, to everybody listening, don't forget to hit subscribe, and you can reach us at feedback at definitelymaybeagilecom, and all the codes and everything. We'll dump it into the show notes, as always, and look forward to next time.
Melissa:Hopefully see some of you at the conference.
Peter:Bring your skates. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, P eter Maddison and David Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital agile and DevOps at scale.
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