Agile business transformation: what it takes to succeed | Joe Justice | TEDxSeattleSalon

[Music] scrum is a team-based project management style it's arguably the fastest and leanest or simplest way to manage teams in a company of any size and any number of teams it's a scaled method for team management agile is the idea of splitting really long projects into many many many really small projects and giving them to the real customer really fast and then changing what the next project will be so whereas a lot of us think of project management as a sequence of phases towards a ultimate deliverable agile is a different mindset where you have a sequence of small deliverables that refine each other add up to become an even larger impact that has a faster feedback loop putting those together you have many teams working together to deliver a series of tiny highly effective focused projects immediately wow so and this is something that is fairly broadly being adopted now by businesses in all sectors around the world do you have any metrics on how rapidly it's being adopted by which different sectors with what level of success at this point when we look in automotive which is where i play now uh we see bmw saying they have a four to five year plan to get agile we see bosch starting four years ago saying we must get agile and they have some agile and they want to increase it and then you see agile native companies like tesla which create the pressure as they're now far and away the most valuable automotive company in the planet in fact if you add up most of the other players they're still thought to be less valuable than tesla so you see in most industries it's similar to automotive where you have a company that's full agile they're agile natives and they're far and away more successful than all the others then all the others are at various stages of their transformation they have some business units working effectively in the method they have some business units that are still trying to figure out what this is or they're still saying it doesn't apply to us so with those ranges of adoption uh and really you're talking about a sprint methodology that's applied with a certain kind of team-based structure team-based project teams how are you seeing when that starts to influence a specific case maybe you could talk through an example of what that process looks like uh can you give us give us one or two examples yeah well every aspect of managing the company it's going to be modified from this mindset if we want it to happen team based means we have cross-functional teams so the idea of an engineering group separate from a software group separate from a design group separate from a test group that concept of the business structure does change because now we have cross-functional teams where all those people are together on a mixed team so that changes the funding model changes because we're no longer making an annual budgeting plan i mean there is an annual budgeting trend to do the finances but it's not locked in or what it's going to build it's instead we're going to make 52 releases one a week this year of hardware and software and we'll figure out what they are in real time so we will budget the company to make 52 releases of hardware and software very different budgeting so budgeting changes legal support evolves because we don't have a ip protection phase anymore every week we have updates of what is potentially protectable patentable best for open source etc every aspect of the company has a tweak a modification and really it's a mindset how we approach the company is going to evolve additional management loops many layers of hierarchy were fast enough now it doesn't keep up with week long releases having the management coalition on the topic meet every other week has no effect on projects that ship in less than a week so all management decisions need to be prioritized differently in a less than our feedback loop which is a highly different way to run a company so that changes too so you know you've given an example of how tesla and 3m collaborated and just because the magnitude of that is so substantial and the rate of change seems so dramatic in such a short period of time could you talk us in a you know a summarized way through how that happened you know mindful that you know many business people are accustomed to multi-year changes and to your to our audience i'll just say this may come across as a bit surprising but stay with it and um and can you give us give us that example in a little depth yeah so uh elon musk the ceo of tesla and spacex and neural link and the boring company and open ai which are all becoming the most effective and uh most followed and financially successful companies in all of their respective sectors he calls the 3m ceo the ceo of 3m at that time with inga thulin and elon says you are fantastic at making privacy films for screens you're fantastic at making solar cells what i'd like you to do is put privacy filters on your solar cells so when looked at from an extreme angle from the ground if it's on a roof it looks like black or terracotta tile or beautiful reflective glass but from the sun's perspective looking almost straight down at the solar panel it sees straight through the privacy filter and sees the solar film to create the voltaic effect to make electricity and you also make highly uv stable adhesives to hold these two layers together for many many many many years of harsh element wide temperature range use i'd like you to make a solar roof for us and inga thulin says elon i'm so impressed you know our product stack and our technology strengths so well that you can propose a new product that is right in our wheelhouse that we hadn't even thought of that's amazing i'd love to do it great we'll we'll launch we'll put the product in our queue immediately it'll go through our new product introduction phase after our new product development phase and you will have your prototype and right about seven years elon says great will start installing it on homes in seven weeks and he hangs up the phone knowing the thulin has a choice hinga can queue up the new product development and the new product introduction phases the way they normally do and lose the business not get any of this business not get the halo effect of working with the mosque companies it all goes away or inga can work in a way that is 4 to 3m outside the new product innovation and product development process they're defined and inga decides to run an agile project and like all agile initiatives they're far more effective if we ask who wants to join the energetic people so he says who would like to join and he gets hundreds of responses and he says who can put all your other work on someone else you can shift it to another area of the company or you can outsource it or you can stop it so this is the only thing you do and he gets a very small number of people that says yes we can then those people sit in one room together full time and they all work in pairs no one's no one works alone they have one big projector screen and a lot of the time they're doing laptop work procurement chemical mix ideas drawings talking to vendors only one person is allowed to type at once everyone sees it on the screen they all point and talk it's real time conversation they're a team they all work on one thing together at once when they need to make a prototype they all go to the factory together and they make it on the line together or they watch it made together and they fly back with the prototype they finish early it set records all across 3m this is agile it's the team-based management of scrum which just makes it really simple and lean to work with many teams at once and it's the agile idea of instead of just phases you make a small project although a solar roof isn't that small an incredibly short cycle so you were able to get a to see the significant result in a matter of weeks that in normal methodology would have taken years in some respects is that accurate it was seven years to five weeks yeah and how large was this team that did the kind of core work for developing this it was four people they added a fifth person in the last two weeks to help file patents and open source as fast as possible and and as a result 3m did they continue to use this agile methodology or was this just a one-off experiment as a result they did the financial calculations what would happen if more of their projects ran that way and uh they flew me in to do team launches where we trained people and then launched these scrum teams uh 50 people at a time in a group and that we did waves for a year and a half two years it ended up being thousands of people and the stock price jumped to its all-time high and how would you say that uh acceptance of this new mindset or new culture um was it difficult for that to be embraced at 3m or did it happen easily what was that like from your perspective of what you saw phil this is this is the billion dollar question um i i really think this is maybe billion is selling it too short a lot of people want to make an impact in a company and the real crux of this seems to be how beaten down have they been until they've disengaged as as horrible as that is and i really think this is the crux of it i think the core of this good work is finding ways to lovingly nurture each other so that we re-engage and then this agile stuff makes great sense it plugs in very naturally very easily kids do this this is how children play before they've been told by their teacher i don't want to talk to you right now i don't want to listen to you right now i want you to sit down and focus on this and only this alone once that's become a pattern this agile stuff becomes foreign and we have to relearn this natural collaboration method that is super intuitive to to all living things or at least humans here's what happens someone says i have a great idea and manager is busy and manager says not right now or submit it to the system or look you have a 15-minute break you can do it on your break instead of going to the bathroom and having a coffee if you want and that person says oh i see my ideas not valued i'm valued for my hands and not my mind they have a choice they can either pump up and fight the system or they can relax and then the next time they see an improvement opportunity that they're now conditioned to say well ask my boss you know they've been told don't engage me well if that's been happening for two three four thirty years it's going to be super hard to invite that person onto a scrum team they've built up self-defense mechanisms to avoid shame which are super healthy given the situation they've been in now if you get someone fresh or someone who's been in these agile companies already they know that they are a powerful force on the planet and they create the situation around them and they'll leave if their managers tell them i don't want your engagement so then it's supernatural so here's what actually seems to happen we go into a massive company like 3m and we say who would like to try this scrum thing after giving a 45-minute keynote on what the scrum thing is and you get a set of hands and those are people who are either at midlife crisis so they're reevaluating themselves or they're new or they're about to retire so in all cases they say change is cool and they opt in and you have a huge mass of other people who say no not right now not right now not unless the system really changes and i'm told that my whole humanity is valued at work uh and so that's the culture side of change and it's super real and that's why it's way easier to do this in a startup even with the same employees the same ones who have been not invited to bring their whole selves to work for 20 30 years it's regardless of age but it's a new company so they know it's new the ground rules are different they got to figure out what they are and you say let's try agile it's super easy with all new hires the same people uh tesla famously did this they took the new me plant which had extremely low quality under gm and toyota had increased the quality but the rate of innovation was tragically low tesla took it made world-class innovation with even higher quality the quality had to ramp but now it's even higher it's the same people it's the same people working there i was meeting with the head of lean he's been there 20 years through gm toyota and tesla and it is now the highest profit company uh the highest stock value company on the planet in automotive and trending to be maybe the top value company of any type maybe and he's been there it's the same person it's the same people working there it's the system that changed and the culture change point was done effectively so change is a key element here and you know we may be in a world where it's not only that change is cool but certainly with covet and with a lot of the ways processes are changing changes maybe even the rule in this environment where people are doing more distance based work how does agile fit into that it seems to be more natural phil um when you and i work together now doing this um [Music] the idea that we can zoom in and task on a window because that means a lot of what we're doing is is screen based zoom in on a window and i have my team here and we disengage re-engage near seamlessly in less than a second hey joe yes phil it it seems to fit really nicely now there's this thing called the agile manifesto written in 2001 that was before zoom that was before google meet that was before azure devops and microsoft stack that supports this that's when we had 9 600 baud modems and text and it was really hard to do it not in the same room it's pretty easy to do now with modern collaborative tools now i'm involved in manufacturing luckily if we're moving atoms that means robots if we're moving electrons that means people so people move electrons that's super easy to do remote robots move atoms that's super easy to monitor observe and cheer on remote and i use those words very intentionally if we are telling the robot specifically where to move our company is going to die and it's dying now the robot needs to be running a machine learning stack and what we're doing is curating the data and making sure it has a valid data stack running to it i mean we're symbiotes full-on in hardware my right arm is a dur robot my my left arm is a funac robot that's that's how this works and humans move electrons robots move molecules awesome and so um we're coming close to a needing to end this part of the interview i would love to delve into the robotics elements and all the others um for businesses in other sectors uh beyond automotives you know certainly software has adopted agile to a great degree what other fields are you seeing uh riposte for agile and what would be the great first step for them to take if they are ready or who's wanting to explore medical and and i use that huge blanket term intentionally it started in pharma and now emergency room care and children room uh pediatrics and now the entire stack the financial system is racing towards this as fast as they can uh that industry has experienced as much of a people as any in terms of funding model and in terms of what resources are available and effective to use so that's a whole business stack that is sprinting to this right now as fast as they can fintech jumped on board uh right around the bitcoin ramp up so fintech is now basically agile native there's not much fintech that's not agile and that brought most of the banking and finance with it legal seems late to the party but legal is asking to defend and arbitrate between agile businesses so they're trying to wrap their heads around what this means so most legal business legal uh groups when they propose contracts they don't even apply they're getting thrown out all the time so you have agile teams writing their own contracts and legals sitting at the sidelines saying no wait what about us so that seems to be a catch-up point media has been on short clocks with cross-functional teams since there was media because they had tight timelines to meet but the respect for people aspects of agility that there's this whole system that makes it sustainable has not reached media at all and uh there's a real rescue opportunity that i don't know if media is aware of yet they might be closer to legal in that regard because they're already fast so they don't feel the pain that legal's starting to feel where they're just being cut out of the loop um there's high turnover and they don't i think know that agile has a has a solution stack that may may be useful manufacturing everyone in manufacturing knows this is the thing and where it's going most people feel clueless and they're saying i just hope i retire before it disrupts my factory and they they feel it's impossible it seems too too high a mountain to climb so we'll see where that goes either ninety percent of hardware companies are going to go under or we're going to have a title change in that so i'm sorry or we're going to have a title change can you say that again or either about 90 of manufacturing and hardware operations are going to go under or we're going to have a title change to agility in about the next 18 months wow well you heard it here first um joe thank you so much for taking the time um you know any final final thoughts or final words of encouragement or a suggestion this is super fun the the scrum thing is only 11 rules you can practice those for two days and have it down uh the agile thing is the mindset but write some poems try to bring your whole self to work re-engage with your passion itself and supernatural kids do it all the time play at a preschool and it's basically montessori preschool at work and it's incredibly effective so you'll love it um start painting do something for fun and the thing that i wish happened more often in the world to save those 90 companies i just talked about most companies think their core systems are about the same as they were 20 or 40 years ago but control systems and control equipment has changed a thousand x in the last four years that's how much built built-up opportunity there is in your company so every time you look at for example robotics like the potential is so high

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 67,893

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Business, Change, Culture, Future, Learning, Technology

Id: u8t8eYO4HIE

Length: 20min 58sec (1258 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020