Agile Transformations - A Conversation with Gidion Peters

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Agility is partly new and partly old, and I think that is also the strength of it, because if it would be purely a new concept, its foundations would be weak. Or if it was pure old concept, well, we wouldn't need it. So while a lot of organizational theory and cultural change theory is about setting new behaviors, this was basically creating new behaviors by doing them, by living them.

Hi everybody, and welcome back to the podcast. This week I'm speaking with Gideon Peters, who defines himself as an organizational change specialist and entrepreneur with a focus on applying Agile and Scrum outside of IT. He's the co-founder of the Dutch training and consultancy company Organize Agile, who specialize in organizational change, Agile transformation, business agility, and Agile HR. With offices in New York and the Netherlands, their clients include Fortune 500 retail, finance pharma, telecommunications, and engineering organizations, as well as the public sector. Gideon is the co-author of the books Agile HR: The Unmissable Role of HR in Agile Organizations, which was nominated for Management Book of the Year 2018, and Scrum in Acti, published in 2015. In collaboration with the HU University of Applied Sciences, Gideon and Organize Agile also published the first International State of Agile HR 2020, an overview of innovative practitioners of Agile HR across the globe. Check out the links in the show notes to follow Gideon at Gideon Peters on LinkedIn and Twitter. How you doing?

Great.

Cool. My work is mainly in schools. So in K-12 schools, international schools primarily, but there's a really interesting shift that's been happening for a long time actually, but really significantly recently, which is a lot of talk about transformation. And because of the disruption, education has to respond. So this word transformation gets used a lot, which is in a way is what kind of put me onto all of the language of Agile. Talking about Agile transformation. Maybe that's a kind of a nice little segue into what you guys do. So maybe if you could just give a little bit of an overview of what Organize Agile is about, I think that would be a good context just for listeners. Then we can, then we can get into it.

Great. Yeah. So, well, I mean, first of all, very commendable what you're trying to do in education and, you know, the work you're involved in because, well, I mean, can't be stressed enough that this is actually our future. Now for ourselves, yeah, as an organization, we started basically, I would say, coming from a certain trauma in terms of, well, the bureaucracies that we as founders— there's two founders of this company, which is Nik and myself— which we got involved in, right? So yeah, we felt stifled, we felt that our creativity was being hindered, and that there should be another way. Now we both have a background in organizational science, basically, So there's a lot of theories about how things can be improved, but they hardly connect to the real practice in the jungle that organizations typically are. Yeah, absolutely. You know, there was this gap between theory and practice, and I only discovered new practices when I ran into this thing called Scrum. And that was probably one of the first times that it was actually applied outside of IT. And I got fascinated by it because this group of civil servants, which I then worked with, which worked for the city of Amsterdam certainly started to show different behaviors. So while a lot of organizational theory and cultural change theory is about basically setting new behaviors, this was basically creating new behaviors by doing them, by living them. So I was inspired by that. I was like, well, you know, obviously it was not— well, you know, there still were a lot of things imperfect about the concepts, and I was kind of suspicious at first because I'd read a lot about self-steering teams and them having field in the '90s. So yeah, you know, whether, you know, why this would definitely work, but I thought, you know, I might as well give it a try. So that's what I did.

So your Agile transformation yourself started with Scrum.

Exactly.

That's an interesting similarity with the stuff that I've been reading about Agile transformations generally, you know?

Yeah, right.

Where do they start?

Well, this was the same on a very personal level.

Yeah. Nice.

Yeah. So I have to unlearn some things and learn new things. And my first mission was how can I improve government? Because I had a lot of government experience doing Scrum. So I started to work as a freelancer and the name of my little company was Scrum for Gov with a terrible 4 in the middle.

Nice.

Nice. This is horrible branding. Helped me to get into some government work and discovered a lot. I'd already been applying some concepts throughout, you know, with my work for the mayor of Amsterdam. And well, everything started to take off slowly, especially because I found a professor specialized in communication science and she was also frustrated by the classic communication plan. So she was like, you know, how can we use Scrum for communication? Well, she wrote a book about it. I contributed to it, et cetera. So, so it's, it's for me in the past years, I've seen different disciplinary fields, whether it is HR, communication, marketing, government, all in their own way trying to kind of integrate Agile Scrum. That is why our mission as well, to change the future of work by applying these new ways of thinking and also adapting them to make them fit for these new contexts.

Nice. So you're, I mean, you go into organizations as coaches and consultants and try to affect Agile transformation, let's say. Right. And like, as I said in the intro, you know, this word transformation is a, It's a pretty big word and it's getting thrown around in education as well. So for you, what is an Agile transformation? I mean, what, what would be the indicators of a successful Agile transformation on the backend once, you know, once it's happened, what, what's changed?

Yeah. So that's a, that's a very good question. And obviously, you know, as you were hinting at, transformation is a very complex subject, which doesn't mean that we shouldn't be able to define it. So, you know, but the first question that basically comes up is, does a transformation ever end? That's true.

Or is it this, Continuous process, ongoing process.

Yeah, it goes on forever, you know. When are you done transforming? Which is a question on a personal level, an organizational level. But yeah, I guess, you know, your question is also about impact. How do we know when we are impactful and whether something has changed? And to me, those are, you know, just like in life, it's very cliché, but it are, you know, it's those little things. Like, you know, we did this transformation recently at a corporate, let's say insurance client, and there was this woman working there who'd been working there for, well, over 30 years in a communications/PR role. And she told me that because she now had this one stable team that she could rely on and work in, which was cross-functional, that she had felt better than ever before in her job and that she felt that she could really contribute something and that things were moving faster and that for her it was this little revolution. That kind of triggered me to think, hey, you know, this is why we're doing this stuff.

Yeah. Nice. Nice. It's kind of a shift in the way of thinking about and the meaning around your, your role, right? In terms of—

Exactly.

But on a, like, on an organizational level, like when you go into an organization, where do you start the transformation? You know, like, do you go in at the team level and start, like you said, like your personal journey started with Scrum and you go in and just get, get some teams going with Scrum, or do you go in Well, if you can, of course, at the top level and start talking to the leadership and maybe you don't, you don't always have access to those people.

Right. But yeah, this, so this is a very, very interesting one. So I mean, we started with very, let's say, hard-hitting ambitions. Our dreams were basically to break down those huge corporate towers. Nice.

Dream big.

Why not? Let's break down those big corporates and let's show them that the future belongs to initiative, to small entrepreneurs, to groups, to swarms. And well, you know, the cynic conclusion is that some very big corporates are now actually applying these Agile principles to stay alive longer. So in a way, sometimes I'm asking myself, you know, are we still doing ethical things by helping the giants become bigger? Yeah, that's a very interesting ethical one.

I mean, yeah, that's a big— that is a big question. And I guess that links in with the doing and being Agile, I guess, you know, that debate. And reading Mikael, your colleague's stuff about the issues or the challenges of Agile coming up in terms of the way it's been monetized and commodified.

Exactly. That's, that's kind of a, that's the thing, like, you know, these big corps have their big consultancies and, you know, I remember when I was at this birthday party, I believe about 7 years ago, there would be someone from McKinsey totally laughing at me for introducing this hippie concept around Scrum. And now they're doing it.

McKinsey went hippie.

Yeah, exactly. Or even worse, they sucked the soul out of it.

There you go.

They commodified hippie and they beautifully packaged consultancy solution.

Interesting.

Yeah.

We do work with senior leadership in a number of companies, but I still, I feel this inner, let's say, revulsion around the idea of, you know, having to purchase a golf club membership in order to reach some of these people. Right.

So you don't strike me as a golf club kind of guy.

I'm not. So I'm also waiting in some ways for a new generation of leadership to stand up and say, hey, you know, we are sick of these Big Four consultancies choking us and selling us the same bullshit.

But there is, I mean, for me, yeah, you have to kind of hold on to the fact that there is something genuinely important, I think, about at the core of, of what the kind of agile mindset and the agile principles are about. And I mean, for schools, I find it a really interesting thing because it's in a way, and one of the questions I wanted to ask you was about, are these new ideas or are these a rehash of old ideas like Senge's learning organizations for, you know, from the '90s? I mean, these have been around a long time and even way before that, right? So do you think for Agile there's something new that it brings or is it just a kind of latest iteration of those kinds of organizational thinking?

Well, my answer is going to be dialectic in a way, right? So it's the old and the new. Obviously, you know, what didn't change is that we're still humans, right? So even when something is new, I think, well, you know, the human condition, if I read the classics, if I read Homer, if I read, you know, Tacitus and those authors, if I read Machiavelli from, you know, there are very universal themes that we're still struggling with. Yeah. Roman army structures remind me of Agile. So I would say that yes, there is still a lot of stuff which is basically a reinvention of the same principle. At the same time, I think what is very new is that, well, let's say at least the 20th and 21st century have built the biggest bureaucracies humanity has ever seen.

Yeah.

And with those have come processes which are so monstrous that I think they're pretty unique. You know, I don't think that in the 7th century in these companies, in order to go to a new land, you had to get approval from 40 different departments. So on the one hand, these huge bureaucracies have served us, they've brought us products, but in a way they've also restrained us. So I think agility is partly new and partly old, and I think that is also the strength of it, because if it would be purely a new concept, its foundations would be weak. So it has to build on something.

Definitely.

If it was purely an old concept, well, we wouldn't need it.

So yeah. I mean, the systems thinking stuff is clearly, you know, it has a heritage in Senghor's work and all the other stuff. So it's all there, right?

It goes before that. Yeah. I mean, I would go Plato and even before that. So yeah, I'm a classics man myself. So, yeah, it's probably proud, by the way, why I went through the gymnasium in Holland, in which you learn two classic languages and histories and cultures.

Yeah.

Nice. And you know, there's a big debate in the Netherlands whether this is still valuable education, right? Why are we learning that stuff?

Yeah, that, well, I think that's a universal debate, right? You know, the role of knowledge and actually ironically, that's a big tension in this whole transformation debate within education. It's like there's been progressive things happening in education for a long time, but they never quite stick. And maybe it's because this thing called knowledge and wisdom that we kind of really value keeps coming back. Until we figure out what, you know, that tension, then we're going to keep going through the same cycles. I think it's super interesting.

Yeah. And I'm curious what you think about that because, well, you know, I mean, obviously having my Greek, you know, old Greek grammar perfectly ingrained doesn't help me a lot in my modern work. I'm still very thankful for some of the lessons around culture and around history there. So I'm very curious what you think about that.

Yeah.

To what extent is that knowledge and to what extent, you know, do you sometimes need to really absorb that to be able to put other things in perspective?

Exactly.

Absolutely. And all of the conversations around the kind of competencies that young people need to prepare them for the future, there is arguably a knowledge base to all of them, you know, in order to collaborate effectively with, with other people, you have to really understand other people. And there's some, there's some element of grammar about that. Like we know some stuff from cognitive science and from psychology about how people tick to some extent. Right. And then, you know, critical thinking, you know, you can't think effectively unless you know some stuff about a subject.

Yeah. It's a great vision. And, you know, I see a lot of lists of 21st century skills, right, around critical thinking, creativity, et cetera. And I agree with all those. I think what's often lacking is discipline. So, I mean, yeah, I see that with some, well, you know, I can't say millennials before I get into the, okay, boomers, but let's say that if we focus only on creativity and critical thinking, we tend to lose the actual discipline factor here, which I think even in Agile is very important, right? So it's not all going to be fun. Sometimes it's really, really putting the effort in. And in order to be creative, yeah, you know the famous expression of 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration. There still needs to be a lot of, let's say, grit.

Yeah, absolutely. And I was, I was watching something earlier today actually talking about if you want easy, then the planning process, the waterfall is easy, right? But the work of actually making change in an organization is really hard.

Yeah, it's tough. It's tough.

So for you guys, in terms of going into organizations, what do you say is the main role then of the, the Agile coach going in?

Yeah, I would say it's, it's ever-evolving, of course, very complicated. But, and there's of course huge discussions about Well, you know, is Agile Coach even a trade? Is it even a serious job? You know, I see this obviously as modern change agents and without being the, let's say, sole conscience when it comes to agility, right? Because, well, obviously the Agile Coach is only carrier of that virus and hopefully he or she spreads it throughout the organization. And I think for us, you know, it goes beyond coaching. I think coaching is a very important part of it. I guess what I love most is this concept of an organizational geek, right? So we are geeked out by new ways of working and thinking and structuring things. And I think you have to have a limitless curiosity. And I think a big risk for some agile coaches these days is that they get too much stuck into a certain framework, certain philosophy, and lose their natural curiosity. So, you know, if we core values are around curiosity, they are around courage, they are around team spirit, and also around, let's say, quirkiness. And yeah, it's a bit of a, you know, yeah, someone who is, who's not completely socially accepted.

Nice, a generation of outcasts of all the agile coaches.

I guess we're a self-help group even more than a company. That's good. I like it.

But I can see that, that people get bought into a particular framework. And also, at the end of the day, you're, if you're going into an organization, you need to be able to articulate what it is that you are going to do in order to charge for it. I mean, you're selling a product in some ways, right? Which is your, your presence and your facilitation of change. And so I can see the tendency towards getting stuck into a particular product because it feels quite safe, right?

Yeah, oh, definitely.

Ironically. Yeah, or, you know, exactly.

And, you know, this is also the huge, the huge tension between standardization and cross-pollination, which I think Spotify perfectly by saying, you know, we prefer cross-pollination. And to me, being agile means being able also to, to actually sideline the standards sometimes.

Yeah.

And, uh, you know, to go your own way. And yeah, I think corporations these days, and they tell me they have corporate licenses with Skilled Agile, and this is their way of working to scale across the company. And to me, it's new standardization thinking, which is great for control, but not really for, you know, eliciting more corporate creativity.

Absolutely. And it, again, like I, I just hear so many resonant things within education as well, because there's obviously the whole debate about standardized education and standardized testing versus personalized learning and personalized assessment.

Exactly.

It's the same tension, right? You know, it's not one or the other for sure, but there is too much of a tendency towards the standardized because it's easier and it's pre-packaged and it doesn't take as much thought and effort. But you know, there's so much more meaning.

And it will have winners. I mean, to be honest, I'm probably a winner of the standardized system because memorizing stuff. I love making those tests. I always came out as a winner there.

Yeah.

But now I realize that, you know, how much it actually depends on my own perspective. Yeah, absolutely. Different talents which they employ in this country.

Yeah, no, I— you're right. It rewards conscientious people and it rewards, rewards certain profiles of people. And many people do incredibly well.

Yeah.

The argument that always comes back is all of this amazing innovation that we're seeing now is a product pretty much of a standardized education system. Why change it? It's doing, you know, it's providing innovation. Why do we need to change it?

It must do something right. Yeah, exactly.

It's not a straightforward answer, right? But it never is, I suppose. But just in my interest in Agile and this idea about the language around it, because I mean, in a way it's kind of the subtext of what we're talking about, is it? And like you say, you know, a good Agile coach will deviate from a framework or deviate from the language. Is the language of Agile kind of a helpful pull in, or do you see it more as a problematic barrier that keeps people out?

Well, you know, I'm very curious what they think about it in France. In Holland, I would say that, you know, for example, compared to Belgium, who, you know, for half of them, they also speak Dutch. We are relatively liberal in our, in terms of using language. I would say that the Dutch language is pretty much, um, influenced by English. There's a lot of English. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those conservatives in our country who hate that, you know, I'm very modern when it comes to that. So, you know, I, I just love— I love being able to communicate with you. To me, I would love to be able to fall in love with everybody around the world because I can speak their language, right?

Yeah.

The language of love is a universal language which we can all speak. Nice. I'm not a cultural conservative. To me, you know, sure. English in Holland, or even to, you know, like my grandfather who studied Esperanto, right? Oh yeah, creating one language. Yeah, that would be all fine. So that's just a very personal opinion. So a lot of conservatives in Holland for whom it can be a barrier to start using terms like product backlog. Yeah, I mean, I understand it, I'm empathetic to it. However, sometimes, you know, if it's for the wrong arguments, there are some people who are like, yeah, I don't like working with Post-its. Well, to me Usually there's something underneath that. So, yeah, because there's something underneath that they really don't like. Yeah. So often I try to ask more questions to discover, okay, so what is it that you really hate? And can we kind of, you know, let's get to that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You know, I mean, let's not talk about the language, let's talk about the actual effect of what we're trying to achieve.

Yeah, yeah.

And sometimes, yeah, we have to change language. Yeah, we also did that because there's a lot of IT languages in Agile And we, you know, we try to kind of navigate that to see which terms are applicable and which not. But it's not only the language, it's also the practices. A lot of these practices from the IT domain are simply not applicable. So I would say the core of our services is also to translate all the good stuff they've discovered in IT into other domains which have very different rules and very different needs.

Yeah, and I think from what my understanding, it's fundamentally, it's just, it's a way of working.

Exactly.

And it's a way of working that hopefully improves communication. Yeah. So what you're not trying to do is put in barriers in the way that stop people communicating effectively, but actually you're giving them tools that increase their ability to self-organize and collaborate. And then therefore communication is a big part of that.

You know, Agile sometimes is kind of a sect, but in a positive way. Exactly. It attracts certain types of people. And you know, when I go to South Africa or Turkey or, or, or Latin America, I find these type of people being attracted to this.

Yeah. It's, it's an interesting, sometimes evangelical sect for sure. It's like, and that, I guess that can be a barrier to entry for people, but at the same time, Like, I can, you know, I can definitely see why people somewhat evangelical about it because it's just, it's, you know, it goes pretty deep when you start getting into the actual mindset of it.

Lovely. Yeah. So there's so many parallels.

Yeah, no, there really is. But it's, it's not an easy thing, you know, like for me in schools, schools are built around the hierarchy and they're built around that waterfall type system of strategic planning and just very systematic routines. And yeah, it's a big shift really. And the hierarchies of even just teachers in classrooms. And that's why, like, what Billy's doing with EduScrum is interesting because it's kind of breaking down the, that hierarchy between the teacher and, you know, the teacher becomes the product owner and the students are the Scrum Master and the Scrum Team. But one of the reasons I've been drawn to what you guys are doing and a lot of the other people in Agile HR is, is that whole idea of trying to create a human-centered organization. And for me, schools, yeah, of course they're about the kids, but actually if you've got a really wonderful organization that values its people and the people are working effectively, then it's going to benefit the kids anyway. So actually what we're trying to do, or I'm trying to do, is create really positive human-centered schools, which will then cascade down to the, to the students.

I think that's, that's a lovely idea.

Yeah. Are you getting a lot of interest from HR departments now with your work? I mean, is it, do you see that it's growing in terms of the interest in it from outside of tech?

So HR is definitely growing. I've been very proud that we were a trailblazer in their domain, you know, starting with our book in 2017. And yeah, there's been a lot of interest. Obviously there's wildly different conceptions by what it means because, well, I mean, Agile is a broad concept, but HR is a very broad one as well.

Yeah, that's true.

So yeah, you know, it means different things to different, let's say, sub-HR contexts, which is why, you know, we, we did this State of Agile HR research. By the way, we're also doing a lot of in education. So we've been working for the Dutch Ministry of Education for, I think, about 3 years now. And we're still very active there. And actually it's, it's funny because it's double, it's the HR and organizational department within the ministry, within the ministry.

Interesting.

A lot of HR work within the ministry. So also teams that set guidelines for different levels of education and also work with their benefits, et cetera. We do a lot of work there. And also currently we're helping a high school, a teacher team and a management team of a high school in Amsterdam.

That's brilliant. Yeah.

And I would say there's, there's a couple of different flavors actually in the Netherlands. So there's this company called Stichting Lehrkracht and they're, They do a lot of— yeah, it's horrible Dutch, but I believe if I'm right, a couple of ex-McKinsey dudes who got frustrated as well, also, okay. Education.

Yeah.

There's us, there's 8 Scrub and Willy.

Yeah.

Yeah. School, which is our own company. Uh, so there's a lot of different people trying to do something, which is great.

No, it's good. I mean, definitely. Like I remember watching Jeff Sutherland's Ted Talk. And then he, you know, he starts talking about the Netherlands schools in the Netherlands, which is obviously what put me onto Willy, but just awesome, you know, but so clearly in the Netherlands has been a bit of a hotspot for Scrum and Agile in education from the beginning.

I would say generally, like, yeah, if we're talking about hierarchy, I would say it's pretty difficult in a German class or French one, probably compared to the Dutch one. We are very egalitarian. And I think this is also the reason why Agile has caught on so much here. So there's these cultural maps of the world, right? They say there's this Protestant bubble of like Sweden, the Netherlands, and some other predominantly, let's say, Protestant-denominated countries. And especially, let's say, the secular Protestantism, which basically led to a very egalitarian view on the world, which is very much enabling for self-organizing teams.

Absolutely. Yeah. It's a kind of fertile context already, right? That's something interesting you're showing me here. This is—

I thought I would just show you a map.

Yeah.

Nice. We saw the cultural map and it's, this is based on at least 30 years of research. I believe it's done since the 1980s. It's a global value survey. I have the exact name of it, but this is the graph in which they plot societal values basically. And as you can see, I think it's not a coincidence at the top right of this, of this picture here, which shows a maximum of self-expression and the maximum rational values. You know, I mean, you see Spotify and their model, they're the most outright on the right top of this graph, right? And the ING transformation in Netherlands, well, it's in the same bubble. Now, if you go down a bit to the United States, it's still, it's a bit more hierarchical, but it's still high in terms of self-expression. For sure. So I think it's kind of, you know, these English-speaking and Protestant bubbles have basically That's really interesting.

Yeah. Really interesting. And one area that's, that maybe is a bit of an outlier in that is Turkey because I think there's, from what I've heard and talking to Vili and you've mentioned it already, there's quite a lot happening in Turkey and people are picking up Agile in Turkey. Right. And that's, that's perhaps not a context that would fit neatly into your, into your graphic.

Oh, definitely. Yeah. So yeah, I'll be in Turkey next month again.

So what's going on in Turkey? That's the question.

Yeah. So yeah, obviously they have a lot of hierarchical legacy. So, you know, this company there, you know, with 12 hierarchical layers and they're radically trying to reduce that. I would say they're very entrepreneurial, generally speaking.

You're right. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's always dangerous to generalize, right? But you know, cause then we get back into that kind of standardization mindset of like everybody's the same, but of course, of course individuals are different, but you know, it is interesting to see the patterns of where, you know, the areas that are definitely picking this up and Turkey just seems to be one that's that's coming up interestingly. Yeah, I hear it a lot in conversations. So yeah, it's good. I have to get myself to Istanbul.

Yeah. Well, you know, I've had this blog idea in my mind a long time to write about, you know, Agile versus national cultures.

Yeah. Nice. Cool. Thank you, man. I really appreciate your time and it's a real pleasure to talk to you.

Definitely.

Well, you know, thanks, man.

Nice, Tim.

Good to talk. Bye-bye.

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