The show’s guest in this episode is Fred Fowler. He is an author, teacher and all-round Scrummy Guy. He is a former CIO, is one of a handful of people worldwide who holds the Professional Scrum Master level III certification awarded by Scrum.or, and has taught more than 300 people to be Scrum Masters in the US, Central America, and Asia.

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Making Decisions Based on Measured Results with Fred Fowler

Hi, everybody. It’s super great to be here with you live today on the experimental leader podcast, we are going to be doing some exciting things today we’re going to be having a great conversation with a guest. And but I wanted to start I was having a conversation over the weekend in the stands at a swim meet, because that’s where I was about the idea of mentorship. And I thought I might, there’s, there’s a variety of sort of support roles that leaders use. And I thought I might sort of dive into those and talk about how leaders and thought leaders and people who are establishing brands and people who are innovating, might use a therapist or a mentor or a coach or a consultant, because I have thoughts and ideas about those. Being that I sort of hold the space in there. And and so I thought it might be useful to do that. And the conversation I was having actually was around someone who was innovating who was trying to create an innovative brand. And what they what they were talking about is they kept thinking they needed a mentor, but they were having a hard time finding a mentor. And my take on that as mentors can be really useful in like leadership in an organization because the the mentor can really help pave the way. But if someone’s actually innovating, and they’re doing something that’s never been done before, having a mentor can kind of get in the way. Because because the mentor is going to have their own ideas and opinions and thoughts. And if someone’s trying to pull out their own thinking, they’re trying to create a brand or expand their thinking or contribute to a field in a unique way, having a mentor tell you what you think isn’t particularly useful. In fact, it it’s the opposite of what you’re actually doing. So mentorship really is about doing something that’s already been done before, and you want to learn from someone who knows how to do it. But the world of innovation is not that.

Whereas a really good coach holds the space of helping you understand your own mind. And so, for four thought leaders, having a really good coach who can ask really good questions, who can pull out of you your own thinking, sort of pure coaching is really incredibly valuable. So if you’re trying to create a brand out of nothing, if you’re trying to do something in a space, like carve out a space, where you’re contributing something that hasn’t been done before, that world of innovation coaching is particularly useful. On the other hand, leaders have a lot of feelings. And coaching can be really useful in that space. But so can a really good therapist, if you’re actually coming up against your own limitations. Either a coach or a therapist can be really good at dealing with things like impostor syndrome, if they’re a passing thing, or if they’re in a time that you’re doing something new, then coaching is a really good place for that. If it’s something that you have been grappling with, and you feel like it’s harming your self esteem, or you’re feeling like it’s affecting you personally, then therapy might be a good place to look at the why, because therapy tends to look at the underlying issue below it. And so therapy can be a really good look. And then when I think of consulting is the other place where you might hire an expert to help you as a leader, you might hire a leadership consultant to come in and work with your team.

And when I think of the space that we do, like with our Leadership Essentials Program, I’m actually acting as a consultant, I’m producing material that helps people learn the skills of leadership, because I’ve gotten to walk in the leadership shoes more often because I have many clients, I’m able to help provide education and learning, then I’m actually consulting to help provide those learnings to my clients are those skills to my clients, or a consultant might actually come in and do it for you in an organization. And so a consultant can be useful in those ways. By the way, our Leadership Essentials Program is a blend of that consulting model and a coaching model where we have coaching involved in it as well. I just thought it was really an interesting conversation that we were having. And I realized that all of these people can be the perfect person given the right problem, but it’s a good idea to ask yourself, what is it that you’re going for? What are you hoping will happen? When you hire someone? Are you looking for them to bring their expertise? Are you looking for them to pull it out of you? Or are you looking for them to help uncover something that you’re unaware of? And so are you looking for them to teach you something they’ve already done. And so those are all of the therapists, the mentor, the coach, and the consultant. And I just thought it might be useful for me to run through those this morning.

I’m super excited about our guest today. Our guest is Fred Fowler. He’s an author, a teacher, an all round scrummy guy. He’s a former C I O. And he’s one of a handful of people worldwide, who holds the professional scrum master level three certification, awarded by scrum.or, and has taught more than 300 people to be Scrum Masters in the US, Central America and Asia. And in May of 2021, he published his second book, advanced scrum case studies. I am super excited to welcome Fred to the show.

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Welcome, Fred.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Well, we are going to dive into all things farm related. And I also ask you to read a chapter of the experimental leader book because we’re doing book club this year. And you do lots of experiments. So we are looking at chapter three, conduct an experiment. Anything that you want to just say that you noticed as you read this chapter, I, I think you went you thought, your experiments too. But what do you notice?

Oh, yeah, yeah, well, you know, I’m a very scrawny guy, expert in the scrum framework. And Scrum is all about experiments. What Scrum is, is an organized process of discovery. It’s a framework where people can, in effect, perform experiments, measure the results, learn from those results, and adapt. That’s really the heart and soul of Scrum. And it turns out that Scrum, the whole idea of experimentation, and adapting, and learning from experiments, is fundamental to anything that you’re doing for the first time, anything that you’re doing, that’s new. That’s why Scrum is so powerful in the world of product development. Because when you’re developing a new product, by definition, nobody’s ever done it before. So you have to discover how to do it, you have to learn as you go. And the scrum framework is a is a framework for organizing people to go through that process of discovery and create the most value that’s possible through an experimental approach.

That’s exactly it. That’s exactly what I talk about all day long. That’s exactly what I think about too. And I think it’s it’s so much a part of what what fields do you work at? Like? Are you in software engineering? Is that where you’re applying Scrum? Or where you think Scrum?

Well, I started out in software engineering, I wrote my first I’m an old guy, I wrote my first professional code in 1981. So I’ve been at this for a long time. And, you know, I made my living as a programmer coming in and fixing systems that were going bad. Ended up in management as again, it was a CIO. But along the way, I discovered the scrum approach. And it just worked out so well because again, it just is perfect. You know, an alternative to Scrum is something called waterfall, where you plan everything out in advance down to the last detail. And then the theory is if you plan it all out carefully enough, then all people have to do is just execute the planet and in your your you’re done is successful. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for doing something new, a new product development new new service, new procedure, because, by definition, you don’t know everything you need to know at the beginning. And you can only learn by doing you have to try it and see and observe the results and adapt and So, the world is full of failed waterfall type projects, where people try to use that kind of approach to do something new. And by the way, Scrum we just make a point, Scrum became popular in the world of software development, because in software, you’re always doing it for the first time, you never write the same piece of software twice. However, Scrum is being applied in all kinds of areas. I’ve got a friend in Chicago that’s using it for mergers and acquisitions. We’ve got another friend in I think it’s Portland. And he’s using it for architecture. Another person I know is using it for the world of HR and back East. It’s in finance and insurance. Because it’s all about solving problems. That’s a product line is there to solve a problem?

That’s why I wrote my book, is because I was working with startups, software in tech companies. And I realized that so many of the practices that we’re working in software could be applied universally, universally in other organizations, to other knowledge workers. And absolutely, like the best practices are there in software and have been for a long time standup meetings, all of those things, and other organizations are still living and dying by people’s ideas instead of seeing them as experiments. And so this idea of experimentation, when we’re doing new things, and you said it, as well as I could say it, but I say it all the time, when we are doing something new, we are experimenting, we just have to decide how long we’re going to do that experiment. We don’t. In other organizations, we see people deciding something and assuming we’ve decided it till the end of time. But what we really need to do is decide how to bound our experiment are we going to do it for a month are we going to do it for a year, we’re going to do it for three months. And then we need to collect data to decide how long we’ll continue that experiment. And, and all of our products, by the way, are tech friendly. We don’t claim that they’re, you know, integrated with tech, but they don’t violate any of the principles of tech, because we don’t put any concepts that are waterfall in any of our programs or products. So I love that you brought up waterfall because it’s the thing that we like it’s one of our company values is not to use anything that requires a waterfall method.

Yeah, now, there’s been some academic work about the different kinds of problems there are to solve. And it’s important to understand those different kinds of problems to just stand where waterfall fits where scrum fits where the other frameworks fit. There are actually four kinds of problems. One is called a simple problem, which is a no brainer, you don’t need much of a framework to deal with that. Now, the next kind is a complicated problem. And a complicated problem is one that might be intricate, there might be lots of moving parts. But ultimately, you know, everything you need to know in order to solve the problem at the very beginning. That’s what waterfalls are based on. Now, there’s a complex problem, where you don’t know everything you need to know ahead of time, or you have to discover the solution as you go. And that’s, that’s where Scrum and Agile come in. And then the fourth kind is a chaotic problem where you don’t know anything, all you can do is react. So for instance, a helpdesk is an example of that fourth kind of problem. And there’s a is a framework called Kanban. for that. So it’s very important to understand what kind of problems you’re dealing with, in order to choose an effective framework to to organize it. If you don’t mind, I can give you an example.

And I just want to shout out to David Snowden for the Cynefin and work that he’s done if we’re going to talk about his work, because most work falls into the connection. Work of David’s No, that’s true. Yes. I want to make sure we shout out to him if we’re going to talk about Kevin, which obviously, these are really useful. Frameworks for talking about problems. Yeah, go ahead and give an example because great idea.

Well, okay, so let’s take the example of your developer, you’ve got a piece of land you want to build 100 houses on it. By the time you get to house number 99 You know everything you need to know about it, in order to build it, you know how many nails you need how much board he’s a lumber, because you’ve got nine, eight houses worth of experience to learn what you need. So the 99th house is a good example of a waterfall problem. Because there’s nothing unknown, you can figure it out, you can make a rational plan, get people in the right place the right time to deliver the house, know, effectively. Now contrast that with the first house in the list. That’s when you find out all the oopss and goofs, like for instance, oh, we put the master toilet right above the dining room. So that when people are eating their dinner, they can hear the toilet flush, or, oops, we put the water heater at the far end of the house. So by the time the water gets to this, the shower in the master bedroom, the water’s cold. So that’s where you learn all the things you need to learn in order to get something done. So in effect, the first house is an experiment. And so you need to approach it in an experimental way, in order to solve those problems, and be effective. So anyway, that’s a good, good kind of rule of thumb I used when I teach people the difference between a complicated and a complex problem.

If you start to think about building houses on the moon or something or on Mars. Give out then you get something truly, you don’t even know what the rules are like you have to start trying to figure out I remember years ago, I I decided to eat a raw food diet. And like everything I knew about food went out the window. Because you can’t hit anything about 15 You like it was it was as if I the whole framework of everything. I knew it had gone away. And so once I had that it was just then it was just like doing it. But in the beginning everything was new and unknown. And it was a little while. Well, Fred, how are you putting your life at work right now?

Oh, my goodness. Well, it’s my personal life. I decided to conduct the experiment and kind of dropped everything in San Francisco and moved to Bangkok, Thailand. Oh, my. I’ve enjoyed it very much. Because you know, I came here cold. Didn’t know anybody. But I’ve made friends in Bangkok has a wonderful place. Full of kind, gentle, generous, friendly people. And very spicy food. How long have you been there since March? Since March? So about what? Yeah.

So, what’s the best thing about being in Thailand?

Well, I grew up I grew up in snowy Pennsylvania. And I think the best thing about Thailand is this no snow a cold day here is 80 degrees. And so my I kind of put all my San Francisco clothes in the closet and I bought short sleeves, and short pants and sandals. And so I’m very comfortable walking around and very comfortable clothing.

Yeah, as a coach, I always think about people’s like underlying these there’s these sort of universal dreams that people have. And I think like moving to Thailand or like giving it up putting everything in storage and, and going on an adventure is a universal dream that people have. Especially if they’re working a leadership job or something like that. Like it’s it’s it’s sort of living the dream, what you’re doing.

The same time though, I really haven’t given up any connections because it’s all over the internet. You know, COVID caused everybody to work from home. Well, that means people can work from anywhere. And you know what I do right now is I I write books I teach, I consult. And I can do that all over, you know, medium like this. You know, I’ve got a good meeting account with Google. And I actually I organize a meetup group that’s got 2500 members. And we get together every two weeks to talk about Scrum. And, and I organize organize conferences to COVID kind of knocked all the conference’s out. But before that I organized to what I called Silicon Valley Scrum. It’s where we brought people together, really from all over the place to talk about the scrum framework and how to apply it in different different areas. By the way, you know, yeah, one of the most important things about experimenting, especially in the context of Scrum, is to understand what the results are. If you’re going to do an experiment, you need to understand what the data is telling you. At the end, how do you do so you need to have a way of work, you have to have a way of measuring the results. And I’m not talking about oh, it looks pretty good. And I’m talking about measuring it in absolute scale. That makes sense. Now, there are different applications of that, depending on what you’re trying to do. If you’re trying to for instance, I did some consulting with a not for profit, that was basically providing showers for homeless people. And so how do you measure the results? Well, what you did was you figured out what value you were delivering? And then figured out what units that was and of course, with homeless people, what you did was you counted the homeless people, how many showers did you give? How many individuals you help? And that gave you a yardstick to use to to understand if you tweak something, did it get better or worse?

I was gonna say you could also connect, you know, you could also do long, lot more longitudinal epidemiological data around. How did that change their lives? Did showers make a difference? You know, if you could find those people later, and ask did showers regular showers, allow them to get a job? Did it allow them to change? What changed in their lives over time would be interesting also.

Yeah. But yes, and actually, they did track that the organization was called dignity on wheels. And the goal was to allow homeless people to regain some sense of dignity. So they provided showers, they provided laundry facilities of the river, that clean clothes. When I was finished with that organization, they were talking about recruiting barbers, and hairdressers, to basically set up mobile barber shops to get people, you know, well groomed, the whole idea of giving them a sense of dignity and therefore a sense of confidence and the ability to go find a job someplace. So but but they were able to measure the value that they were delivering in a way that was unambiguous. So that they could then make changes and understand whether the changes were improvements or not. Now in the world of software and business, there’s a very simple yardstick to use. And that’s how valuable is the product that you’re producing. So if you’re doing software while you’re paying people to write it, so you know what is costing you, you need to be able to measure what the value is as being produced, you can compare the value that they produce with the cost and come up with return on the investment, which is your yardstick to figure out whether things are working or not. And that’s something that companies very rarely do. They don’t seem to try to measure the value of what’s being produced on a short term basis. And unfortunately, I’ve got lots of war stories. I get called into places where unfortunately there are disasters going on. The worst was a company that spent half a billion dollars trying to replat form their entire system. without measuring the value that was being produced along the way, hoping that in the end, there would be something worthwhile. And in the end, they spent all that money all that time, and had nothing to show for it. But one of the keys to Scrum is you have to be able to measure what’s going on. And again, you measure it on a on a sprint by sprint basis, which is a short period of time. So you don’t go too far off the track.

If you’re generalizing about a sprint, what do you think that? Like, if if we were generalizing, and you’re stepping out of just software? Do you have a guideline? People ask me this question all the time? I usually say a week. But where do you fall on the sprint timeline or the timeline for measurement?

Advanced Scrum Case Studies: Real-World Situations and How to Address Them

Oh, boy, well, there is no right answer to that. Yeah, I’ve been involved in Sprint’s at last a month. I’ve been involved in sprints that last day. Actually, one of the most successful projects I ever did was one where in effect, we did a sprint a day. But the key is that the the, the product owner, that’s a technical term, but basically somebody who decides what’s valuable to do. Yep, has to have a short enough window in order to learn what’s going on in the marketplace with learn what’s going on in the product and make decisions about what the priorities ought to be. So they need a short window. The people who are actually creating the product, oftentimes need a longer window in order to create a meaningful amount values. So it basically is a trade off. And then oftentimes, there’s a big debate between the product people and the developers to say, okay, what are we going to do? And then they say, Okay, we’re going to do this. But it’s important to have a finite period of time. So you can actually measure how much value you produce. How much effort is taking, so that you have some hard measurements, you can make decisions on in terms of the will proceed or not.

That’s super helpful. And I do notice that none of the answers were a year. They were they were still quiet. And I you know, I think that’s really noteworthy. I want to talk for just a second about your book. And I just want to, you know, advance scrum case studies, which, you know, I love this stuff. And I don’t picture myself like getting that for my beach reading in the summer, or my holiday reading over Christmas, who should read your book? And what’s it for help us understand? Like, how, what would be, you know, who do you want to read your book? And tell us about it?

Okay, actually, you might enjoy it for a B tree, because what it is, it’s fifteens. It’s 15 stories about real problem situations that people encountered, and how to deal with those things. Okay, it came out of my meetup group. Because every two weeks, you know, we ask people, can you submit some kind of a problem you’ve got or some kind of situation? And then let us discuss it and come up with a solution. So I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’ve got more than 60 of these problems written up in my notes. So I took 15 of them and turn them into a book. So each case is it’s not very long, but there are things like, what do you do about monitoring workers who are working at home? There’s a case of that, you know, an engineering manager who used to like to watch everybody in the big open office area to make sure they were there doing work. They’re busy. They weren’t talking on the phone. But all of a sudden, everybody had to go home because of COVID. And the engineering manager was kind of lost. Well, what do I do? What do I do? Should I surely get software to count people’s keystrokes? Should I get software to find out where the people logged in or not? What should I do? By the way, it turns out that it doesn’t matter whether people are working hard. Because that’s not what you want to measure. You don’t want to measure how busy people are. Because if you measure how busy people are, they’re going to make sure they’re busy all the time. Yeah, and this half billion dollar project had lots and lots and lots of busy people. You don’t want to measure how busy people are you want to measure what the results are. You want to measure the value that’s produced. And if you’re measuring value, and is being produced, and who cares, where the people are in the officer at home, you figure out what the results are that you want to measure. And then you determine whether that’s happening or not. And that’s how you keep track of what’s going on and intervene if necessary. So that’s one case, there are 14 other cases. What do you do about there’s one case is called bossy Bobby, about a particular developer, who’s very bossy, and makes all the decisions for everybody else, and, you know, tells her what to do. You know, what do you do about that? And then there’s another one about a manager who doesn’t want to take any responsibility. Doesn’t doesn’t make any decisions. What do you do about that? So it’s, it was a lot of fun putting that book together, I’m actually working on Volume Two, although it’s not out yet. Because I’ve got, like I say, 60 of these stories written up and published 15, they been very popular. And when I get around to it, and myself, the other things I’m doing, I’m going to put out more advanced scrum case studies.

Well, where how can people find you? I’m not going to say where because we know you’re in Thailand. But how can people find you?

Okay, well, of course, my books are on Amazon, you can go there. Look for advanced chrome case studies, you’ll find them on Amazon. Or if you want, you can order them directly from me get a discount. By the way, I’ve set up a discount called experiment to discount code, you can enter that in my website and get a 20% discount on on the books. So code experiment. Can we get? Okay, very good, though the website is www.svscrum.com. And that’s got all the information that’s got the information about the meetup group that’s got books is actually there are some self study materials there if you want to get a scrum certification. That’s why I’m on LinkedIn. And that’s really where I do too much.

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Well, it was super fun talking to Fred all about experimenting. And I love that. He said anytime you try something new, you’re experimenting. I believe this wholeheartedly. And I think one of the things I really want to challenge you need to do is if you are doing something new, think of it as an experiment number one, but number two, think about how long you’re going to do the experiment for and how will you know whether you should keep doing it? So how will you collect data? How will you measure what you’re doing so that you know whether or not it works. So make sure you’ve got that measurement in place before you start so that you know whether or not what you’re trying. What you’re doing for the first time is a good thing to do or not a good thing to do as you try it. It has been such a great time being with your you today. I can’t wait to see you next week and go experiment!

Important Links: 

• Fred Fowler – LinkedIn
• Silicon Valley Scrum – Website

Fred Fowler

Fred Fowler is the former Mayor of his hometown (Sunnyvale, Ca, “the heart of Silicon Valley”) and an internationally recognized authority on the Scrum Framework. In May 2021 he published his second book, “Advanced Scrum Case Studies” (2021, Silicon Valley Scrum Press, San Francisco), which is available on Amazon.com. He holds a Doctor of Scrum certification from SiliconValleyScrum.com and also a Professional Scrum Master level III (PSM III) from Scrum.org. He is the author of the book “Navigating Hybrid Scrum Environments” (published by APress, Ny, Ny) and hosts two “Advanced scrum Case Study” podcasts. He is also the organizer of the Silicon Valley Professional Scrum meetup group (approx 2,000 members) and has recently started a similar group based in Shanghai, China.

In 2018, Fred organized the first “Silicon Valley Scrum(mit)” conference, which took place in the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley. The following year he organized the “Silicon Valley Scrum(mit) v 2.0” which was very well received and attracted speakers from as far away as Boston and Chicago. He plans to organize future Scru(mit) conferences in Silicon Valley and also Asia and Latin America.

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