Passion Struck with John R. Miles - What It Means To be a New Age Digital Leader w/ Sid Tobias EP 18

Episode Date: April 13, 2021

On today’s show, we interview Director, Digital Standards Office, Technology and Business Transformation, Advanced Education and Skills Training, Sid Tobias who shares with us his distilled wisdom on agile workflow and digital leadership. He mentors new digital teams with the BCDevExchange and teaches digital leadership to executives.  Before this, Sid has served for 25 years in the Canadian Armed Forces.  We start this show with Sid sharing a life-changing incident that sparked his interest in agile methodology.  In 2002, when Sid was stationed aboard a Canadian destroyer in the Persian Gulf near Afghanistan, Canadians' training exercise was wrongly deciphered as a threat by an American F-16 bomber. The F-16 pilot decided to retaliate, and many innocent lives were lost in the aftermath. The Canadian and American leaders were quick to take responsibility and collaborated closely to ensure there was no repeat of such unfortunate incidents. This incident was also the pivot point that made Sid go agile. “How can leaders develop and introduce work procedures that create bigger and more frequent success opportunities across the board?” wondered Sid. You will learn the importance of being a true “Servant Leader” or Leader Gardener” who can recognize the weakest signals from team employees to result in a truly collaborative approach.  As a public safety transformational specialist, Sid emphasizes the importance of a team-driven work approach. We also compare and contrast the waterfall approach to the agile approach. And reveal how a shift towards agile can help organizations fail cheap and pivot quickly. You will also learn how the agile methodology allows the government to rope in private sector enterprises for top-secret projects.  Enjoy! Question That I Ask In Today’s Show Why did you decide to get educated in the Agile Methodology? What are some of the major obstacles in the digital transformation drive? From your time in the military, what is the most important leadership lesson that you learned? What are the three words that describe being a Canadian?   What You Will Learn In This Show An agile vs. Waterfall approach How going agile can allow you to fail cheap and pivot quickly Giving up the command-and-control management style and being a “Leader Gardener” to your people instead How going agile can help ensure the success of public-private partnerships And so much more…   Resources BC Dev Exchange - https://bcdevexchange.org/ Sid's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sidtobias/ How to Contact the Show --- Follow Passion Struck on Instagram -https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast -- Combat veteran, multi-industry CEO, and Author John R. Miles is on a mission to make passion go viral by helping growth seekers to overcome their fear, self-doubt, and adversity. He loves taking his own life experiences, lessons from his time as a CEO and Fortune 50 C-Level Executive, and the truths he has learned to help make other's lives better. His new podcast Passion Struck provides inspirational interviews and powerful guidance for people to take their lives to the next level. Watch as these high achievers weigh in on life's biggest questions and challenges as we journey on the path to becoming passion-struck. -- Follow John R. Miles Here: Website - https://passionstruck.com/​ ​​Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/john_r_miles ​​ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Johnrmiles.c0m​ ​Twitter: https://twitter.com/Milesjohnr​ ​​ Medium: https://medium.com/@JohnRMiles​ ​John's Website: https://johnrmiles.com/​ - John's New eBook - The Passion Struck Framework https://passionstruck.com/coaching/​

One of the things that have really appealed to leaders to do at all levels is go to the sprint review, go to the demo, see what they've built in the past two weeks. If you're worried about metrics, look at the client's eyes when they see that thing that has been built. And you know, you get from them, wow, they're really excited about that. I think it's time to be realistic about it as well and start measuring, you know, oat coms instead of oat quits. Meaning those oat quits are those milestone things that you set in the road that were arbitrarily came up with because, Tances are, you never talk to a developer or development team, but how long it's going to take to get to that milestone. team, but how long it's going to take to get to that milestone. Welcome to the PassionStruck podcast. My name is John Miles, a former combat veteran

and multi-industry CEO, turned entrepreneur and human performance expert. Each week we showcase an inspirational person and message that helps you unlock your hidden potential and unleash your creativity and leadership abilities. Thank you for spending time with me today and let's get igniting! Thank you for joining me on the PassionStruck podcast. Author and venture capitalist Antonio Belosanto said,

Author and venture capitalist Antonio Belosanto said, our role as business leaders is to understand the strategic implications of digital transformation. Lead the way forward and implement our vision for the future of our businesses and their contribution to the communities we support through our activities. There is no doubt that the impacts of digital transformation are having profound impacts on us, both in our careers, in our futures, and how we need to approach both of them.

And this is a great lead in, for our guest today, Sid Tobias, who is leading this revolution in British Columbia and teaching others his wisdom. Sid and I discuss how he made a big change in the direction of his career, his transition from the Armed Forces to government service, what it means to be a gardener leader, and what the future of digital development

and digital leadership looks like for the British Columbia government. Sid Cabayas is the director of digital standards office for the Ministry Advanced Education and Training in British Columbia. He has 25 years with Canadian Armed Forces working in naval joint and combined forces. In his time with the forces,

he was a specialist joint interface control officer, Canadian joint tactical data link coordinator, Hawkson or head chief of the HMS Ottawa, and chairman of the NATO tactical data link. He has been formally recognized for his work in leadership by NATO, ASIC, Hungary, Poland, Greece, and Canada. And he's quick to admit that none of his accomplishments would have

been possible without exceptional mentorship, leadership, and the support of international teams. I am thrilled to have him on the show today and I think there is so much to be learned from him in this interview we're about ready to hear. There is so much you can learn from Sid and I'm absolutely thrilled to talk to him today. Sid Tobias, thank you so much for coming on today's episode of Passionstruck. I am so excited to talk to you and I think the listeners are going to learn so much from you, from both your military service to your government service

that you're doing now in British Columbia. Thank you so much for being on the show. Absolutely, Prada, pleasure, John. Thanks for having me. Well, Sid, you have had a really interesting career. And thank you for your 25 years of service to your country. I wanted to start the podcast out by giving the listeners kind of a description of, you know,

during your time and service, you know, what was your role, what was your training, and what was the main thing that you did as part of your service? Yeah, I guess most of my service was spent in a kind of a crossroads between an operator and a technician and that destroyer operations. I think you called them OSs in the American Navy. The main role was fusing sensor data together together to make decision-making a little bit easier for commanders. So that's the operation of SONAR's radars, intelligence, and kind of building that situational awareness plot

for to allow commanders to make real-time decisions kind of in the field. And so most of my time was split up both at C and a shore and instructing various levels of Naval Combat Information operators to be successful in their jobs and then significant amount of coaching and mentoring those same teams through various levels of both individual training and team training. Okay, interesting. So I think we both have some similar experiences in working with in the joint world

and with people from different countries. I know you're gonna talk about kind of a friendly fire incident, but as a lead in, I, who wasn't a friendly fire situation, but I was myself on the destroyer of the USS Kid. This would have been back in around 1994. We were on patrol off the coast of Bosnia, Croatia. And at that time Yugoslavian Navy had these OSA patrol ships that had, you know, in today's world, they weren't that sophisticated, but they had some Soviet Erskad missiles on them that could wreck havoc on a destroyer. And I was standing watch, it was in the middle of the night,

and all of a sudden we got lit up by a few different shifts at the same time. And I declared general reporters and tons of things are going through your mind as you're there. And luckily the chief of the boat, which I think you've got experience was there with me. And he and I were talking.

And then the commanding officer came in. And I was in a similar role because I was deployed on the ship as the perplodic officer or kind of their intel officer. And so he said to me, we take him out or not, you know, do they have pastile intent or not? And, you know, I used the best knowledge that I could, but it was purely based on, you know, the threat posture that I had seen and other things and not what I would have loved to have had was a

true, you know, digital fusion of information, but I told them I don't, I think this is just a, you know, they're just trying to show their muscles and they're not going to fire on us, they'd be stupid to because we've taken both out and don't do anything and it turned out to be the right guess. But when you're sitting there in that situation, you've got the life of the crew on your mind, and you've got, in that decision, you're gonna kill the people on those two boats as well, because we had more than enough firepower

to do it 10 times over. So, I wanted to relate that, because that was really before we entered this world of digital disruption, but you went through a little bit different scenario, but I thought it would be good for the listeners to hear this as a starting point for you as well. Yeah, I guess it was a personal motivation, a significant life-changing event. And I think for many of the listeners, they've gone through those significant events

and have questions about a way forward. And I think a way forward from learning from other people's experience, not just one person, but a diversity of voices can help guide courses that toward where you are now. And for me, it was an incident, and unfortunately the incident occurred between an American F-16 and some of our troops on the ground in Ternac farms in Afghanistan. And it was I think 2002 and I was stationed on a destroyer in the Persian Gulf, a Canadian

destroyer. And so the our troops, Canadian troops on the ground were conducting a night life fire exercise and the F-16 interpreted it as a threat, but the intent was there that there would be harm. So the pilot made a decision to drop a 500 pound iron bomb on the position. And then, of course, the consequences for that were significant to a coalition. I think it's really bad when you have friendly fire incidents within a national or nation's joint forces, but it becomes that much more challenging, I think, when you involve coalition or your allies and friends in that, it becomes a little bit more difficult to maintain those same bonds of trust.

The response immediately from some of the American leadership, I remember an admiral coming over from the aircraft carrier and American Admiral and talking about how significant this event was and personally apologized for. It's a number one that was a big thing that, you know, there was a significant failure in all the sudden leadership was standing up and saying, we got to do better at that. And, you know, from my perspective, I could see both kind of the position of the F-16 through some relays and new air position of our Canadian troops in other systems, but they couldn't see each other. Right. There was no way for them to identify that pilot scene, a little blue dot, that would made all the different rules over our position and by the same token, you know, it was, you know, not

known the identity of the jet that was overhead from the perspective of our troops. So I took with great healing the words that were said by, you know, the American leadership and the Canadian leadership at the time, but my concern was who's doing anything about this? This problem will repeat itself unless somebody does something about it. So what small difference can I make to hopefully affect some change? I guess it was ground home for me a little bit further when after I made it back from that deployment, I was presented with an advanced

southwest Asian medal by the Governor General in Canada. And at the same time, the families were receiving thers for those that were lost post--human award. So that, you know, the effect that I saw was the direct effect on families of those services that had passed because of that incident. So I guess it motivated me to ask a lot of questions both internally. Do, are you the guy? Are you the guy to take this change on and how hard is it? And in all of my work, I've seen tremendous success by organizing small teams of like-minded people to really look at some of the root cause of the problem, not to come up with the perfect solution,

but just say, hey, can we experiment in a way that we can see each other? Let's start there. Let's just see each other and, you know, move on and learn from that experience. So very early on, I was of course supported by my leadership, even though they were kind of taking a bit of

flack because I think when we, it was just the beginning as you were aware of kind of, you know, the joint collaborative warfare, both in the states and then as a coalition. It was hard stuff. New technology, new procedures, you had differences in understanding each other, for instance. And I think the one thing that I kind of focused on more than anything was like small, iterative, short, burst development. How do we provide leadership opportunities for others to, hopefully, if you do it right, do better job than you could do.

So looking at failures as successes, if you're learning from them and being able to share and distribute those failures widely. So if another team can come up and be successful, then that's okay. That's what you want to do. It's not your ego isn't into solving the particular problem. It's kind of solving it as a group and being comfortable in achieving that. And I think the one hard thing about metals or accommodations is I don't think there's a single military leader out there that could say, I deserve this medal for what I did. There are teams of people behind supporting

those decisions, supporting actions, supporting the award of that medal. And I think those that have served before certainly get a good appreciation for that. And all I could do in my small way was to provide the conditions for teams to get together. And they started off as one service like the Canadian Navy, and they greatly branched into involving the Canadian Air Force and Army, and then we started mixing crews up. So we had started mixing crews up. So we had international guard from Washington State

in ourselves and US Navy that was flying up from third fleet to participate in our exercises. Not as another unit, but an integrated heart what we were trying to do. And I developed some phenomenal friendships over the years with my counterparts both both in Noret and with Comfort Fleet, to enable these small exercises that we would embed opportunities to learn from.

And I think we all became better because of those opportunities. Well, that's great. And as a backdrop, I think I remember reading from your background that you are educated in agile methodology. And did that desire to go into agile come out of this experience? Absolutely.

Yeah, I think, you know, those small iterative changes we can do, not only in our opportunities for, you know, introducing new technology or making it better, but also the procedures that we work with it or develop it. What are some of the ways that we can replicate or the, I know, to speak in your terms, how can we be a leader gardener? How can we create the conditions, the best success opportunities for something to grow when we look at our team being that thing that we're trying to grow? And I think, you know, it can only be done through small iterative experiments, really. And I responded to your invitation email as, who knew all of trees would grow in Canada.

And I've got two that are growing in my backyard. There's a couple that didn't take, I'll admit it. And so far they're successful, and I hope they're enduring. But, you know, if next year came along and it was a hard winter, then, and I lost one, it wouldn't be so bad because I'm learning from the experience. So I think that setting the conditions around teams is difficult because in ways you have to be cognizant of getting the right people, you know, getting the right people in the room with that same motivation. And I will say that one of the strongest attributes has been that servant style of leadership, you know, not only from above and

protecting the team, but also within that team and creating conditions. I think the retrospectives that agile teams use are phenomenal and I see a great deal of parallel in those military after-action report for a brief period of time you take off your rank. And everybody has their say, and if you're the lieutenant or the sergeant and you let somebody now, they're gonna somebody down during the exercise or or life fire

Operation they're going to let you know they're going to let you know that you know you put them in an unsafe space and you've got to you've got own that you know it's it's also listening and I think in the business world and in other worlds You don't have the same type of urgency, and you're not as open to those opportunities where everybody can take the rank off and just be honest. And boy, if you can create an organization or an industry that that's possible, and I think that would have phenomenal power. Because oftentimes, I think in leaders, whether you're in the military or in the private sector, you have a hard time listening to those weak signals.

And being a SIG-in guy, you know, that it's sometimes those very weak signals that are the nuggets, right? They're not the loudest. They're very small signals that can really change the course of future decision making. And so how do we, as leaders, listen to those. How do we allow ourselves both the time and the attenuation to hear those weak signals that are occurring?

And by weak signals often, they're good ideas. You know, they're good ideas. They're good ideas from the crew or from your team that you tune yourself out because you're kind of focusing on that end state as opposed to iteration. So yeah, I think there's some real power in looking at that iterative kind of development. And a lot of leaders look at, you know, the traditional transformation

model where I know where I am right now, and I'll go through some strategic planning of figure out where I want to go. And, you know, the exercise over the next amount of time, whether it's years is closing the gap between the future state and the current state, you know, the basis of what you decide as a digital architecture or digital transformation. And I tend to look at it backwards. I tend to look at, let's define that thing that we want to get to in the end, but instead of mapping out from current state to there, let's map it out backwards.

Right, what are the things that conditions without putting an arbitrary milestone timeframe around that we can learn from? What are those things that we know that are going to enable us to be successful? But it's okay if you take a different path, but sometimes if you're looking at those milestones to get to the end state, you lose the whole purpose of what you might have achieved by taking another path along the way. And the difference, I think, is X-Needy guys you realize that in order to get to a point, you navigate to it. It's not a linear path. You do slow down for a storm or a landmass or something like that. And you navigate to it. It doesn't mean you're going to make it

in any less time because you're going to think about that. But your course corrections are almost, you know, they're constant. Constant course corrections along the way, and that's okay to have course corrections along the way. It doesn't have to be a linear path. No, there's so much to unpack and what you just said. I remember my first exposure to true ranchal methodology was when I was at Lowe's, and I had come off my first job where I was helping them recover from at that point the largest cyber security attack and retailer history.

And I had been given the job of taking over all application development and changing our path to do more Omni Channel retail. And as I got into the job, I started in those first 90 days, I tried to interview as many people on the business side as I possibly could and I met with my friend, Scott Butterfield, who was the head of strategy at the time. And I said, Scott, what's your view

of how we're doing software development now? And he said something that stuck with me ever since that point. He said, John, we're absolutely world-class at delivering solutions that by the time they come into production are completely obsolete. And it was one of those things where it's like getting a pale of cold water poured on your head because it just, I mean, it for me, it, it, like the light went off. And at that point, we were doing these long monolithic waterfall development projects. And these things were taking years and years to get out the door. And so I ended up getting trained in agile and becoming a scrum master and started to prophesize to my teams and to the business why we should go in this route. And as you

go into it, the immediate feedback you get is this is just an IT thing, a technology thing. It doesn't matter on the business side and it can't be more farther from the truth. So for me, the hardest thing to do was to actually get someone, one of my business peers to sign up and do it. And I found it in this gentleman Ron Lutz, who was a good friend of mine to this day, but he was, at this point, probably in the top two

or three most dissatisfied customers of the technology group that there were. And he had this, he'd been given the task by the head of merchandising that he had to come in and re-merchandise or find a way to do that across all the stores. And he, at this point, was going to go outside of our organization and hire a third party because he just didn't trust it. And I said, Hey, are you willing to go on this journey with me? And I'll do it together with you.

And I'll walk side step with you. And we ended up bringing in an Indian outsourcer called InfoSys. They kind of trained his team, my team, in the methodology, and from that point forward, we started scrum sessions every single day, and he and I would, you know, made it a point that we put ourselves completely into this. And, you know, something that would have typically taken us years to develop, we were done in six months with that minimally viable product. And from there, we just iterated. And it made such a profound impact that he became my biggest advocate to all his peers

and why we need to change to this methodology. And from that point forward, we started shifting the way we were doing everything because it changed, it altered the complete way. And I think you bring up a good point because it allowed us to treat things and baby steps and, you know, as you said, fear, you know, fell fast and fell off and through those failures, you learn. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then when you start to grow that a little bit and have other teams, what I'm really seeing is the power of that collaboration.

So when I joined the public service, I literally left the military on a Friday and started on a Monday kind of thing for me with public. Oh, wow. So no time at all. No time at all. Yeah. And my initial role was a kind of come in as a transformational specialist. I mean, part of my work, I guess in iterating and experimenting out on ways to lessen the likelihood or friendly fire by the use of tactical data links in joint coalition operations was, you know, my leadership recognized that I needed to kind of teach what I've learned. And so they sent me a ways for some graduate training and knowledge management. And that led into another kind of master's degree.

And by the time I was doing that, I was also chairman of the Nito Tactical Dattling Group with 27 nations struggling for the same kind of in state of situational awareness so this doesn't happen again. And that kind of finished up with some more experimentation I did working with NORAD and doing the tactical data infrastructure

as the Joint Interface Control Officer for the 2010 Olympics, which I learned so much about teams and effectiveness and talking about your reference to, you know, a gardening style of leadership. It really came true that if you set the conditions not in great detail, but more or less in the characteristics and giving people a general idea of good enough. Like this is a good enough thing. Let's move on to the next thing. That concept of a minimum, I call it valuable product instead of viable product because consumers don't often like that they've been given viable, but valuable is good with it.

viable, but valuable is good with it. Yeah, that's a good word for it. Yeah, and then when I joined, I was in a multi-million dollar large-scale transformation project with the public service that was, you know, it's goals were lofty like many of those waterfall projects is that we're going to transform the everything. And we're going to do everything at kind of once. And it imploded in many ways. But when you look at many organizations that do these things, they're not a failure. Or it doesn't matter which way you look at things.

Sometimes this is successful regardless of is successful, regardless of, because people don't want to be honest, right? If you're a corporation with stakeholders and stockholders, you don't want to admit failure. That's not a good way to increase your margin. But you find companies that do do that now, smaller, more nimble boutique companies are actually able to gain quite a little bit about sharing some of those failures with it.

So what that came out of is there was two sub projects within that large project. And the BC government has always been pretty forward leaning and through some of the work that your country's done as well in creating opportunities to excel the public sector into the digital domains such as 18F, the government of the UK went on a large transformational journey for its government as well. And there was a lab that was created called the BC Dev Exchange within the government. It was to link this small industry that were involved

with development with the government to come together and learn from each other and actually execute some of what was actually You know that Lab evolved despite the system, right? It was running kind of counter. It was I Guess it was a a a black jet propulsion lab or a lucky Martin's, Conquerks kind of thing. It was, we don't know what it's going to do. We're going to experiment. Because what we do know is what we're doing right now

is of work so well. And it still exists today and various teams have gone through it. Unsolvable problems known before are being tackled by teams across different ministries and they're working together. They're sharing code through GitHub, but it's not just the code they're sharing, they're sharing their successes and failures, their procedures.

One of the things that we're noticing is that leadership had a hard time really adopting this new way of doing things. How do you move from that command and control style, micro management that's noted in the public service? Because these folks are responsible for the risk. To a more trust-based opportunity for emergence and growth within those teams. And so most of my focus lately has been teaching those, you know, frameworks around what it means to be a digital leader, what it means to, you know, encourage and support as opposed

to measure and diminish the successes of the team. And I think about being real, one of the things that I was really curious about is we started off in the natural resource ministry with a few teams within, that we're doing agile. And we went, I think there's 10 teams now in that ministry. And we had just enough of them to get this workplace evaluation survey judging on how happy they were in doing their job. And what we found is that they,

their ratings for happiness amongst their team exceeded even the best other places to work within the public service. And a lot of it was focused on their mission, they did their mission every day. They created their own opportunities from being cross-functional to Make their processes better and they felt much more in tune with Organizational vision because their organization was five to seven people and that denominator I mean knowing in the military and working closely with with effective groups like special ops and whatnot, there's reasons why groups are small, you know, when you talk about effectiveness and getting that small group of people focused on a problem, when you

start to add more resources to it, all of a sudden it comes to a point where it's diminishing and its capability to actually put out OECOM. So, yeah, small teams focused on a problem seem to be a recipe for success. Yeah, well, you, I mean, it's a great topic and you look at many of the different institutions who, you know, have used it to take them to new heights. You know, one of the most famous is, you know, Jeff Bezos and the way that he leads initiatives, you know, I think he always referred to it the pizza box team, because you should have enough people on your team that pizza box can feed them all. But I've always been amazed at how if he has something critical, he will give it out to three small

teams, not tell any of them that they're working on the same project, and then let them come back with their ideas on how to solve it. And I think that many organizations are now trying to use it, but you're right. Something as large as British, Colombian, and government, you know, it's the same thing as trying to move an aircraft carrier or a Fortune 500 company. And, you know, I think both of our experience is likely that it's not, it doesn't happen by the masses, it happens by braiding these small impetus themes, like you're saying, that go out with a specific task and are called to solve it. I got first introduced to this when I was at Dell, and it's something that Michael Dell would use as we were trying to look at

that Michael Dell would use as we were trying to look at skunk work activities of capabilities that we could add into our brand. So we had our main campus, but we also, there was a site that no one really knew about, that we also had where he had, you know, 8, 9, ten different startup companies that he would fund working on new technologies that would benefit Dell sometime in the future. So it's interesting. And I really got a deeper look into this about two years ago, a friend of mine, Jeff Aggers, one of my classmates from the Naval Academy, works as part of the Macrystal Group. Jeff is a former Navy SEAL, and I got to go through the Macrystal Group's two-day session and in that General Macrystal and Chris Pusel and their team go through the team of Teams approach, which is great.

It's exactly what you're describing. It's how you apply what they've learned and special forces to corporations to get innovation done more quickly. So it's incredible, you know, when I look at the difference, I remember my father who was a World War II vet that swept mines off of the beaches for D-Day in a wooden mine sweeper and pulled some of the obstacles off the beach because they were below the trajectory of the main guns.

And after he retired from the military, he was hired by the military, but by business as well, to teach leadership to business. Like from a military perspective after 34 or 37 years of service, go in there and talk about that. And then there was a departure away from that. So folks in MBAs were learning what they'd studied in management school and came up with 100 years ago. And really hadn't evolved much. And now when I was looking at a couple of colleagues who were doing

their MBA, a lot of the content was actually taken from special forces and small group operations and joint operations. As kind of this is what leadership looks like in the future. And we probably should never get away from it because I think leadership is an evolution. And there's reasons why there's some general principles that have endured. I mean, we talk about the Canadian military or the US military, which it was modeled after the British military, which probably had its foundations

and the Roman military, who's had its foundations and the Greek military, whose had its foundations in the Greek military. These are institutions and lessons learned, but are thousands of years old. From a leadership perspective, the way of doing things, I'm not sort of saying that everything could be modeled, but there's some pretty sound principles that were weeded out through whether you want a battle or not,

whether those practices and procedures were enduring. So I think there's some really valid lessons to learn across that organization and how it's kind of evolved. Yes, exactly. Did you know that Forbes magazine recently cited that over 70% of individuals who did personal development courses, masterminds, or one-on-one coaching, benefited from improved work performance, relationships, and more effective communication skills?

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Speaking of evolution of organizations, so you now are leading much of the digital strategy for the government, and I saw you're also doing a lot of teaching around digital transformation. What do you see are some of the major hurdles that our listeners need to be aware of, and how they need to look at digital transformation and how it's going to change their lives in the future. Yeah, we'll say I'm doing some of that for my ministry, but the government's a big place. So even though I try to influence strategy as a whole, I think there's not a big bang, right?

There's not a big bang. Like do what you can to avoid anything except your own experimentation is going through it. I think I rely quite heavily on some of the work that Dave Snowden has done with Kennevin Theory or complexity theory and kind of talking about remaining kind of true to those initial agile principles, you know, that are based on looking at a problem with complexity, you know, and that you have to

think differently about it. I think there's going to constant struggle for me to keep kind of that human process engineering or that engineering underlying waterfall process away from Agile team. They really don't mix well. No, and oil and water. Oil and water. And some of the, you know, I think when I started, it was almost a constant knife fight between opposing views on how software development should be done. And often our processes within waterfall or big engineering process get in the way

of real progress. And leaving the team alone just to develop and not be interrupted by a multitude of meetings and being able to have, you know, be cross-functional, be self-organizing, have all the things you need within your team, and if your team doesn't have a skill set, learn from it. You know, if it means that they got to learn a new language, then the team slows down, you don't add another five developers on the team to make it go faster. Okay.

No, you're making such a big point here because I remember in the early days when I was working with Ron, when he first heard about what we were going to do with the Ancholl, he thought it was going to be more work for him. And I remember about a month or two into it, you know, we didn't have the big steering committing me. We didn't have these huge burns of time that you normally had because you would sit on this stand up, but that would last 10, 15 minutes. He came out of it, the experience saying, I have so much time that wasn't wasted because

we end up getting to these stuck points when you're on these larger projects where you spend hours and hours analyzing it, because at this point, you're talking hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of potential rework. Whereas, you know, if it's two weeks of work and it's cost me, you know, a couple thousand dollars, he goes, if it's a failure, you just pivot. And you don't think of it in the same way. You're able to make a very quick, you know, strategic decision. Exactly, exactly. And they're decisions. They're not like a decision that's gonna take you

two years to get that transformative work done. They're a various decisions. And I think one of the things that have really appealed to leaders to do at all levels is go to the sprint review, go to the demo, see what they've built in the past two weeks. If you're worried about metrics, look at the client's eyes when they see that thing that has been built. And you know, you get from them, wow, they're really excited about that. You know, I think it's

time to be realistic about it as well and start measuring, you know, outcomes instead of output, meaning those outputs are those milestone things that you set in the road that were arbitrarily came up with because, T are you never talked to a developer or development team, but how long it's going to take to get to that milestone. So they're kind of arbitrary at the beginning, right? But if you start talking about outcomes, like what's putting smiley faces on people visiting your site, those are the important things you want to focus on. So if you can see the indications of smiley faces through these every two weeks, you're able to see a demo and see maybe it's

not a real big smiley face at the beginning, maybe it's kind of like a little bit of a smile. You're on the right path. You're going in the right direction for it. You know, in the other part that's really strong with us and it's taken hold in the BC government, and I'm very encouraged to see it, there's a real focus on user research, right? A real focus on bringing the public in and asking them how they feel about things. We've got to be a bit careful about it because like everybody doesn't know what they want because they don't know what's achievable by technology. But in my recent experience in, you know, we're all used to going on Amazon,

particularly in this day, in age, we have COVID and ordering stuff that we couldn't get from our local shop. But sometimes when you go to the side of Amazon to another site, it's a bit of a lunch bag let down is that it's not, I'm not getting an indication that it's been shipped. It's not, I have no idea what the tracking of my package.

So it's like, is it gonna come? Is it gonna be next year that it's gonna come? So I think we're spoiled by some really good user, research and user design. And there are companies out there that are making a bit of a difference with small teams and making things more intuitive. But how do we make it easier on the public to interact with government is like my daily concern. But I think that same concern is shared with businesses across the board as well. And interestingly enough, even within the military context, even though it was being introduced to NATO when I was deeply involved with it in the 2000s, is now NATO has an innovation of

that they have challenges. That is open open that is looking for people's best ideas. And I think the future leadership, you know, in this space is being more collaborative and not just with other businesses and that kind of competitive collaboration. It's inviting academia along for the ride. It's inviting, you know, the military along for the ride as well. So you grow together and I think good things become of that and you get good leaders. Well, we have a local thing here in Tampa where it's become a private and public partnership between the special operations command and public sector vendors trying to service them.

And what they're trying to do is get around the complicated tournament process that the government faces. And so, you know, the best way for the listeners to understand this is let's say special operations command wants to create an Ironman suit. And that Ironman suit in a hotelity may be a top secret project. But what they're able to do is they're able to give this out

without discussing what the big project is and they're able to divide it into small chunks of capabilities that they need, that they themselves are unclassified, so more vendors can participate. And then they have people who are in the classified program who are kind of overseeing kind of the project management office who are divvying these projects out, taking the technology and compiling it, so it meets the end goal.

And I thought that that was, you know was a brilliant way to kind of get around the procurement issues but it's something you could do in the government, it's something you could do in a large corporation too. Because oftentimes people get so distracted by the Iron Man suit aspect that they don't work on the intricacies of what it's going to take and the technology it's going to take to make it come to fruition? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it's the innovative approach as well.

And I think that the superhero that's been portrayed on Marvel, you see an iteration of the success of those suits as it's gone on. It's not started off with this end state that is going to answer all of the problems in the future. It's probably putting on a hockey helmet on with a jet pack until you realize that you need a bit of armor because landings are rough, right? And that's a good place to start. And we did that with the BC Devigchange, some very bright people get together and came up with a thing called Sprint with us. And I can send you a link on that later that it can make available, but it was a way to quickly go out for what you needed, make available, but it was a way to quickly go out for what you needed, a team to come in and support your product that you were trying to build. And it would be posted for, I think,

10 days. It would go through a bit of a coding challenge and a team challenge. And within the space of a month, you could have a team starting in agile development with you to support your government thing. But you're right, that procurement synergy between private and public was just unnecessary crossroads and too often it's so much of a barrier. And absolutely is. Well, I'm gonna switch topics on you a little bit here. So, I had the opportunity a few weeks ago to interview another guest who's pretty big in the agile world.

Her name is Maria Madarelli. And Maria coaches people internationally on agile. I'm sure you've heard of Alistair who lives here locally as well as has been one of her mentors, but she has started, she created a new company called Personal Agility Institute where she is applying Agile methodology to her personal life and the personal life of others. And for the listeners I wanted to, you know, as part of your ministry or things that you were doing, have you tried to cross that, you know, from business to life standpoint using agile? I think for the people that swallowed the hook, I think it couldn't help but be deeply entangled with their own sense of their approach to problem solving and decision making. I think that

we always struggle with what we want to be when we grow up. Even though I'm 54 now, I still don't know what tomorrow is necessarily gonna bring and I'm okay in that gray area I still don't know what tomorrow's necessarily going to bring. And I'm okay in that gray area, but a lot of people aren't comfortable with the gray. I think it's important to embody a lot of the considerations for the process of problem solving that Agile is an embodiment of, if it's mean done right, it's the experimentation, it's the tolerance for failure, it's the opportunity for reflection, it's the importance of teamwork, you know, even in your personal life and both the support that you're being given, right? The freedom to make decisions and the freedom, you know, to fail, given permission to fail.

Like, we talk about this in a team setting, but we often don't give ourselves permission to fail, right? That it's okay. We can do better next time and be able to get up kind of with a fresh look in. And I think part of it is just being real and honest that you're not going to get it right. That linear path isn't going to be doing the things. So I think the folks that I've worked with both in the military kind of in the academic world as far as my work now goes in the public service, I think they live it, to be honest with you. I think it goes deeper than a methodology that they are working on. They fund a significant amount of satisfaction in

the perspective. I'm not going to talk about it like it's a cult or if it's a completely foreign way of thinking. I think it's a more realistic way of looking at how you can iteratively develop your own competencies, by going through it like a cycle. It's okay to have those in states that you want it to get to. But I think a little bit of pampering how long it's gonna take to get there and what The steps are to get there. I mean, obviously in your path, John, you didn't probably have your career trajectories

Sustote when you left the Naval Academy that you know through the You know a bit of the Journey that you've taken that it would have passed through all the milestones it has to lead you to this point. But you've been, you know, able to reinvent yourself after each iteration, after each go of thing. And I think that's that's that style, isn't that? Isn't that kind of living, living the lifestyle, so to speak? Yeah, I've applied the same methodology that I learned when I was at Arthur Anderson going through their formal methodology, where I'll train down method one at St. Charles and I, and it was a huge thing, so I took it and modified it.

And for me, it's, you know, you've got to analyze and look forward to where you want to be. But you've got to figure out where you are now and how to get there. But the second step of prioritization is where, you know, Agile can definitely come in on a daily, weekly, monthly, you know, basis to help you staying on track.

And then for me, the other stages are, you know, once you do that, you've got to ignite the commitment to it, execute on it, measure it, and then keep renewing it. So it's very much similar to agile in that it's a never stopping process. And with each iteration of it, you've got to get better and fine-tune and et cetera.

And the faster you can get through it, and you're going to make mistakes along the way, the quicker you recognize those you can measure them and reapply it into your life or career. So yes, absolutely. Yeah, I think John Boyd, I think his name was, did the work on the Udalupe. And you can see many of this kind of correlations between some of the

Kanavan theory and his work and agile methodology. And I think at the heart, the thing that really inspires me about John's work is he's able to really promote that you go into decision making even about yourself with your own baggage, with your own bias. And what's harder to wrap your head around sometimes is you are aware of a lot of those biases. And your wife probably tells you about them on a daily basis, or your children remind you of your biases that you might have. But there is some that are unknown to right and through a process of discovery and enlightenment I think they become apparent to you even if you don't want to own that. You know they exist. So some of it is those unknown unknowns that you'll never know and some of them you know but you just don't want to know because you know

they're there but don't want to admit they're there. The kind of thing. So I think seeing yourself in the problem, you know, I, I try to love the problem, whatever it is as much as possible, because I think there's, there's significant unpacking to do with the problem as opposed to speeding toward a solution that might solve it for now, but why did the problem exist in the first place? You know, and that, as I've matured, is one of the biggest differences I think I have now, as I've altered my perspective on things, is I used to try to go into a problem, and I was very good at solving them, but I would go into it you know both feet without taking the proper time, really analyze all elements of it,

and specifically get other people's feedback on it because as you walk into a problem, normally a problem exists because something was designed a certain way that created the problem. And unless you understand that backdrop, especially when it comes, I think, technology systems, a lot of the accidental architecture that you end up experiencing as you're trying to do a digital transformation

was put there purposefully. It just had a got out of control. And unless you understand the fundamental decisions that led to it and can walk back on them, you don't have the whole picture of how you're gonna solve the problem because you'll end up solving a portion of it, but you might not get to the absolute thing that's causing it. Absolutely.

I couldn't agree more. I think it's the same thing. If you've had a traumatic situation in your life until you deal with an angel with calm stuck points, PTSD trauma, they call it beliefs. If you can't get to the bottom of that belief systems that are holding you back, it's going to continue to play you. Same thing with stock points. Yeah, I think that's entirely relevant.

It's about belief in having those teams and people around you to support you and sometimes getting up every day and just doing. Yes. Well, I mean, there is nothing happens without action. First, you got to make a choice that you're going to change, but without action, nothing occurs. So craving speed, craving action is absolutely essential. Yeah, I think I still have that sergeant major in my head from your basic training. major in my head from, you know, your basic training. And, you know, he's the person that yells at me to get up in the morning, even though I might want to sleep in. And he's also

the voice that says, for give yourself, learn from it. Get on with it. Yes, exactly. Well, I am going to take you now to your favorite part of the interview, which is gonna be the rapid round. I think you're one of the first guests I've had who was actually looking forward to it. Most, I think this is the most stressful part of the interview for them, but are you ready for it? Let's go.

What is the sound that the Northern Lights make? They crackle. Okay, if you could meet anyone Alive or dead who would it be? Socrates. Okay, what is the best compliment you've ever received? Probably something I didn't deserve. If you were an astronaut and You were sent up to colonize a new planet and as going up there you could establish one law what would it be? I would have to say don't punish failure. What is your kryptonite?

I think fuzzy bunnies. Fuzzy bunnies, okay. What are three words that describe living in Canada? We're being a Canadian being a Canadian That is a really good thing. I think being a Canadian means and three words Finding who you are Maybe that was too many, but I don't think it's an end state. I think it's a discovery journey

that was too many, but I don't think it's an end state. I think it's a discovery for journey. From your time in the military, what is the most important lesson that you've learned that you would want our listeners to know? Trust your crew. Okay, and what is the most important element of leadership that you have found? Trust your crew.

Okay. Well, thank you have found. Trust you, crew. Okay. Well, thank you for that. You actually mentioned Dave Snowden earlier, and he is actually going to be a future guest, so I'm excited to have him, and I think that's going to be a very interesting interview. So thank you for bringing him up. If someone wanted to learn more about your ministry and what you're doing, where can they learn more about that? I think it's a BC dev exchange, kind of all one word, but we can send you some links, John,

you can post on there. And it's an opportunity for other like-minded public institutions. We publish on GitHub, all of our code is normally in the open for source. It's so that some of the work we're doing with the BC wildfires, California could pick up that type of thing to hopefully make it better across the space. That's where I am. I'm a little bit timid when it comes to digital media as I have stated. But please reach out to me on LinkedIn. Be happy to take any questions.

Hopefully some of what we discussed today, John, will motivate other folks and make them stronger leaders than we could ever think of me. Well, I think there was a ton of content here today and I will put those links in the show notes. So people will be able to get access to them. And I just really appreciate your service to your country and your long service in the military. Thank you very much for that. And thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for the opportunity, John.

Much appreciated it and enjoyed it. to the opportunity, John, much appreciated it and enjoyed it. Thank you so much for watching Sit to Buy us on the show today. What a great interview that was and he unpacked so many things from understanding how you can apply agility, not only in your business, but in your personal life, to really going into why the team of teams ocean works and how that can work for you, again, both in your personal life and how you're dealing with relationships and in your career and how you're dealing with subordinates, peers,

and superiors and why that team of teams approach makes so much sense. He also talks about the impetus for him getting started and why that was such a defining mark. And lastly, he brought up Dave Stoden, who will be on the show in a future episode, and I'm so excited to have him join us as well. Thank you so much again for listening

and watching PassionStruck, and I just wanna say, keep on igniting. Thank you so much again for listening and watching Passion Struck, and I just want to say, keep on igniting. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for joining us. A purpose of our show is to make Passion Go viral. By sharing the knowledge and insights you can use to unlock your hidden potential. To hear more, please subscribe to the show in iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you'd love this episode, we'd appreciate a five-star rating on iTunes, where if you

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