Your Transformation Station - 130. Agile at Work: Why It Breaks and When It Works

Episode Date: February 21, 2024

By dissecting the Larry Apke VUCA framework and discussing the shift from effort-based to value-based incentives, we reveal the secret sauce to thriving in a VUCA world. Whether you're a C-suite executive or a team leader, you'll gain insights into how prioritizing learning and adaptation over traditional management can lead to leaps in innovation and operational success. If you've ever wondered why some organizations soar while others stumble, this episode holds the key. EPISODE LINKS: Larry's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larryapke/ Larry's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LarryApke Blog: http://larryapke.com/ Company: https://vucamba.com/ OUTLINE:  The episode's timestamps are shown here. You should be able to jump to that time by clicking the timestamp on certain podcast players. (00:00) - Understanding the Agile Movement (06:28) - The Value of Business Agility (20:41) - Enhancing Agility in Organizations (27:04) - Changing Incentives to Drive Organizational Success (40:02) - Leaders vs. Managers (51:17) - Challenging Confirmation Bias in Today's World PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com⁠⁠ Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/apple⁠⁠ Spotify: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/spotify⁠⁠ RSS: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/rss⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/youtube⁠⁠ SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Facebook: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/facebook⁠⁠ - Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/instagram⁠⁠ - TikTok: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/tiktok⁠⁠ - Twitter: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/x⁠⁠ - Pinterest: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/pinterest⁠⁠ - Linkedin: ⁠⁠https://www.ytsthepodcast.com/linkedin⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So why actually have this movement begin in the first place? Like what did they recognize that was happening prior to agile becoming this movement? You're listening to a podcast that encourages you to embrace your vulnerabilities and authentic self. This is your transformation station. And this is your host, Greg Favaza. Hey, Gregory. I'm doing all right yourself. I am doing good.

You go by Greg or Gregory. Whatever you want to call me, as long as it's not against any morals, ethics, or anything that I stand for. Okay. Are you a Guido, Larry? Am I a Guido? No, I'm not a Guido. You look Italian, so I figure I'll go down that route. No, no, no.

Well, that's okay. I mean, I don't think anybody's ever said, hey, you look Italian, but, you know, there's worst things in the world. supposed and look in Italian. My heritage is English and German. Okay. Cool. Cool. Well, I appreciate you giving me the time today to come on to your Transformation Station.

Now, just to understand, you're an agile coach, right? Yeah, I actually dubbed myself a Vuka consultant, but basically an agile coach, if you know what those things are. Yeah. Not a fucking clue. So that's beautiful, because I figured you look like the person. the perfect individual that's going to teach me. Sure.

I've taught thousands of people worldwide. So hopefully we can talk about that. And then your viewers and listeners can understand what it is that I do. Yes. Or at least try to. Yes. So I have a basic understanding of organizational leadership and how operations run as far as small business perspective and large. so we could have it move at a faster pace than basic Barney style where we would have to just go into everything.

Yeah, no, my job is sometimes referred to it as being a catalyst. You may get there in your business. I'm going to help you probably get there faster. Oh, okay. I like that. So this is our one. on one session. You're teaching me. We're recording right now. And yeah, our audience will be listening to this. Good. No, excellent. If you want to talk about Agile, which is a big part of what I do,

I had the title of Agile Coach for the last dozen years. Agile is really, in my mind, a philosophy that came to us around 2001, came to us from software development. And basically, you may be familiar with the kind of opposite of Agile, which is Waterfall, which is a way to manage projects. And what these folks found out, there were, I think if I remember the name, the number correctly, there were 17 people who came together in Snowbird, Utah in February of 2001. So we're coming up on an anniversary of this thing that they created called the Agile Manifesto. And basically this manifesto, which is a strange word for it, I think, was four values and 12 principles that kind of started this agile movement in software development.

And since this term agile has been, and this philosophy has been applied to other areas of work. So when you say this philosophy, it's a concept that we could use, a framework that we could apply in managing personnel, having a systematic approach to how operations are running, whether it's internally or externally. It leads to that. But to me, the essence of it, I would say, is more philosophical in nature. And the way I describe these four values and 12 principles is as a philosophy. It's a way of looking at the world. And at its time, it was somewhat radical.

And in some respects, it still is for some people. It basically said, we're not really happy with how things are going under the current way of doing work. So here's what we believe in. And because of those beliefs, you had methodologies and things that would spring up from this philosophy. So one of the big ones that most people are familiar with that kind of sprang up from this agile philosophy culture or whatever you want to call it is something called scrum. Yes. So a lot of people are familiar with scrum. Well, Scrum is in itself a framework, not even really a methodology.

It's a framework, but it sprang up from this agile kind of this agile movement of how do we take these four values and 12 principles, which we can all agree on. There are things like, you know, we value change over following a plan. We value certain things over others. So that's philosophical. How do we actually do take these wonderful things, these four values of 12 principles, and then make them part of our daily life? And so Scrum was one of the things that happened very early on. In fact, Scrum predates this Agile Manifesto because in the manifesto it says, hey, we're doing things differently because we're trying to achieve better results. And through doing things differently, we've come to believe these things.

So Scrum comes to us before Agile because the people who founded Scrum Southern and Swayber were doing things differently. And then there was a bunch of other people that were doing things differently. And they all got together and they said, what do we agree on? So why actually have this movement begin in the first place? Like what did they recognize that was happening prior to Agile becoming this movement? Yeah, that's a great question because the word agile, sometimes loses its flavor, but what you're really looking for is agility. And agility is a really big business benefit.

So the way projects used to be done in software development is you would go through a number of phases. I think most people are familiar with them. You'd do a discovery phase, and then you would do a requirements phase, and then you would do a design phase, and you would do a coding phase and a QA phase, et cetera, et cetera. Yes. The problem with doing that is phase gauge. and it took a very long time to deliver things. So you were delivering software in a lot of places,

and still places today doing this probably, you know, three months, six months a year, two years. The problem with that is we live in this VUCA world. I sometimes refer to, you know, I sometimes refer to myself as a VUCA consultant. VUCA stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. We live in this VUCA world. We can't have two-year timelines.

I mean, if you look back at the last two years, And if you created a plan two years ago and just executed on that plan, how successful are you going to be? So people said, hey, how can we get things done sooner? How can we deliver value quicker to our customers so that we can be more successful? Sometimes I refer to as optimal because there's companies out there who are making money doing waterfall stuff, long timelines, et cetera. but that doesn't mean that they're optimal. They could be so much more successful if they would take some of these thoughts and ideas, sometimes they refer to them as mental models or lenses or mindset and apply it to their business.

And so one thing. Let me ask you this. Just to compare it with companies that are not applying this process, are they the ones that are not actually pioneering innovation today? there are different types of companies. And one of the things that I love to share is there's a concept that comes to us from a guy named Dave Snowden, which is, it's called Kenevin. It's a Welsh word.

It means habitat or place. And what he said is, look, you have these different quadrants that work falls into. And the four quadrants he identified were chaotic, simple, or obvious, complicated and complex. And I got to tell you, I knew about Agile and the benefits of it, but when I saw this, I was able to put it into better perspective because Agile works really well on the things in that complex realm. It doesn't work as well in the complicated realm. So let me give you an example of how that's different. The complicated realm, we need experts, but it's something we can plan ahead of time. So think about building a large apartment,

complex. It comes in mind because I got one, they're building one right behind me. You're building a large apartment complex. That is complicated. I need experts. I need, I need electricians. I need drywall people. I need, you know, masonry, whatever, plumbing. I'm not that good at these things, but I know we need them. These people can work to a timeline. They can work, it tends to be somewhat physical in nature. It tends to be something that we've understood for a very long time. We've been building buildings for a very long time. It's something that you can do with checklists. It's something where you can do waterfall, where I can plan in advance, I want to plan in advance, and I can work towards that plan. And the plumbers and the electricians never really have to work together. I can have them

working on different parts of the building. They don't talk to each other, et cetera, et cetera. That's complicated. Software development knowledge work. I'll just throw knowledge work in there, but software development being what I've said of the quintessential knowledge work. You can't work that way. You're not going to be as successful. You need what waterfall removes, which is you need not silos, but you need cross functionality. You need people to work together. You need to break down those silos. You need to communicate frequently.

You need a bunch of feedback. You need a whole bunch of things to be successful in this world that you don't in this world. And the problem that we had in software development was people were taking things from this world and trying to apply it to this world. And it wasn't working out very well. Yes. Yes. Okay, this is definitely ringing a bell. So that's one of the things that I, when I'm talking to people, I'm interested in the complex, right?

So I have this class that I teach, which is very popular, called the Vuka MBA. And the MBA part, you're not going to get a, you know, master's in business. It stands for mindset for business agility. So we need to have that mindset of agility if we're in over here in this complex. world in this Vuka world. And that's most of us today, because if you look at most of us, we're working in knowledge work. And knowledge work is fundamentally different than physical work and the things that are over here. So we need to really say, if we're going to be optimal in the world we live in, we need to start looking at it differently. And to me, that's what these folks did

when they created the manifesto as they said, hey, we're looking at the world differently. we see things differently than you do. And because of that, we can build, in their case, it was about software. We can build better software. We can deliver more value sooner. Okay. So now I think I might have a grasp on this. It's having this understood philosophy, like a standard with the certain understanding of these applications with technology that will support innovation, but also support the operations.

it will support the cultural dynamic. It will support everything to flow freely and have everything collapsing the the longevity or the timeline in half, essentially. But getting people at that level, you have to have this certification. Yeah, the certifications I'm not as concerned about. I'm concerned about people having the knowledge. I think sometimes certifications actually lead us down a wrong road because what we're doing is we're saying, I'm going to go learn what I need to grab a piece of paper so that,

so that somebody will, you know, will hire me. I can definitely fucking agree with that. Yeah. So I'm more concerned and I always have been concerned about the education of it. Because as I mentioned earlier, I think I did. I ran a nonprofit for five and a half years called the job hackers where what I did is I taught agile and then I also taught scrum as a way to to make agile a thing in your life, you know, a real thing, a way to operationalize it, if you were. And I taught that to, you know, over 4,000 people, I think over 50 countries for free for, you know, seven years. I did it, you know, a year and a half before I even started this nonprofit.

It still exists today. It's called the job hackers. So if any of your, you know, listeners want to join the job hackers because they're interested in getting this education, it's to help people find work. And it does. show notes. Yeah, it does help them to get certification as well because the thing for me about certification is it's a necessary evil for somebody who doesn't have a track record or a history of doing the work. You've got to have something that that separates you from, you know, everybody else.

But the key is to me is really the education. The key is to me always about looking at the world differently. So even the class that I teach on Agile or now I refer to as VUCA, is fundamentally different than what most people do. I don't teach people necessarily what you do, even though there's an application, there's practical application for teaching people what you do. What I try to do is try to tell people to see the world differently. Because I believe you have to see the world differently

in order to think differently, and you have to think differently in order to act differently. And I know those things are all interrelated, but we tend to skip over the seeing thing. So if we could have an example to understand, understand what Agile is doing as far as, I would say, challenges and benefits of scaling. Like, what is an example that you could give us so we can imagine this? Well, scaling is a whole other big debate topic in the world of Agile these days, too.

So I don't know if scaling's the best place to start. As I don't know. So you're teaching me. Yeah. Well, I created something, and I actually ended up putting it. wrote a book about it, and I just published it recently. It's called Apke's Golden Rule of Agile, a focus on value delivery. And I'm not... Don't be breadcoming now. Are you breadcoming? Trying to put your little stuff into show? Don't do that to the very end. No way.

Okay. No, no, no. I just mentioned it. It's... Authors don't make a whole bunch of money off of that, off of books anyway. But the reason I mentioned is this. I came up with this thing that I called the Golden Rule of Agile. I said, If we take the four values and the 12 principles and try to boil them down to one phrase, because that's a lot to remember. I mean, even for me, and I wrote a book about another book about that earlier, but is what is it? What is the essence of it?

And to me, it's we deliver the optimal value to our customers in the shortest time possible. And everything in my world of agility is that we do that, right? We figure out how to set up our business, organize our business, We figure out how to create processes, or frameworks around our business, that ensure that we're delivering the most value to our customers in the shortest time possible. In parentheses, given our constraints, right? We all have constraints as far as how we do business. Money is a constraint time is a constraint.

Dependency is constraints. We live in a constraint-filled world. So the question is, how do we deliver the most value as quickly as possible? And what I found in a lot of businesses, and I've worked for some very large, well-known companies doing this work, is that we don't always follow that golden rule. We don't always follow that value. And how can we actually get that to our customers quickly? Now, if you look at startups and smaller businesses, you'll see a lot more of what I consider that kind of behavior. because your very existence, in some cases, relies on you being able to deliver value quickly.

So you find that startups and small business tend to be agile. They tend to be nimble. The larger the business, the more your opposite we put in place, right? Yes. So it's like training a large formation of soldiers. There's a strict guidelines on doing that to get a large amount of people to be physically fit. for a battlefield scenario is possible in a month in six months. So there's that strict regimen that everyone has to follow in order to meet that timeline.

So I can see you referencing that as a large organization has to follow these strict guidelines. And then versus the small businesses, they have to be agile, meaning they have to compete against these global leaders in today's marketplace. So they're going to do whatever they can to pioneer innovation. Yeah, I think it's really interesting that you mentioned the military, though, because one of the things I found, I worked, one of my first coaching jobs, I worked for a company that was very closely tied to the military. So I started to study the military because I wasn't, I didn't come from that background. And I found out that the military is actually a lot more agile than most people think they are. Yes, they are. And so I've always found that that's really interesting to me when you look at military and how they do things, because They do things in some respects that we would do, even though we wouldn't call the same thing, in scrum. They have daily briefings. They have daily goals. They say, okay, here's your objective.

You go figure out how to do it. That's what they do on the ground level. Now, of course, there's a lot of bureaucracy probably at the top. Yes. Okay. Don't go admit it further. Don't go anything. Stay still.

All right. So this is why I wanted you on the show because I worked in various levels of the military. And then I'm reading about Scrum Agile. And I don't know what the fuck it means. Let's be honest. But however, when I served, I served at the very bottom at the lowest of, was it 4,500 troops at a division level at Fort Carson. Then I moved myself up to, no, not division. It would be a brigade.

I moved myself up to brigade. So I got to see how operations and planning actually happens in real time from being at the very bottom to the top. and side by side with the colonel who's delegating authority and his intent to make the mission happen. And just communicating with battalions and platoons. It's just fascinating how that information is being transferred over. And I'm starting to understand it. I don't know how. But this is why I wanted you on.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting when we bring that up because what it reminds me of is a book that that I'll plug for somebody else is Stanley McChrystal, this team of teams, I believe, if I got it correctly. He talks about, in fact, the Vuka World, word, the acronym, comes from the military, because the military started to recognize that, wait a minute, this world has changed, it's different. And if you look at the history even of battle, it's the guerrilla warfare that tends to do pretty well. This country was formed by, you know, a rag-tag group of folks who were able to beat a world-class army and Navy. You know, the British Navy was incredible.

So historically, agility was always big on the battlefield, and it was kind of something, and again, I'm not a historian of this, but we kind of lost that learning in Vietnam, and we brought it back to the military after Vietnam, when we identified the world as Vuka. because then we started to ask the question, okay, if the world is not what we have planned for, you know, we have to plan for the world that exists. And McChrystal talks about it a little bit in his book. In fact, when I was reading the book, I thought, man, this guy must have taken my class on the slide. Some of the things he said in the military context would be the same things I'd say in a business context.

of how, so one of the things I think about agility and how this really applies to military, and you alluded to it, is agility is really the ability to make quick decisions. And I would also say quick and effective decisions. So when you look at bureaucracy, the problem with bureaucracy is things move slow. And the reason it moves slow is it's generally its work that's waiting to be decisioned. Oh, yes. So with doing that, it comes down to like, if we have to make a decision to execute a plan of action,

it might involve other companies, it might involve large organizations, and then being able to get to that high level and come to an agreement requires this standard level of thinking, which comes to agility. Yep. But you have to think in terms of that, because you really have to look at it.

I have a lot of good friends who are excellent. military. And one of them said, you know, the worst decision sometimes is no decision. And you're taught that in the military. It's like, look, you may make a bad decision, but it's worse not to make any decision. So make a decision and then deal with it in real time because you're not married to the decision. This is another thing that folks do a lot, that in the military, you certainly wouldn't want to do it. If you start heading out one way and it's not the right way, you're not going to keep going down that road because you're much closer to serious consequences if you do. So the ability not only to make decisions quickly, but also to change decisions quickly,

is something that's not really in the DNA of human beings, I think, in our nature. We tend to have this kind of sunk-cost thing that goes on in our head. Yeah, yeah. So we have to look at it and say, okay, we have to, we have to, always get this feedback from the system. Am I making, is the decision I made right or wrong or heading me in the right direction? So right or wrong probably doesn't help us when we start trying to answer that. Is it heading me in the right direction? Am I going to get, you know, some negative consequences if I continue along this path and should I change it? Agile companies can do that.

But I don't believe, and this is why I say it's mindset and it's the way we think and the way we see the world. I don't think we're built for that as human beings. I think we're built for if you look at human evolution, which happened over hundreds of thousands of years, and our brain being part of that human evolution, we evolved for a world that was very simple. And so our brain is good with the, when we talked about those four quadrants, the simple and the complicated, our brains are built for that. We weren't built for this VUCA world. So we have to look at the world differently and we have to do different things because of looking at the world differently that will lead to better results. I always tell people it's like,

It's like playing poker. The complicated world is like playing chess. You have a certain number of pieces. They have certain moves. You only have X number of squares, and there's only so many combinations. Now, it may be astronomical, but it's finite. But you look at the Vuka side, the complex side, it's poker.

You can play your hand perfectly and lose. You can play your hand crappy and win. The smart players win over time. So if you look at World Series of poker and stuff like that, why do you see the same names? When hundreds of thousands of people compete, they compete online just to get a spot in the real live tournament. And the same people went. Why? Because they understand poker.

They understand the game. And so for me, what I really want to do because it's good for people, right? It's good for business. But it's good for the people doing the work is I want people to understand that the world that sometimes you're looking at is not. all there is. It's there. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm not saying it's right. It's there, but it's not all that there is. There's more. I want you to look at these things too, and then I want you to make a decision. Should I change my behavior by knowing this, can I be more optimal? Can I improve my odds? And that's really what my practice of consulting and my training is all

about is can we improve our odds? Let me ask you this. How will, would you use your training, your practice, and apply it to the culture of an organization? How could they use that philosophy you just said and say that our company is now a learning company? Well, there's a lot of things we can do. There's a lot of things I talk about in my training that I think are a little bit different than what you would normally get in an agile training, which is one of the reason I'm starting to call it VUCA training. Because one of the things that I really want to look at as systems. You look at systems, you look at culture. But culture is a tough one of me. So instead of looking at culture, I want to look at systems. When you look at systems,

one of the very first things you're going to look in systems is you're going to say, the system is doing what it was designed to do. I tell this to companies all the time. And they scratch their head. They said, what do you mean? I said, your system is doing what it's designed to do. So in order to get a different outcome, you have to redesign the system. They say, okay, well, they get that. Okay, well, how do I do it? Well, systems are generally built on incentives because you think about it like a game. So the players in the system are acting and behaving in a certain way because they're incentivized to do it. So you have to look at what incentives have you put into place in your system when we talk about HR? Well, most people are incentivized by money.

How are people getting paid? How are people getting promoted? How are people getting rewarded? What are we rewarding them for? The other thing that's a big incentive, what are we measuring? I often find that the biggest problem that you have in companies is they're not measuring the right thing. In the Vucca world, we need to measure using Apke's golden rule, which I talk about, is we need to measure the value. We need to concentrate on the value.

But it's very few companies, even the big, maybe especially the big ones that I've worked for over the years, that actually really spent a lot of time talking about value. They'll talk to death about the effort that they put into something. But in the Vuka world, effort is asymmetric to value. Right? I can put in a lot of effort and get no value and I can put in a little bit of effort and get a lot of value. Guess which one I should do. Right.

So when we start concentrating on value and we start incentivizing value, that makes sense. That starts changing your culture. That starts changing the system. So to give you a perfect example of it. I worked at a very large company recently that did their IT spending was all done by project and scope, meaning I had to have, I'd get an idea, I'd have to go get sponsors and everything like that, and I'd have to write detailed specifications, and I'd have to take it to a board, and the board would approve it or not approve it, and it'd take three months to get funding,

and then once I got funding, I had to put a good team together, blah, blah, blah. Very slow, not the good way to go. If you're in IT in software development, a lot of cases you're building software products. So it makes a lot more sense to do your financial incentivization or your quote-unquote funding by product and capacity. So you change the calculus. Instead of saying, I'm going to fund this scope, you say, I'm going to fund this product. Much easier question, actually, because you look at the product. You identify the product, you say, you know, I'm going to spend $2 million on the product this year.

But that's going to determine how many people you can hire. And basically what you're going to do is you can say, hey, look, for that $2 million, I'm going to do the best thing I can do. Meaning that anybody who comes up with a good idea, I can start to execute that idea immediately. There's no cost of delay. There's no opportunity cost. I can start working on something immediately because it's already been funded, right? because the product is funded, not the idea. So the product is funded by investment.

So using the mindset, when I talk about mindset, mental models or lenses, using the investment mindset versus investing in products versus investing in scope. It's very odd for people. But we're able to do that at this large corporation with over a billion dollars of IT spending. And we were able to make that change in seven months. It's the largest, fastest transformation of its kind. And I was a part of it. I was in the eye of the storm. I was somewhat responsible for it.

So this is a perfect example of how a mindset change and a funding change can actually start to change the systems under which you're working. And then you're going to do better. Because the interesting thing about systems, I wasn't the first to observe this, but you'll appreciate this. I think it comes to us from Deming, W. Edward Deming, for those of you are familiar with it. He says that I think it's 96% of all problems are systemic in nature, meaning you don't have, it's not people problems. I don't have to solve the people problems.

If I solve the system problems, I'll solve my people problems. If I don't solve the system problems, I'm going to continue to have people problems. I'll give you an example on that one. There's a well-known financial institute that's paid billions of dollars in fines recently. Probably people could figure out which one. Why? Because the players in that system were incentivized to do things that were not right to do. Were those bad people?

I don't think they're bad people. Bad incentives. Bad incentives will make bad people better than good incentives will make good people, you know, good people. but you want to start with good incentives. So that's an example of when we talk about the larger things that we do as a company. We have to look at how are we incentivizing behavior within our organization. And if we're not getting the results we want in our organization, chances are really, really good. It's because the incentives we created are terrible.

And I would say that if you look around the world, the incentives we build into our education systems are pretty poor. The incentives we put into most businesses are pretty poor. The things we measure are not the things that matter. And because measurements generally equate either to promotions or bonuses or et cetera, et cetera, we have to be very careful also what we measure because measurements are incentives on their own. Okay. So before we go any further, how would you mention some cost fallacy and how would like how would businesses apply that in real time and to make this change? How do they recognize that they are not growing like they want to be or ending up at the timeline? So one of the things that when you look at like scrum or or some of the frameworks that are

being deployed and implemented in this agile world, one of the things that's really, really interesting about this is if you came to me and you say, what's the the one thing that we need to be successful in this VUCA world. I'm going to give you one word, and that word is feedback. And the key to feedback, by the way, is three things. I refer to it. It's like the Federal Aviation Administration FAA. It needs to be fast feedback. It needs to be accurate feedback, and it needs to be actionable feedback. So the keys to sunk cost filacy and a lot of the cognitive biases, and I do a whole class on cognitive biases, because it's so important to us as individuals and companies and organizations, whether we be for-profit,

nonprofit, to understand our biases because they get in the way of us being optimal. Definitely, I would love to go into that next. Yeah. So there's some cost-falysis or any of these. If we start putting in fast, accurate, actionable feedback, we're going to start to look at the world, as I said, look at the world differently, but we're always asking the question, am I doing the thing that is most valuable now? And what is the expectation of return on my effort?

Because this is what sunk cost fallacy is all about, right? I've put in a million dollars, so I might as well just keep going. Exactly. The fallacy of it, and the reason they call it a fallacy, is I can't pay attention to what's passed. I can only pay attention to the expectation of the future. So whatever was spent is spent. So I have to look at, continue to have feedback mechanisms that allow me to continue to look at what I'm doing and say to myself, do I have an expected return?

So, you know, we'll take it back to the military. If going left has a bad expectation of return, I shouldn't go left just because I made a decision to go left and I have to remain consistent. I should be able to say, wait a minute, I need to change course. And businesses need to as well. So if you remove, this is the real bad problem with waterfall and long term planning and other things. And the reason that you want to do continuous planning is you're not getting feedback. Thus, it lacks autonomy. You do lack autonomy.

So this is the other problem that you have with bureaucratic organizations. And again, it's not the military so much as it is businesses these days, is that you only have a few people who are making decisions. So decisions move very slowly. So the way that you combat it in military is you have platoons that are semi-autonomous. They're not fully autonomous, but they're great. I shouldn't even say semi. They're greatly autonomous, which means that they have the ability

to make decisions at the level that really counts. And this is a lot of what Agile is, too. When I say Agile is about decisioning, when I looked at scaling, and we created a custom scaling framework for this company I recently worked for, I said, look, we have to create a decisioning framework, meaning who gets to make what decisions in when,

in. And when you put that in place, that's also going to help you with sunk cost fallacy because the people who are closest to the worker say, wait a minute, guys, we shouldn't be going this way. We should change course. And again, a lot of this stuff is built into what I teach and how I teach people to practice it. Because one of the things that I do with clients is we create usually what's called a backlog, which is basically a to-do list. And we look at that to-do list always. We're always looking at that to-do list. We're always looking at the do list. asking ourselves a question, what are the things on this list that are going to deliver value? What are the things that can deliver value with less effort? And we're going to do the work in that

order. So there's a lot that you can do to mitigate all of these things. And the other thing I'm going to throw in there is science. Science is good. Scientific thought is good. And the reason it's good is because in science, which is different than what most people think, is you assume that you're wrong. And I know that sounds strange, but that's how science works. Most people say you get a, in science, you get a hypothesis, look for the proof. Nope, that's confirmation bias. Science says, create a hypothesis and then create an either opposite, and then try to prove the opposite. And if you can't prove the opposite, then you've probably got something that's good here, so this is probably close to true, but it still just becomes a theory. A theory just means it has a

preponderance of evidence, but it has to be falsifiable in order to be scientific. Once you move from the realm of falsifiability, you move into the word of dogmatism. Yes. Right? So it has to be falsifiable. So the other thing that we're doing is we're always assuming, instead of assuming that the project's going to work, which is what all project management in my life has done, you assume it doesn't work. you assume it's not going to achieve what you want it to achieve because then what you're going to do is you're going to put into place the feedback that's going to either verify or not verify that you're headed in the right direction because when you think it's going to work you don't put feedback into the system because you just assume it's going to work so you say just let's execute the plan don't change the plan the whole point is if the execution is not working agility says you change it right so even and with that expectation in mind it also keeps people's separate from the work or the main, the owners, the people who are implementing the plan in real time, it separates them from it. So it allows to, allows them to look at it logically rather than emotionally. Right. And it also gives in the ability, if you're doing it right, if you're

creating a proper decisioning framework around it, and it gives them the ability to make those changes without having to go through five layers of bureaucracy and waiting for somebody to make a decision three months from now. Right. The number one thing, really, when we talk about cost, there's something that I refer to a lot called cost of delay. What is it costing me not getting this to my customers today is a good way to look at it? And the cost of delay goes up in systems that don't allow for quick decisioning. So if I have to push up and let's say I've got a great idea and I don't have the autonomy to execute it and I have to go through three layers of bureaucracy, it might take three months. before I get an okay to do something. By that time, the cost of delay has gone through the roof.

And I might have missed the market opportunity, which is another thing, because the world is moving fast. It's not, I'm not playing poker against the computer. I'm playing poker against, you know, a dozen other people at the table. That's why it becomes really, really complex, or VUCA is because now I've also got to consider the other players. Because I often tell clients, you don't really have to be the fastest gazelle on the plane, but you sure as heck can't be the slowest one. And if your decisions are slow, that's going to make you one of the slower ones. So you should probably be getting a little bit nervous about that. But here's the thing about leaders, though. Great leaders have always done that. And you look at the military and other things.

Great leaders have always done that. And I have a whole bit I talk about the difference between when you look at the complicated world and the simple world, you need managers. Difference between a leader and a manager. That's the difference between a leader and a manager. Managers manage and you need those in the world that's simple and complicated. Fine. You can get away with it. Carrot and stick, all that stuff works.

You go over to this Vuka world, it doesn't work. Carrot and stick doesn't work. Leaders don't incentivize. They inspire. They don't motivate. They inspire. There's a difference between the two. And that's why it's important for leaders to understand the difference, you know, between being a leader and a manager.

And again, these things that we're talking about here, in my mind, these are all mental models and mindsets. And that's what I'm, you know, my mission is to help people understand that there are different ways of looking at the world and these ways will be beneficial to you. They're going to help you. And I want to help you. And, you know, fortunately, I've been able to make a living deal. like that. Wow. Like, this is a lot and I'm still learning this. Like literally I just started to apply this today. Like I have no clue what this was about, but I had a feeling that it's a universal practice that somehow I can see myself connecting to other applications. Like it seems easy. It's like

it's like a young kid with this trust fund just flunting it around with this knowledge. But I have no clue what I'm doing with it. But you brought something into life. that now I can kind of reflect back on after the show. That's great. I mean, that's kind of what it's all about. That's what my, you know, classes have been about and, you know, teaching thousands of people over the years. And here's an interesting thing that people have said about my training, by the way.

And I think you'll appreciate this. I think it is pertinent of this conversation, is I have people who come to me after the training and say, that it's the least practical training I've ever taken. And the reason they say so, this is true. is because they want me to tell them exactly what to do. They want me to tell them, we use a tool a lot in Agile World called Jira. They want me to tell them how to use Jira.

That's what they're looking for. And that's fine. There's nothing. I'm not saying this right or wrong. There's nothing against that. And it's true. If you're looking for that, my training isn't for you. But then there's a larger group of people at least, and I think it's a law of attraction.

So the people who come to my classes know this. going into it. And they come to me after the classes over and they say, this is the most practical education I've ever received. Because like you, they say, wait a minute, I can apply this here and here and here and here and here and here and here. That makes it practical in my book. So I agree, I obviously agree with the second set of people. It doesn't make the first set wrong. It just for when I, when I can help teach people what I would consider, Al Shalloway calls them first principles, things that are kind of universal. in different ways of looking at the world and then how we can kind of operationalize it,

though I won't go into too much detail because it's more important how we think about it and how we see it than it is what we do, because if we can see it accurately and think about it more clearly, we'll do better because we're, you know, I assume most people are pretty smart and they know their context. So I think by teaching this, it is eminently practical. And there's so much in my training and so much in the world of Vuka and Agile on the things that I've spent the last you know, dozen or so years studying and writing about and teaching that are so applicable to people's lives. And I just love the opportunity of doing it. I mean, when you tell me and I can kind of see light bulbs going off, that's, that's dopamine. That's like crack for me, you know?

No, this is insane. Like, I just like there's another world of understanding that when you think you got just one specific context of organizational leadership, now there's another world. Yeah. Yeah, it's a rabbit hole. It honestly is. I mean, I went down the rabbit hole like a dozen years ago. I haven't come out yet.

I mean, I guess I pop my head out every once in a while to talk with people and say, here's what I found down here in the rabbit hole. But it was, for me, it was a long time. time ago, somebody, I was, I was already a director of software development. One of the people reported to me said, that's great. You don't know anything about software development, you know, how to lead people or manage people. And I thought I was doing pretty good job. And he gave me a book. And I use it in my class. It's called People Wear. It's a great book. And it's about how knowledge workers are different, specifically software developers, because that's where

I spend most of my life. And I read it. And like you, I was just blown away. because it showed me a whole world I didn't see before. And that's when I went down that rabbit hole, you know, because I read that one. I said, well, there's more out here I haven't seen. I'm just scratching the start. And I just kept reading. I read a lot.

I like to read. I just kept reading things. And it just kept feeding my mind and feeding my mind and feeding my mind. And so that's what my class is about is all those things that I learned is just helping people understand the things that I learned. And I, you know, I presented it in a way. And I think it's pretty entertaining and inspiring. but, and people seem to like it.

So, you know, that was something that was, I found out very early on that was surprising to me. When I taught this class, I never imagined that somebody would take it more than once. I mean, because it was free, so anybody could take it. I had people take, I had one person, I met with him, he's a good friend of mine now. I met with him for breakfast earlier this week. He took my class 16 times. Yes. I didn't, why did you take it 16 times?

He said, I learned something new every time. Yes, because you get the framework from the first class that teaches you how to think a little bit differently. And then you go back and then you do it again. And now you have a new view. And you keep doing it. There's always a new view. Same thing with watching movies. Same with rereading books.

It all applies. Yeah, it was just amazing. And he wasn't the only one. So it was called job hackers. So we called him rehackers. We had a huge group of rehackers who used to come to all the, I did the class four. times a year. It's still going on, by the way. They teach it slightly different than me, which is fine. But let me use a metaphor. Metaphors are great, by the way. I grew up in

the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio, wonderful place. Great place to grow up. It was a great time to grow up. I'm a little older than folks, probably most folks these days. And it was wonderful. And we spent all our time outdoors. I tell my son that. I said, man, you know, mom would us out at 9 o'clock and we'd come back, you know, for dinner at 5 and they never knew where we went. And then they'd kick us out after that and we'd stay out until it got dark, you know. But when it got dark, we'd look up into the sky and we'd see the stars. And we, you know, I can identify big, dipper, little dipper like that. I was never really that much into it, but you'd see the sky.

And I think you can imagine it. So those of folks who grew up in the city, which is most of us are the suburbs, you look up in the sky, you saw a certain thing. And to me, that was the sky, right? That was the sky. And then, much, much later in my life, for some reason, we took this really strange trip, and I ended up in the middle of Idaho, in the middle of nowhere, in a cabin, and I walk outside and I look up at the sky, and I could see the Milky Way. If you ever seen the pictures of the Milky Way?

Yes. And I looked at that sky, and I said, is that even real? Because for so long, the image that I had of the sky was this sky where you really didn't see that many stars. And you certainly couldn't see the Milky Way, but now. Now I'm seeing all this stuff and I'm like, this isn't even real, is it? And that's kind of the way my class is for a lot of people. Because they start to open up to, it's the same world, right?

The world doesn't change. Our ability to see things in the world, just like seeing the two different skies. Sometimes we see things a little bit more clearly than other things. It's the same sky. And that's what I, that's what I'm, the essence of what I'm teaching is, look, it's the same world. I'm not, I'm not showing you a different world. I'm just showing you pieces of the world that you may not have seen before. And when you do see them, it's going to change the way that you think.

Your life will never be the same. My life will never be the same when I see this sky, because I know this, this is closer to reality. Now, there may be another view that's even different, but it's certainly closer to reality than this. but it was always real. I mean, I always refer to objective reality as that, which is beyond our senses. It was only my subjective viewing of the sky that led me to believe that this was true. And so it shakes you when you look at something. Now, there's a lot of people when this happens, they'll choose this, right?

They'll choose this because that's human nature. That's confirmation bias and all these biases. We'll forget about it. I'm just going to ignore this because it doesn't. fit this thing that I thought the world was. But for those who can expand themselves and see the world differently, it just opened up a whole new world on your ability to function within the world. And again, be optimal. There's no guarantee in the VUCA world that you're going to succeed. The bet you can do is put the odds in your favor. In other words, recognizing what's

hindering you from seeing past what you see. In essence, a lot. of it is. So a lot of it comes down to, I've often been asked, I just talked about this recently, I did a talk at Oakland PMI, the product management institute or whatever, PMI, and project, sorry, project. And they asked me, they said, what are the main barriers to agile transformation? Because there's a lot of companies that are going from traditional project management to agile. And I said it's two things in my mind. It's intellectual curiosity, and intellectual humility. And the biggest of these is the humility.

So let me explain those just a little bit more briefly. Curiosity is I want to know. Yes. I have a desire to know what's quote unquote real, objectively real. And then the second one is I have the humility to accept it, to think differently, to see differently, and to accept a world that may not be exactly what I always thought it would be. And if you don't have those two things, you're going to have a hard time. We see it all the time in our lives, by the way.

And I see it mostly, and I don't want to get political, I see it in politics. We've chosen our worldview, and we're only looking for confirming evidence for that worldview. That's not scientific, nor if somebody came to me and says, I'm looking at it. for the truth, are you? Would be my first question, right? And if the answer is yes and they're sincere, then I say, okay, well, if you're looking for the truth, you're not going about it in the right way. You're only looking for things that confirm your existing belief.

If you want the truth, the way you get to the truth is you have to go to the other side and you have to have conversations with people who don't agree with you. And you have to see their worldview and you have to ask yourself the question, is there's more accurate than mine? the answer can be no. But it takes a lot of humility to do that because even biologically we're wired for confirmation bias. We're wired that way. I spent a lot of time studying neurobiology and neurophysiology because to me it's so fascinating.

When we see a pattern, we have that thing in our heads, this is the way the world is called a hypothesis. When we see a pattern that fits the pattern that's in our head, we get a shot of dopamine. And dopamine is addictive. So when you look at all these people on social media and all this stuff, they're outraged all the time. There's a whole outrage machine, both left, right, center, et cetera. People get outraged because it's clickbait. We know it.

Why is it clickbait? Because even though we're angry about it, it's still confirming our worldview. And because it confirms our worldview, it gives us a shot of dopamine. and the most addictive neurotransmitter is dopamine. It's the same one that you have in drug addiction. And so what social media is, as so many people have astutely put out, and I'm sorry to go off on this tangent, but it's a drug. It's a dopamine delivery system.

And there's way too many people, myself included, who probably fall into this behavior because it's what we're programmed to do. There was an evolutionary component that was, that made this something good at some point in our existence, it's no longer something that's good for us as human beings. So all these things I talk about, it's strange that, you know, to even call it an agile class sometimes, because these are a lot of things I talk about

because these are the things that really matter to us as human beings if we want to improve, if we want to be optimal. Well, that's a lot that we're going to cut it right there. Now, how can our audience get in touch with you and where can they find your book? Yeah, there's all kinds of ways for folks to get in contact with me. So I'll go through a few. The best way, if you're on LinkedIn, just link in to me.

Just type in Larry Abke. Fortunately, I have a unique name. You're not going to find a whole bunch of Larry Apkees. I think you'll find one. So LinkedIn is a good way to find me. The other way is I have a website. It's called Vuka MBA. It talks about the class that I've referred to numerous times.

and it's buca mba.com, v-u-c-a-M-B-A-B-A-com. I also have larryapkey.com, so you can find me there. So there's all kinds of ways to find me. The book, I have three books that I've written over the years. They're small books, they're easy reads. They're not very expensive. They're all on Amazon if people are interested in. But if you find me, you send me a note through LinkedIn or something like that,

and you say, hey, Larry, I want to get your book. I'll send you a free copy because it doesn't, you don't make a lot of money off books. And I want that information out there if people are interested in it. So, you know, I want your folks to know that, hey, come to my website, send me an email, go to LinkedIn, send me a message and say, hey, Larry, I heard you on a podcast. I want to get your copy of your books. Great. I'll send you some copies digitally or at least a place you can download.

So all those ways. And honestly, if people want to talk to me, if I got time on my calendar, I got a calendar link, I'd be happy to share it with people. You just talk to me. I'd be happy to talk with folks who are interested in these kind of things. I like that a lot. I'll be sure to link that in the show notes. Yeah. If there's anything you want to leave our audience with before I let you go, would you like to leave them with?

I had a saying that the reason I came up with this Agile, Apke's Golden Rule of Agile was because if somebody ever asked me a question, you know, like this, what would I say? I think the thing that I want to impress upon people is this VUCA world is not what we were built for. So a lot of people run their businesses and make decisions based on intuition, but our intuition was built for a different world. So I'm borrowing this from a famous behavioral economist who said, don't trust your intuition. I think that's the key in this VUGA. If you're in the VUCA world, don't trust your intuition. learn what it's really about and stop and think and don't just go with your gut feeling because it's not always the best or optimal thing to do.

That is, that is awesome. I like that. I really do. Larry, I do appreciate you coming on the show today. I appreciate it. Hopefully folks enjoy it and I had a good time. I hope you had a good time.

And I really enjoyed being here today. Thanks for joining us on this adventure of growth and discovery. If you're ready to achieve a sustainable transformation, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you've never miss an episode. And hey, if you've enjoyed the show and want to support it, take a moment to leave a podcast review on Apple or your favorite podcast platform. Stay connected with us on social media for behind the scenes sneak peeks, inspiring quotes, and the latest updates. You can find us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Just search for YTS the podcast. Until next time, Remember, change is constant and transformation is inevitable.

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