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The Agile Within
Providing agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections.
The Agile Within
9 (oops 10) Steps to Create an Agile Environment with Jeremy Berriault
Unlock the secrets to building a high-performing agile team with evolutionary agilist Jeremy Berriault. Jeremy offers a wealth of knowledge on the fundamentals of creating an agile environment, starting with why it's essential to lay a solid foundation before diving into frameworks. We discuss Jeremy's ten-step approach to agile transformation, emphasizing the importance of understanding the value chain, aligning agile values with organizational goals, and marking the starting point of any transformation. Jeremy’s insights into servant leadership and the application of Simon Sinek's golden circle will revolutionize your approach to agile initiatives.
Discover the keys to evolving agile teams, with a special focus on financial institutions. Jeremy shares how breaking down cognitive biases and logical fallacies can lead to significant productivity improvements. Learn about the shift from managing large tasks to executing multiple smaller tasks within sprints and the importance of adaptability in response to changing tax laws and technology. We also explore how fostering a self-organizing, trust-based environment allows leaders to guide without stifling team autonomy, ultimately cultivating a culture of continuous improvement and maturity.
Get to the heart of what makes teams tick with insights into personality dynamics and effective team metrics. Jeremy sheds light on the importance of selecting the right metrics, such as throughput and cycle time, to measure team progress objectively. We delve into tools like team health surveys and DISC personality models to tailor communication strategies and enhance team collaboration. Jeremy's real-life examples and practical advice from his book "Beyond the Framework: Cultivating Agile Growth" will equip you with the knowledge to build thriving, agile environments. Don't miss out on these invaluable lessons that will transform your team's dynamics and performance.
When in Toronto, explore the beautiful Terra Cotta:
https://www.visitcaledon.ca/explore/terra-cotta
Simon Sinek's Golden Circle:
https://simonsinek.com/golden-circle/
Discover the DiSC profile:
https://www.discprofile.com/
Get Jeremy's book "Beyond the Framework" on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-framework-Jeremy-Berriault/dp/1965064620
Connect with Jeremy on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-berriault-mba/
Email Jeremy:
jberriault@berriaultandassociates.com
Check out Berriault and Associates' offerings:
https://berriaultandassociates.com/
Follow us on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-agile-within
Welcome to the Agile Within. I am your host, Mark Metze. My mission for this podcast is to provide Agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections. My guests and I will share real-life stories from our Agile journeys, triumphs, blunders and everything in between, as well as the lessons that we have learned. So get pumped, get rocking. The Agile Within starts now. Well, I hope everyone's having a wonderful day out there. This is Mark Metze at the Agile Within. My guest today, from the Toronto area, is evolutionary agilist author, speaker and coach, Jeremy Be. Jeremy, welcome to the show. Thanks, thanks for having me. Great to be here, absolutely Wonderful to have you. So, jeremy, being from Toronto, I've never been there, but if I were coming for a day, what would be one thing that you would say that I would have to do?
Jeremy:I think one of the outside of like all the big touristy stuff around this area. I think there's a lot of. We have like a lot of provincial parks and paths. There's one path that myself and my family would like to go on. It's called Terracotta. It's actually about 45 minutes northwest of Toronto. It's really nice, especially in the fall when the leaves are changing color. I think that's a really nice path just to kind of walk around and enjoy the scenery, have the leaves started changing colors, yet Not yet.
Jeremy:Not yet Probably in the next few weeks they'll start, and usually October is when the colors really start to come up.
Mark:The peak time. Gotcha All right. Well, sounds wonderful. We have an interesting topic today, so the title that Jeremy has for our episode today is the nine steps Oops 10 to create an agile environment. I'm interested to know what was your motivation for creating these 10 steps for an agile environment.
Jeremy:So during COVID actually this is when it all came out was during COVID. I wanted to create an online course and throughout the course I created like a flowing of nine steps for each particular lesson and it was really to take in a lot of the information I've gathered and a lot of books and training, and even some of my colleagues that I've worked with Take that information almost want to build out a good environment, because I find that a lot of organizations they feel let's just throw in a framework and we can call ourselves agile, and for me it was more like you kind of have to build out the environment first to ensure that everything else kind of falls into place. Actually I wrote a blog just a little while ago saying in a zoo you can't throw in a jaguar in a polar bear environment right off the bat. You have to build out the environment to make to have the jaguar flourish and enjoy like have a good life in that environment. So this is kind of helping build that environment so that everything else can flow and succeed.
Mark:I'm curious to jump right in and hear about these, these 10 steps. So where do we get started?
Jeremy:So really when I created this, I created it almost like I put it in chunks of three again, started off with nine steps, the oops, the 10, we'll get into that later. So really the first part is three is like having identifying kind of where you have to start identifying your goals and and your design. Design and what I mean by design, is actually designing the teams and designing how the environment's going to look. Uh, when you look at the start is a lot of organizations. They have sometimes a when they create the transformation or they want to move forward in implementing a framework, they don't mark where they framework, they don't mark where they start or they don't identify where they start From there. Like, really it's identifying kind of how you have to shift to a servant leader.
Jeremy:You have to kind of develop your agile values that tie into the organization values and kind of understanding. You also have to understand the kind of the value chain within. From there you're going to have to identify your goals. What do you want to achieve? What is the kind of identifying your why? I'm a big proponent of Simon Sinek's golden circle finding your why and I find that when you go from the why out, especially in an agile environment. That's where everything kind of succeeds and that's where you identify your goals and you start looking at your design on how the environment is all going to look and flow through.
Mark:So you mentioned that it's important for you to mark where you start. Give us some insight. What do you mean when you say mark where you start? Are you documenting, or what does that mean?
Jeremy:I think it's recognizing recognizing where, like what you have at that particular point in time of when you start. We've all used kind of google maps or ways or anything like that to to travel around before like I'll age myself, I'll talk about paper maps too you always know where you started off, like Like you have your start point and your end point. Sometimes, if you don't understand where you were, you don't actually see the benefits and the progress you've made as you go along. And a lot of teams that I've worked with they if they didn't, I don't have that start. They see the frustration, they get frustrated, but they don't and they kind of want to revert back to the way it was and or they kind of mumble, jumble things up and it doesn't work all that well. But when you understand, it's like hey, okay, we used to do it this way, we are a little bit faster, yes, we are showing a little bit more value than we did before. Let's just figure out how we can make things better and go forward instead of trying to go backwards.
Mark:I think that's really important. What's the phrase? It's like if you don't know history, you're doomed to repeat it, or something like that. Yeah, so I can see how it would be very easy to slide into old habits if you don't have that marker set, that pen, to say start here. If you don't have that marker set, that pin, to say start here.
Jeremy:When you're in a very high stressful situation or something's just not going right, you unconsciously start kind of reverting back. You want to go back to where it's comfortable and you want to start doing things where you're comfortable instead of trying to be kind of vulnerable and uncomfortable, and try to push forward, try to find new ways of doing things, and I think when you understand where everything started, then it's like hold on, oh, I was miserable when I did that three months ago before we kind of started using all this. I don't want to go back to being miserable like that again. Let's push through and make things better for ourselves.
Mark:So knowing where we start, talked about designing the teams identifying some goals.
Jeremy:What's next, jeremy? So from there and that's kind of. Those three were like the foundation. The next three that we look at is kind of getting understanding the system, part of it, right. The next word is, like you're kind of looking at pathways, like pathways for the teams to work, not just for the actual product. You're looking at identifying kind of how you're going to continuously improve and I think that obviously in an agile environment, that's the big thing we talk about.
Jeremy:We want to be getting better.
Jeremy:We want to at least I always say, be 1% better than you were yesterday, right, and if you kind of do that and the algorithm for that it's a you actually have a lot greater value and just trying to be one percent better a day than if you just kind of stay at you where you are and not kind of improve above all else.
Jeremy:And we talk about trust. If you don't have that foundation and having setting up the environment, setting up the trust and building out the trust is going to take, it's going to just even be harder to do, right, like once you get everything all sorted out and set up, getting your kind of trust, environment and understanding where, like, the team wants to go where the organization wants to go, how you want the team to achieve the goals like using the guidelines to achieve the goals to get to where they want to get then everything just falls into place and then the continuous improvement is just kind of like the icing on the cake for this kind of for these three. Is that you're, you want to become better, you want to get better at what you want to do, you want to make the product better than what you want to do.
Jeremy:You want to be able to make the service better. It better than what you want to do. You want to be able to make the service better. A lot of these paths, a lot of like these steps here, it's not just straight for a software development organization or department. It can be used for anyone, like for sales, for marketing, for finance. It's just helping building out that foundation so that you can be that more adaptive type group and building out that foundation so that you can be that more adaptive type group.
Mark:I've worked with teams before that perform very well and they were very strong together because their perception is they're working better than other teams. They almost have the attitude of well, we're doing so well, there's nothing we need to improve. How do you help those teams at challenging them to be 1% better every day?
Jeremy:Two teams I've worked with before they were really struggling to have a consistent throughput and they're using story points. It was Scrum they're doing everything, they're kind of following all the steps, but their behaviors within it they're still reverting back. So there was a little bit a lot of conflict in between. When I was working with them they started getting better. They were trying to put through like maybe two, three tickets a sprint. In the end they were putting close to 20 tickets a sprint. A lot of other issues involved, like those three tickets were huge. We had to kind of help them break it down and get through and understand the throughput. But then they were using story points and they would have like oh well, we're now doing before, we're doing 10 story points of sprint, now we're doing like 60 story points of sprint, we don't have to do anymore, we're better. It's like well, no, like there's no such thing as being perfect, right, we're human, like we're never going to be perfect. We can strive for it, we can try to move ourselves to get there, but there's always going to be something going on where you have to adapt. Um, these teams here. They were in the financial institution with the canadian tax, uh, tax division and they're like oh no, we don't have to do any changes, Like going well, you do know, and I'm sure in the U S as well actually every country tax laws change once every few years or once every year, depending on what's going on. You're going to have to be able to adapt that. You're going to have to be able to change it just in that alone, and then kept telling him, like going, then you got technology that's going to be changing over the next year. Before, in the 90s, like technology changed like once every five years or so, the 2000s, we are getting kind of more innovative type technology once every couple years. Now, pick a month, and I'm sure something's changed. So there's always going to be stuff going on.
Jeremy:Where we have to be more adaptable and understand some of the things that I really focus on with teams is kind of eliminating those cognitive bias and logical fallacies. That kind of get them in that way where there's like ah, like, like you said, it's like ah, we're perfect, we're good where we are, like I want to stay at this consistent speed. It's like well, why do you want to stay at that speed? Don't you want to be better? That's being kind of lazy, isn't it? Now I don't. I'm not that straightforward with some of the. Obviously, with some of the people, I pick my pick and choose my words. Obviously with who I talk to, but I of the point I want to bring across is always that like no, you can always be better At some point.
Jeremy:You're going to wake up, get ready to go to work and in your head there's going to be like I don't want to go into work today. Oh, I got to drag myself into work. It shouldn't be that way. It should be like I'm ready to go to work. I want to go, like exciting stuff is happening. I'm going to make myself better. I'm going to move. I'm going to make my product better. I'm going to make this better. I'm going to make my testing process, my testing flow better, you name it. But you want that excitement to go in.
Jeremy:And usually the teams that I've worked with I want to focus on that psychological aspect of is like hey, like a lot of the stuff. Yeah, it might be hard, but think about what happens when you figure it out. And that's where a lot of teams in this kind of the steps here help build out is build an environment where you get excited for building something out. You get excited for hey, I got a problem, let's solve it. Awesome, let's move on to the next one, move on to the next one.
Jeremy:And it's allowing leaders as well to create those true self organizing teams where you giving them the trust to build out what they need to build out and you're giving them a guideline, saying okay, here, here are the guidelines I want you guys to follow, right, like whether it's a financial institution, wherever you have certain guidelines you have to follow. However you want to figure it out, go ahead, figure it out, but these are your guidelines, these are the goals we want to achieve, and just do the best you can and go on. And that's where all these steps kind of came out. I wanted to create that environment where it's no longer micromanaging, there's no longer leaders kind of exactly, kind of peeking over someone's shoulder saying it's like oh, what are you doing? What are you doing? It's like I trust what you're doing, I trust what the team is doing. You guys know your goals, go ahead and do it.
Mark:Gotcha All right. So we talked about forming the foundation, we talked about creating a system. What's the next step?
Jeremy:So the last part that when I was creating all this, I called it maturity, and it was just after COVID started kind of walking away. I was thinking more and more about it and it was more about evolution. I wanted to create something where everything evolves, so I started backing away from talking about maturity. I actually did a talk at Agile 2023 about maturity and evolution steps. Well, sorry, the last three steps within the course that I created was really focusing on how to create that evolution and move forward and it kind of build out across organizations, across teams, so that they are they sit there. Other teams will sit there and look at your team, say do you know what I like what you guys are doing? Let's figure out how we can do something similar so that we can be in sync and move through. And there that's where I looked at like from a quality perspective. I talked about evolving and I talked about kind of growing. What we wanted to, what I wanted to look at, was more setting up the environment so that people want to get excited, they get excited and they see what other teams are doing. It's like I like how you guys are doing stuff. I like your kind of they understand the why they're doing stuff and they see how everything is flowing and they want to do something similar.
Jeremy:When we looked at quality, a lot of teams that I worked with when, especially regarding quality, they figured quality assurance is, oh, someone's just a tester, there's a tester that's testing all their stuff. They're a quality assurance, just a tester. Right, just a tester. Yes, and I've spent a lot of years as a tester. Sorry, everyone didn't see, I'm just doing air quotes here. Sorry, everyone didn't see, I'm just doing air quotes here. And for me, I fully understand and I appreciate what quality assurance is, and there was a quote from an e-book. For the life of me, I think I switched computers and I lost the e-book, but there was this one line that really stuck out with me and it was saying basically, quality assurance is helping others do better or be better at what they're doing.
Jeremy:When I talk about quality here is when we talk about like an agile environments, like retrospectives or any sort of like follow-ups or end of end of sprint, end of cadence type reviews, and I look at quality there as okay. How is the team going to make each other better? How are teammates going to help make each other better and that ties into before with the quality, the continuous improvement where we want to move forward. And then the other main steps is kind of like evolve. Steps is kind of like evolve and that is.
Jeremy:And growing is to have everyone again have that excitement. All right, every living thing and on this planet has cells and the way I see it is, all the cells work together, like they may be individual cells to like on their own, but they do have to work with other cells or other organs or everything else within the body, within that organism, to survive. And when you have that synchronization and that excitement of kind of evolving and growing and dealing with any sort of obstacles or impediments or anything like that, or market changes, anything that goes on, where you can rapidly adapt and evolve and change through and deal with it, not only is a team going to feel more accomplished at what they're doing but it's also providing more value to the organization. Where they can like if there's any sort of change within the market, the leadership knows that they can just trust the teams. They'll be able to adapt and deal with it right away so that they're no longer falling behind in their market share. They can kind of keep pace or even get ahead of it.
Mark:So this is really fascinating, jeremy, I'm curious to know. So, similar to how you began our conversation, you talked about having that mark about where you start. How do you mark that start and then measure the progress so that you can be seen where you're able to objectively measure how teammates are making each other better, how other teams are observing what you're doing and starting to implement some of the things that you're doing in their teams and coming along for the ride? Can you give us some insight there?
Jeremy:First we try to figure out like what are the best metrics? If we want to, like, obviously we're going to use metrics. I'm a big metrics person, to the chagrin of my family and my wife. I like to use stats. I understand and I appreciate it. Every organization is different, every team is different, so I can't come in with kind of a cookie cutter saying it's like well, let's go. Like I could basically come and say let's look at throughput, like everyone understands what throughput is going across.
Jeremy:But there's other things and other kind of tangible type data points that organizations have that they can use. I've done qualitative data whereas like just kind of team health. Right, have some quick surveys. Okay, how do you feel at this point? How do you feel the team is doing now? How do you feel working through?
Jeremy:I've also used other tools, like five behaviors. They have a good kind of assessment type tooling where people can do. They do the survey and then it gives them idea how everyone works together when the team, how they see each other, how they see themselves, how they see each other. But also it gives them an opportunity to say, six months down the road they can take the same survey and see their progress. Obviously there's a lot of different kind of psychological type surveys as well that you can use just for that. I focus a lot on throughput cycle time like stuff like that that can, where they can actually see things going through, especially like a lot of executives, they money talks right. So if, if they under, if you can sit there and tie it to a dollar figure, then away you go, those can be kind of dangerous.
Mark:You have to be careful with those because you can reach a little too much on some of those and I found that people can sniff those out.
Jeremy:It's like you're trying a little too hard yeah, well, and what I use is usually it's kind of time savings, right, so that's good. I I'd understand more. Okay, I've had one engagement where it's like oh okay, we do, we do releases every four months, but we're always late. There's always a there's like we're, there's some sort of delay where we're not, we don't deliver on time or we just have to. It's so bad, but we have to cancel the release and merge it into the next one, and so, with them that particular one, my key thing was okay, let's focus on, like you have your release schedule, all right, let's hit your release schedule. Let's show the time savings and show the quality going through of trying to hit those cycles as we're working through and I did some assessments with them, there was other savings I I saw where they could potentially take advantage of, whereas, like I told him, it was like on every release, if things are done right, you'll save two weeks of work. Just from a regression testing perspective, there's savings here, here, here, all these potential, and at least that gives an idea.
Jeremy:It's like, wow, gee, because a lot of organizations, especially as they're like if they're using consultants or consultant firms, they're like, oh God, we're going to be spending this much money. It's like, well, yeah, but here's the savings you can have as we go through this, and I think that's the key thing I like to use is using savings. I don't come out and say it's like guys are going to make $2 million this year Nope, because I don't know what their strategy is. I'm not focused on that strategy. I'm focused on their delivery. So it's more. You're going to have this much savings. This is your end goal going through.
Mark:Yep, all right, jeremy. So we built the foundation, then we formed a system.
Jeremy:All right, jeremy, so we through this flow. It worked out to nine and it made a lot of sense as I was going through it Just over the past kind of six months I was kind of, and actually for the past couple of years I've tried to, I've moved the course into a book. I know it's kind of a little bit backwards for most, but hey, who says I like to do things the right way or the easy way? The one thing I found was the one step that's missing and a lot of like within change management. That I've kind of dealt with and I'm sure others is. Even if you've used Carter's change management style, it's very okay.
Jeremy:This is kind of what you have to do. It's what they have to look at. You have to gather information, share the message, so on and so on. What I found was that not everyone takes in information the same way, not everyone works the same way, and I think, as you look at teams and building things out and providing the right message and going through, we have to appreciate everyone's different personalities or different behaviors. Everyone has their obviously different personalities, but there's kind of different behaviors. There's the I like to use the disk model I don't know if you're aware of that, or the four. Like the four behaviors, there are different colors. Like well, there's the disk, there's four behaviors, there's different color schemes, you name it. There's a lot of different literature and assessments out there and understanding how everyone kind of fits in those scales it works in understanding how you provide the right message. Like for me under like my disk style.
Jeremy:I've done the survey, I'm identified as a dominant. I'm actually identified as a pretty strong dominant person. And that's really interesting because when I, when I went through, went through the assessment, kind of like, okay, I in my mind, like yeah, it's kind of fluff stuff answering the questions going through, but as I was reading the assessment, it kind of really started triggering. So like yeah, okay, that is me. Like I have like dominant styles. They don't like things sugar-coated, they want to be, they want things straightforward. They can sometimes come across as not caring or anything like that, just on how their tone of speech. There was stuff that I kind of I saw that and I recognized. I thought it was kind of interesting, it was fun and it was. I already recognized some of that stuff before.
Jeremy:So I try to make sure I adapt to different people. Now this kind of helps me even more understand. Like, oh, if someone is in the influence style under disc, okay, I have to talk to them. They're very sociable. So I have to make sure that I don't want to come across as too gruff, but I don't want to make myself uncomfortable and kind of sound like very happy, happy, joy, joy type of thing and and discussing with that so that you gotta be yourself you gotta be yourself right yes, you gotta, yeah, you have to have integrity, you have to be yourself, but I don't want to get that person offended or upset or kind of put off if any sort of messaging I put off onto them.
Jeremy:So I want to make sure they go through and I think a lot of teams that I'm working with now I use these models to one. It helps the team understand how each other works, how each other kind of gives them an idea as to how to communicate with each other. Because one engagement I've had a team we went through this there was two people and I remember when I was doing the assessment I was sitting with a team and I was going through and I'm watching them, just observing, and knew right away there was there was an issue between these two people, like there was a lot of stress, a lot of kind of conflict in between them. I had an idea. I was thinking like they're talking the same thing, they have the same goal, but they're just not, they're just kind of talking past each other or just kind of conflicting.
Jeremy:When they went through the assessment and they saw it and that now they understood, it's's like oh okay, when you talk this way, you're not being kind of defensive or you're not being condescending. It's kind of how you are, it's how you understand. And now, and the other person was like okay, well, now I know why you kind of get a little bit upset or you look upset when I say stuff Now they're working together and it's great. Now that team is, they're even better at what they were doing before because now they just have that understanding.
Mark:I think, another benefit and, by the way, I took a similar personality test a few years ago and it was similar to DISC, but it was a four animals personality test.
Mark:I think it was a lion, a beaver, a golden retriever and an otter or something like that. And I knew which one I was going to be right off the bat, and maybe that biased my, but I knew I was going to be a golden retriever because I'm loyal, I like to serve people, I like to make sure people are happy, I have a lot of empathy, so I knew right off the bat. But I think another byproduct of these is that you can play to people's strengths and not try to make people do things that they're not good at. And if the person wants to improve in a certain area and they want to grow, then that's great. But, boy Jeremy, between me and you, you can spend a lifetime trying to get somebody to excel in a certain area that they don't want to and you'll never make progress. And if you're a parent out there and you have kids, you know this lesson the hard way. School of hard knocks right.
Jeremy:Yeah, well, I had. There was a team I worked with. Well, it was before I was kind of started my firm and which I, from a career perspective, I kind of grew up, got up through the ranks, and there was, I was a manager of a team, one of the individuals we were sitting there talking and he was, he kind of seemed off, put Like. He's like oh okay, oh, a new manager, okay, here's here. He's going to tell me where do I see myself in five years? I hate that question. I have no idea If anyone wants to really put someone off-put for where you see yourself in five years in that question. Go to your boss and say I want your job.
Mark:I've had that happen before.
Jeremy:Yep, and it's good, happened before. Yep, and it's good. But with this individual, as we were sitting there talking with him, as I was talking with him, I found out that he's just, he was quite happy just doing what he's doing. He had no aspirations to be a manager. He didn't want to do any leadership stuff. I mean, he didn't really kind of he didn't show any kind of leadership type skills, like a skill set. I would talk with him and in the end he's like hey, you're happy with doing what you're doing, right? Yep, and I think he was getting close to retirement. I think it was like five, six years from retirement and I'm like do I know? It doesn't make sense if you want to be to put you as a manager, because for you to actually really succeed in that type of role, it's going to take you two, three years just to get to that point. It's going to take you probably another two years to be very well in your management role and you're going to be retired like your, your, your mind is off on kind of going on to the sunset. It was easy. For me. It was like hey, let's just talk about any sort of issues and we'll go from there, I'm not gonna. You don't want to do that role, that's no problem.
Jeremy:The um, the latin engagement, I told wherever we did this test, I remember speaking with the executive and they're like oh, this is really good and so we have to have like the right mix, like we have to have one of each style on the team. And I'm like no, you don't, don't mix up the teams. The teams are working together. They all know each other. They just now have to understand how to adapt.
Jeremy:What if we have like a team that's full of, like this, all kind of eyes, they're all influencer, influence, they're kind of, they're they're really team going, but they don't have the type of direction of like a C style where they're like they have to follow the rules. They don't have to like the D style. It's very straightforward, it's like that's fine. They just have to be able to understand what's expected within each and each of those people. They do have some aspect of all the other styles. It's just a matter of making sure they have that right mix so that they can get this, get the work done. And that's where a lot of organizations, with this particular part, they find that they kind of struggle with. It feels like, oh, we want a whole bunch of go-getters, let's put a bunch of D-type style people on that team and they'll be great. But if they have to work with other teams, they have to be able to appreciate how everyone else works.
Mark:I had a manager once tell me that somebody's got to take out the trash, somebody has to take out the garbage, and if you have all strong type A personalities on the team, all of them feel like it's not their job, it's beneath them to do menial tasks. So well, jeremy, how would you summarize this?
Jeremy:I think to summarize everything is you want to build the environment, you want to build things around so everyone else can succeed. And I think when you go through your understanding, where you start having, like kind of the leadership, it's not and again, it's not just a team that's going through any sort of change and adapting to a framework, it's also the leadership they have to. They can no longer be that bureaucratic type style of leadership, of management. It has to be more generative, has to be kind of like that servant leader has to be there to help, right? You have to identify your goals, have your guidelines in place. You have to and have understand how the teams are set up. You have your design. That's your why. Once you have all that, everything else like that, like if we go through the golden circle, your how is how the team's going to work together? So there's your pathway. And then, like the, the framework is your what right? So that's why you go from the inside of the circle out.
Jeremy:The framework I've always seen, I've always talked, talked about over the past five some odd years, was that frameworks are tools. That's what they are. A framework doesn't define whether you're an agile team or not. The framework is just the tool of what you're using to get to the end goal and understanding how and the why, then you're going to use that tool effectively, right? Like you don't use a hammer to put in a screw, right? So if you know how to use a screwdriver, that's your why and your how, and then you use a screwdriver to put in that screw and then finally it's understanding.
Jeremy:I think this was the biggest piece kind of I had the aha moment recently was that to understand how everyone works together as a team, how understanding their behaviors and to get them to appreciate each other and understand each other more, then it's easier to communicate, it's easier to collaborate, it's easier to get to those end goals, to understand how to resolve these issues. Tying all that in, then you can throw in the framework, then you find the framework that works best for that, for the team, and then away you go and then with that it creates excitement, it creates energy, it creates other teams to kind of look in and see how those teams are doing. And it's like I want to do stuff like that. I like like like they're all happy, they like they're solving problems, they're getting stuff done. What can we do to get that.
Jeremy:And it is again. You follow through these same steps, you kind of build up their environment. And if we look at it from a zoo perspective, right, each zoo, they everyone has a different piece, like every animal has a different location and it's built out specifically for them. But they all flow. And here you're creating something where you can create a organization flow of a agile environment.
Mark:So, jeremy, if our listeners out there want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Jeremy:So there's a few ways to get a hold of me. I'm on LinkedIn. If you do a search for jeremy barrio in toronto, I am the only jeremy barrio in toronto around here. You can reach me through my website at barryownassociatescom. I know it sounds like a law firm there's a lot of reasons why I called it barryown associates but you can reach me through there. Or you can reach me through my email at jbarrio at barianassociatescom.
Mark:As always, we'll put those links in the show notes. And how about your book? How might people get a hold of your book?
Jeremy:So right now it's on Amazon. It's called Beyond the Framework Cultivating Agile Growth, and we're looking at putting it on Barnes, noble and Google Books in the next couple of weeks.
Mark:OK. Well, Jeremy, I've really appreciated having you here on the podcast. It's been a great episode, my friend, We'll see you next time, OK.
Jeremy:Yep, thanks for having me. Great to be here.
Mark:Thanks for joining us for another episode of the agile within. If you haven't already, please join our LinkedIn page to stay in touch. Just search for the agile within and please spread the word with your friends and colleagues Until next time. This has been your host, mark Metze.