123: Joshua Kerievsky
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Joe Krebs speaks with Joshua Kerievsky about the Joy of Agility and his upcoming book with the same title. Joshua is a veteran agile community member since the late 1990s and an advocate of eXtreme Programming since then. Joshua will deliver a keynote at the Agile 2022 in Nashville.
Transcript:
Joe Krebs 0:10
Agile FM radio for the Agile community, www agile.fm. Thank you for tuning in to another episode of agile FM today I have, you know, I've been waiting for Joshua Kerievsky for a long, long time, because your name came across in conference, manuals and content and everywhere since 1996, or something like that when industrial logic was founded. I have Joshua here on the podcast, he is the CEO and founder of that company. And there are two things we want to talk about that both related to the joy of agility today, because that is the title of his brand new book, that is to be released very soon, as well as his keynote for the Agile 2022 conference in Nashville. Before we go all into this, welcome to the podcast, Joshua.
Joshua Kerievsky 1:07
Joe, thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here, obviously. And we just appreciate the opportunity to chat with you.
Joe Krebs 1:15
That is fantastic, Joshua. Well, as I said, you have been in the Agile community for a long, long time you even have released the book. We're not gonna talk about this book. It's an award winning book, it's refactoring to patterns that was released in 2004. Now, the next book is on the shelf joy of agility that took 18 years as an 18 year break was the release and the writing of the first book such a pain that it took 18 years.
Joshua Kerievsky 1:43
Oh, gosh, well, writing books is hard, hard work. I mean, you know, it's if you want to write a book that has any kind of enduring value, then yeah, you have to really dig deep. But yeah, I did. I mean, a lot of elearning in between those periods. elearning is very challenging in its own right, and multimedia elearning content that really helps people learn skills and spend a lot of time doing that in between. But yeah, agile is also a complicated topic. So I really was learning and learning and learning and not wanting to encode stuff in a book before I felt like I had something that I thought could be very valuable to share.
Joe Krebs 2:18
Yeah, your LinkedIn profile reads extremely humble, you know, lifelong learner. Since 1996, you have been in the Agile community, you will call yourself a global citizen. But you know, if I read this profile, correct, you have definitely a little bit of an affiliation with Italy and everything related to Italy. So you're global citizen, but you are biased, right?
Joshua Kerievsky 2:45
Well, yeah, I mean, I grew up in New York City, which I you know, is a true melting pot. So I'm so so thankful that I that happened because you know, in New York City, you have every race and gender and just every kind of imaginable person under the sun and so you just developed an incredible appreciation for different kinds of people and different kinds of food. And then luckily in my in my business travels I've gotten to you know, travel to many parts of the globe and I really just love that I love appreciating how things are different elsewhere and it's it's a it's a pleasure to meet people I you know, a lot of times I get mistaken for the natives when I go to a particular countries like France they start speaking to me in French I don't know why or you know, in Brazil they think they can speak to me in Portuguese it doesn't happen in Japan but I'm working on that.
Joe Krebs 3:50
That is awesome. What does it look like? Is it the food is it the fashion and lifestyle or?
Joshua Kerievsky 3:56
I don't know I guess I don't look to America or something.
Joe Krebs 4:01
You also you also describe yourself as a tennis player as far as I you know what I what I think I can tell is like you're pretty good in in the sport of tennis. Do you see any connection between tennis and agility?
Joshua Kerievsky 4:14
Well, to be quite honest, I mean if we were not recording this podcast I'd my eyes would be glued to Wimbledon right now because Emma Raducanu is an up and coming British star and she's she's she was down to set so she's an amazing athletes but yeah, I love to watch tennis I love I love the tennis is a very mental, emotional and physical game. It really and it's a deeply mental game at a certain point with the pros. They know that a lot of times they all have the same skill level, but it's the mental game that becomes so important and some of the top players even have, you know, therapists or, you know, these psychologists that travel with them. You and help help them because you know, how you think out there on the court makes a huge difference to your performance. I love to watch, watch tennis and play tennis. It's a it's a lifelong love of mine. And I see a lot of analogies between sports and business.
Joe Krebs 5:21
Absolutely. I mean, you're definitely right mentally, right, I most likely did not play on a level as you do. But I used to play some tennis and it's not easy to serve on a match point against you. Right, and, and how to deal with a situation like that. So definitely, there's a there's definitely a mental challenge if especially if it's closed game.
Joshua Kerievsky 5:42
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, being able to relax, I've discovered is so utterly important, if you can, if you can just not get tense. And so again, that comes back to emotions comes back to the mental game. So I'm not that good. I injured myself too much lately, as I'm getting older, and I'm trying to learn how to play injury free.
Joe Krebs 6:03
Yeah. And we need you injury free in Nashville, because you're going to do the the keynotes, we need you on stage for that. So move all the tennis past that also it's the book is called The Joy of agility, not the joy of tennis. So let's talk a little bit about that. Right? You have a website out, it's called The Joy of agility.com. It's obviously linked to the, to the book, which is currently still on pre-order. So you people can pre-order it, you have anything, just before we go a little bit into depth of what's going on in the book is that when it's going to be published, and for sale, it will
Joshua Kerievsky 6:39
be you know, in print, it will be in print February 7 2023. So you can pre-order it now. And yeah, I'm, you know, I'm really excited about this book, I'm, it took a lot of work, it took it in went in directions that I didn't expect as I wrote it. So it definitely follow a very agile approach to writing. And that means that there's a lot of emergence and evolutionary design, like, you know, I don't pre plan every chapter or every, the structure of the book was not pre planned. Okay, yeah, kind of emerged. And what emerged kind of surprised me, it took me took me completely by surprise. But what eventually emerged, and yeah, we can get into that, but I'm super excited about this book. It's very, very different from most agile books.
Joe Krebs 7:33
Okay. All right. So let's, let's organize this a little bit. I'm curious to hear what kind of detours you had, I think every author out there their property dealt with some corrections in the writing process. But I expect you in particular, to deal with those kinds of changes in a very interesting way, you know, just based on your background, in the Agile community. So what came out as a as a finding where you felt like the book took a turn?
Joshua Kerievsky 8:00
Well, I mean, what I what I started to do, before I ever conceived, the book was simply to to note that first of all, I love stories, I find that stories are the stickiest things around in terms of sticking to your brain, a good story can stick really well, much better. So then like a hypothesis, or some kind of Maxim, or whatever a story or story can be sticky. So I love stories. I've been telling stories for years. And I started a small collection of stories to explain to people what does agility really look like? So I started writing these stories. And whenever I write anything, you know, I put it in front of people as soon as possible. early draft, hey, what do you think? Yeah, this makes sense to you. Anything you'd suggest to improve so I do continuous integration with other humans? Continuous refinement of the language. And so my, my writings go through tremendous amount of refinement over time. But anyway, I started collecting some stories about what is real agility look like? And I'm, you know, part of me is what's driving me is that Agile is not sprinting. Agile is not doing stand up meetings, we've come to some people have come to think that Agile is just these rituals, you know, for the roles. So if you put the roles and the rituals together, you're agile, well, we're not really I mean, there's, there's people that are agile, who never even use the word agile. We don't sprint and do stand up meetings, right? A lawyer could be agile, a surgeon you could be agile, a dancer could be agile. A team of accountants could actually be really agile when it comes to some challenge. Agility is existed for centuries, and I wanted to have highlight what does that look like? I also wanted to deal with a, you know, ongoing question that people have for me, which is, I created these four modern Agile principles. And people say, great, that's awesome. But what did we do? What do we do? You're not telling us what to do. You're just given us principles. So the book also is trying to say, Okay, if you want to know what to do, here's some things that people do when they're really, really agile. And so it's looking at all kinds of aspects of what people do when they're agile. However, it's not specific to any given profession, or any given human endeavor. I covered live stories about biking, I have stories about entrepreneurship. I have stories about you know, psychological safety, or one fellow who created a bunch of balloons, water balloons that could be created in seconds. I mean, there's all kinds of stories that ultimately point back to different aspects of agility.
Joe Krebs 11:04
So how do these six mantras that you outline in in your book, so the whole book is organized around 6 mantras? How do they connect to what you just said?
Joshua Kerievsky 11:15
Alright, so first of all, I didn't know I'd be writing about mantras, identity at all that was, that was where the emergence came in. So what happened was, I started writing stories of agility. My favorite stories, and that grew, and grew, that pile of stories grew. And I started to realize, oh, you know, this could be a book. So at some point, I had, I don't know, 60 stories, 70 stories, maybe, maybe more, and I showed them to a book agent. And he said, Well, this is great. But that's not organized. I mean, it's, it's got to be organized, which I knew I just hadn't done that yet. So I was like, alright, alright, alright, it's time to start organizing them. How am I gonna do this? And I'd have to read the read the stories very closely again, and think well, what, what is this really trying to say? And of all the stories I wrote, some of them are personal stories. Some of them are stories of others that I admire. But there's a coach from UCLA. He's he's passed away, but his name was the coach John Wooden. And he's considered one of the greatest coaches of all time. And he's written books, many books have been written about him. There was some stuff that I encountered in writing my book that I did, I did a lot of research on what and I'm continuing to research wouldn't I'm actually reading a book, written by Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the famous, I think seven foot two basketball player from Harlem, not too far from where I grew up. And he wrote a book about it's called, you know, Coach John Wooden and me. And it's an incredible detailed account of their relationship and 50 years. What I learned there was that Coach Wooden use mantras to help his team to help his players become champions, and that there are certain mantras that are repeated every day, many times per day. So I started to really love this concept of mantras. And one of John wooden's most important mantra was, be quick, but don't hurry. Right. And that was something on top of my mind, so I started looking again at the categories of these stories, where does each story fit and it's a lot of them started to clearly fit into that category. Be quick, but don't hurry. For example, Tom DeMarco, is well known for many, many boxes, an industry icon and Guru. And one of his books that I love the most is called slack. It's not about the tool. Slack was written long before that, but it's about having time. Having slack in your schedule, having time spaces in your schedule, to just think to just learn to slow down a little bit maybe to improve to get faster ultimately, and that's that's a story it's like, well, this clearly belongs in that area. Don't be quick, but don't hurry. So you know, basically the stories started to coalesce into different sections, which I started to see as mantras be quick but don't I didn't make these up right. A lot of these are mantras that others said so be quick but don't hurry to John Wooden-ism. Another mantra in the book is drive out fear. And that's, you know, W Edwards Deming, very, very, very famous for saying that that the leaders job is to drive out fear. But a lot of the stories I have were about you How do you drive out fear? How do you do that? What do people do to make that possible? So, over time, you know, the mantras evolved, you know, a few times I'd be like, Okay, that's the mantra. And then a couple months later, I'm like, nope, I gotta revise it. It's slightly different. And there's more to it than that.
Joe Krebs 15:18
So, six members, you have like these grouping categories where you organize your stories in?
Joshua Kerievsky 15:24
That's correct. That is correct. Yeah. So now that all of that exists, I look at that. And I say, wow, you know, that's like the DNA of agility right there. If you can practice these mantras, you will get closer and closer and closer to being genuinely agile. And I'm not talking about following the framework, following a manifesto, following someone's process. This is about actual genuine agility, which is being quick, easy and graceful, and your movement or your bearing, or being quick, resourceful, and adaptable in life and challenges and how you approach things. And those words, I all of those words, I think of it this way. It's like this is like a wave just came over you I just set a definition or two. I don't think I think any given definition has to be explored. You have to get deeper into it. What does that really mean? What does what do we mean by quick? And what do we not mean? We don't mean hurrying. We don't mean rushing, we also don't mean going slow, in a bad way, like, add slow, or you're just like, oh, my gosh, this is taking forever. You know, imagine ordering something at a store where you're like this should have come out by now. You know, you don't go to a drive thru and wait an hour for the for the food to be delivered. Good, slow, there's bad slow. So there's what's the difference between good and bad? Slow? Sometimes you got to slow down.
Joe Krebs 16:50
Yeah, what was interesting, what you said, I think is something along the lines of this is not about you know, sprinting at agility, right, or the daily standup. The word sprinting, in particular, how does that relate for you in terms of quick and hurrying?
Joshua Kerievsky 17:06
Well, I think it's, I mean, you know, it's, you're trying to get to a point where the John would would call it quickness under control. So he would have a freshman from various high schools around America, who are champion freshman champion players in their high schools. Now they get to university now they're at UCLA, a premier school. Well, guess what, they're not going to get to play much. The veterans would play the the the upperclassmen would play the most, even Kareem Abdul Jabbar sat on the bench as a freshman. But the thing that they learned was not to hurry, and most of them hurried. And most of them would just do things in an uncontrolled way. Wouldn't wanted quickness under control. So he first had to slow them down to the point where they can understand the wooden style of playing, then they could practice doing it faster and faster and faster and faster. Right. So both elements, were there slowing good slowing down to learn, and then speeding up speeding up speeding up through tons of practice.
Joe Krebs 18:15
It's very interesting. In the reason I'm asking for that is because I myself, like recently I've been working on on and things like that, where we'll be like, removed the time box and just like work on something, see the results. And, you know, I refer to that as the, as the Kata, but it's very similar to what you're describing it. That's why I'm so intrigued by this, right, because there's a certain speed to work, but you know, it doesn't mean necessarily or cutting corners, or, you know, cutting quality obviously, that is also an important factor. Another mantra that is goes along the line, and I'm intrigued to hear what you say about that one is grow a solution by starting minimal and in walk and evolving. Why is tha a mantra? I think that resonates very well with somebody who has read the Agile Manifesto, for example, I think that just goes into spirit with that. But what did you find in your research on that? And why did it become a mantra?
Joshua Kerievsky 19:17
It's, it's one of those mantras that I struggled the most with in the book because I thought is this is this too specific? Is this not really the level of a mantra, but ultimately kept it in because the stories in that section are so powerful, and so helpful, I think, to to understand, you know, the doing of agility. So, let's just let's just go back to tennis for a second. Let's say you're brand new to tennis, love to. A good instructor is going to teach you the minimum necessary to just do a forehand or backhand a minimum. They're not going to get into all the nuances of bending your legs. This for bad or, you know, they're just going to try to get you initially to do the the basic strokes start minimal and evolve from there, right? So you could look at it from the point of view of like learning a sport, or let's say learning an instrument, right or I, before I moved in my old house, we built a shed in the back. And, you know, basically made a big mistake, it was a costly mistake. What we should have done was great, we're gonna build this shed in the back, not sure where to position it, but we kind of think over there would be a good place to put it. And it would have been great to then say, Great, let's go buy some cardboard. And let's erect the shed the shed with some cardboard and see what it feels like. Because that's a cheap, quick stock minimal solution to feeling out and we didn't do that. Because I make mistakes all the time. Right? I'm I'm not a pillar of agility, I make plenty of mistakes. So yeah, they went ahead and poured concrete, and then started to erect some of the wood siding. And then I realized, wow, this is blocking one of my daughter's views. No, and I knew it would, but I didn't realize how bad it would look. And as soon as we saw that, we're like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, this is not going to work, we have got to move the shed over so that it's in between these two windows. And $3,000 later, they moved the shed and we could have, we could have failed faster. And we could have learned faster with just a quick and dirty cardboard version of this right? To get a feel. And then you know, if you go back to like famous architects like Christopher Alexander, who wrote thw books, the pattern language and a timeless way of building. That's what they would do. They would put cheap, quick stuff up to see what does it feel like? How is this going to work for you and and then evolve, it evolves. So evolutionary design is at the heart and soul of that mantra, start minimal and evolve. It applies to all kinds of things.
Joe Krebs 22:14
Yeah. Once you pour cement, right.
Joshua Kerievsky 22:18
Yeah, that's.
Joe Krebs 22:21
foundational. And then that's, that's where the headaches begin. But, you know, as you said, like some architects might even keep the structure up for a while and just live with it and feel over time. Right. So because your perception might change.
Joshua Kerievsky 22:36
Yeah, exactly. The same same applies to an article. Here's the quick, early, rough draft, or even the idea for the article, what do you think, give me feedback? Yeah. You know, just being able to learn faster, cheaply, right, cheap, quick experiments. That's a key. That's a key to agility. And it's a key in all sorts of endeavors. So, you know, that that ended up in the book,
Joe Krebs 23:02
if I will take you back to Tennis, as an example. So it's also motivational right to start with a forehand , backhand, simple routine of some sort, and then build on top of that, but you have the feeling of success as a player or as a learner, which is obviously very important in that step, rather than getting frustrated with an information overload.
Joshua Kerievsky 23:24
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. I now on the counter side of this, though, I will say that a lot of times, some of the biggest successes we've had with teams in the software field has been where we bring them into, and I think they, these are willing co conspirators people that want to actually try this. We've talked to them, like do you want to do you want to try like real full on agility and software development? No, yes, no, if they want to do it, and they're willing to try it for, let's say, three, four or five months, they say, Great. Here's the experiment. We're going to be doing all of these awesome practices we've learned from continuous flow, to story mapping to continuous integration and continuous deployment or continuous refactoring. All the good stuff, right? We're going to do it all at once. We're not going to be like, Hey, you're so immature, that the only thing you could do right now is learn this one practice. And then maybe six months later, we'll have another practice. That's very slow. That's right. So there's all kinds of approaches to being agile. I don't I don't claim to say there's one way. I don't think any framework would never want you to do that, too. Frameworks are meant to be adaptable. That's right. But ultimately, you're trying to get to your outcome. You're trying to have success, and there's many ways to achieve success. And it's not just like one way. So
Joe Krebs 24:51
it's the art of coaching, right? That's why it's the art of coaching.
Joshua Kerievsky 24:56
The art of coaching. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You know, I got some inspiration. from Charles Duhigg, he's a Pulitzer Prize winning author. And he wrote The Power of Habit, he wrote, I think it's smarter, better faster. And I think it was in smarter, better, faster, he talks about the Japanese railway system, the bullet trains. And that was a situation where, you know, they, they didn't take their trains and go from like, let's say 50 miles per hour to 60 miles per hour, or 60 miles per hour. And they said, Listen, we want the trains to go 120 miles per hour. And this is the 1950s we're talking about, which seemed crazy, but they said, You have carte blanche, you can do whatever you want to make this happen. Right. So they put this big, hairy, audacious goal into the lab. So the railroad engineers and said, you know, do what you want, but please make this happen. Now, that's, to me that that was defined in the new new product development game in the Harvard Business Review back in the 80s. The article by the two Japanese gentleman, I forget their names at the moment. Because they, they would say, Give a big, audacious goal to the team. And then let them let them manage that give them the freedom to manage that.
Joe Krebs 26:18
And there was all examples like this in the worldwide going to the moon, you know, like the railroad, people can come together and, and group and build a team and, and achieve something outstanding. If there is a definition of that goal. That is really cool. Joshua, I also want to connect a little bit your book in the title of your book and the joy of agility.com. With your talk in Nashville, right? So we kind of do a keynote in Nashville. So first and foremost, I can't even believe I'm saying this after two years of COVID. We're back in person, there is a conference in Nashville.
Joshua Kerievsky 27:01
I'm excited. I'm also a little apprehensive because I don't want to catch COVID. But, you know, I think I'm there to I'm really there to deliver this important message to the community. I feel like again, I mean, I worked so hard on this book, I can't begin to tell you how hard I worked on it. And I feel like this is a message that the the Agile community desperately needs. There are tons of people that have abandoned agile, because they view it now as this horrible project management, rigid thing that basically hurts them more than helps them. There's a lot of, there's a lot of there's a lack of joy, let's just say in a great deal of agile implementations. And I could easily have focused on that, you know, I mean, I could have easily spent the day in a row wrote a book about how bad things are. But that, to me wasn't very helpful. I wanted to focus on what excites me so much about agility. What brings me joy, from agility. And that, that's, that's the focus, of the book.
Joe Krebs 28:06
Great, and we're going to be there in Nashville, I think there's going to be a good gathering. For me, personally, I'll be there as well. It's like the starting point of agile conferences, again, being in person. I know, there have been other conferences in person. But just personally, for me, this is like the starting point again, and I hope and I gonna fall deep in fall, again, with more cases and cancellations of conferences. So I hope there is this is the beginning of something good. Again, so we can, especially in the Agile community can regroup again, see each other meet, collaborate and do all the great stuff. So maybe that's the starting point.
Joshua Kerievsky 28:45
That'd be wonderful. It's going to be wonderful. And I'm really looking forward to it. I think, you know, the, the chance to get together with like minded folks is just there's nothing like it. The the the Zoom has been great, and the other video platforms, but there's just nothing like getting together with like minded people and having productive conversations and, you know, so forth. So I'm super excited. I've been working extremely hard on the keynote as well. We're doing a lot of work on sort of a way of assessing agility, then we'll be having some fun with that during the keynote. So I'm excited about that. And yeah, it's for me, it's gonna be the second time I've given a keynote. So for anyone who has not given a keynote at the Agile conference, you might be hating me right now. Why is he getting a second shot at this thing? Well, I put myself forward and said, I've got something really important to say and I have this new book and I really feel like this is a key the key thing for for our community to hear. And, you know, of course I'd love to sell some books, but you know, I really love agility so much that it's not about Money for me. It's never been about money I could have been certifying people. For years we don't, we haven't certified a single soul. We are big into training, but not into certifications that don't have any merit. So, to me, it's not about money. It's about the joy of agility, sharing that joy. And that's free. There's no payments involved in that learning, you know, to to succeed over your obstacles and challenges by being more agile. That is a wonderful thing.
Joe Krebs 30:32
Right. And that is the subtitle of your book, how to solve problems and succeed sooner. And that goes right along. What you just say. Now, just at the end, Josh, what is this? This has been great, a great conversation. Thank you. I know you pointed out that this was hard work to put this book together. I hope it was not too hard and too painful so that the next book will wait for another 18 years. So anyway, I do want to thank you for spending your time and sharing your thoughts around and as some people got already two, three stories out from you. There's plenty of stories in your book. Some folks will probably get some other stories in the keynote in Nashville. I just want to say thank you and point everybody one more time to joy of agility.com. That's the website for the book, and actually much, much more.
Joshua Kerievsky 31:26
Thank you so much, Joe. Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. And I look forward to seeing you in Nashville.
Joe Krebs 31:33
Great. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Agile FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host show Gramps. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www agile.fm. Talk to you soon.
