134: Klaus Leopold

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Joe Krebs speaks with Klaus Leopold about his Flight Levels Model and Business Agility. Klaus Leopold is a well known author and speaker in the Kanban community.

Transcript:

Joe Krebs 0:00

Agile FM radio for the Agile community. www agile.fm. Thank you for tuning into another podcast here with Agile FM. I am Joe Krebs. And today I have Klaus Leopold with me, Dr. Klaus Leopold. And he is for many in the Kanban Community. Well known figure, he has written books like practical Kanban or Kanban change leadership. He's also you can reach him at leanability.com. He is native Austrian, He's truly a Kanban pioneer. As I said, He is the creator of the flight levels models. We are also going to touch on that a little bit. He has many years of experience as a top management consultant, and is reaching about 1000 workshop participants per year. And so that that says a lot in terms of how he is reaching and approaching leadership. Before we get started. Welcome to the podcast Klaus.

Klaus Leopold 1:15

Thank you, Joe. Thanks for having me.

Joe Krebs 1:18

Of course, I'm excited. Unfortunately, you're on episode 134 of agile FM if I'm not mistaken. And it's Wait, it's been way too long that we're connecting, you should have been in a much, much earlier episode we should have touched base many years ago. We want to talk a little bit about your latest book that is available. We're also going to talk a little bit about a book that is in the making and soon to be available. But that latest book is rethinking agile, an interesting book. It is an and relatively easy read. There's a lot of deep content, though, when I when I approached the material. And for me as somebody who likes visuals, also very, very impactful on your learning. One of the things maybe we'll get one thing squared away will often talk about agile transitions, Agile transformations. What's your take on on these words? Some people have a hard time with transformation, some like transitions. I myself, I call it transformations. I'm not coming up with a better word right now, but because you do need in that book, you do make several references.

Klaus Leopold 2:29

Yeah, well, actually, I don't know, to be honest. So I mean, I use the word transition. And lately I use more transformation. So I think from a linguistic point of view, there is a difference. Yeah, I don't know. I tried to somehow maybe use it interchangeably. But that's probably not the best thing to do. But yeah.

Joe Krebs 2:56

My view is, yeah, we might use terms here in this podcast, right. And also, like in your book, we were talking about the conversion converting an organization changing and etc. What's interesting is, and your book gets it right, starts right off with that you're saying, you know, taking teams agile, like development teams, that is not business agility?

Klaus Leopold 3:18

Yep.

Joe Krebs 3:19

You want to elaborate a little bit with the listeners on why is that and why is that an important point? Right, their business? We have a lot of agile teams, but that's not really business agility?

Klaus Leopold 3:31

Yeah. So I mean, business agility itself is quite a broad term. And I think, if we start on the team level, so what I see really quite often is that we are making teams agile, right? And then in the end, let's assume we have 300 teams. Now we have 300, Scrum teams. And finally, our organization is agile. Unfortunately, it's not like this. I mean, of course, you can build cross functional teams, and all these kinds of things. And don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of cross functional teams. But this alone does not solve your problem, because most of the time, one team alone cannot deliver customer value. So that's why we need to zoom out a little bit from the team level. And we need to make sure that the right team is working on the right stuff at the right time. This alone does not make your business agile in terms of business agility, but that's the first step into this direction, right? Because, yeah, if I mean, we've seen this so often, when we start to visualize the work across the teams, and you have these agile teams, what you do is the teams they have a backlog, right? And what you see is that yes, work now it's not cumulating in their doing part it's accumulating in the backlog. But the thing is, if you need multiple teams that are connected, you have many full backlogs in the end, so it's not much better from a delivery perspective from a getting things done per se If we are used to work, the work in the backlog somewhere into a huge in a huge value chain, or in the doing part of the team, I mean for the team, it makes a difference. But for the end customer, there's usually no difference. That's the point.

Joe Krebs 5:14

And that's also a problem, right? We often see in organizations that teams feel like, and they should feel like they have an accomplishment if they have completed an item. Right. But on the other side, it might not be customer. Something that...

Klaus Leopold 5:28

exactly that's what I mean with the with the with the backlog. So this is done from my team, but it lands in the backlog of another team and in this backlog is sitting for another I don't know, whenever they decide that they work on it, right. And that's the point that that's what we're obviously okay make sure that the right team is working on the right stuff at the right time. So we need to zoom out from the team level, see the entire your value creation that's actually going on, and also target these backlogs between the teams, we also need to empty these backlogs between the teams kind of

Joe Krebs 6:00

interesting, right. And then beside the teams also. And I think that is one one sentence, I actually actually wrote down from this book, this is really deep, because I feel along the same line. If the desired state is agility, the way there should be should already be agile, right? And that's really the that's that's the idea. Like, we often go in and, and transform and we take a team, but then there's even if we have an integration with a team, the rest of the organization is not a part of the game. Right? Yes. Also you experience in your work?

Klaus Leopold 6:34

Totally. Yeah. And yeah. So it starts with the change process, actually. So I've seen it so often that the desired state is agility. And now let's come up with a waterfall plan to become agile. I mean, there is some humor in it, for sure. But this doesn't make a lot of sense, right. So how we target this usually is that we also think in iterations when we are doing the change process, right? So we contract iterations, each iteration has an outcome that we want to achieve. And then after each iteration, we do a kind of retrospective so that we achieve what we wanted to achieve. What does this mean for the next iteration? And then we contract the next iteration. And well, we call it a change flow. So we try to establish flow in the change process iterations. That's the idea. And when I say contracting, it's not like the legal contracting. It's more like a clarification what we want to achieve, right? Yeah

Joe Krebs 7:34

yeah, it's interesting, because there was another one I took down. And these are, I think this is the the last one I actually took down word by word. business agility is created for lean processes that rapidly implement ideas, thus allowing teams to be able to deliver something quickly right. So there is this Lean process. And we do need something that is agile, lean in the conversion of creating agility within an organization, to really get out the full value of agility within an organization. I do think this is a topic that's really on the rise. This is definitely something that's coming up quite a bit. Now, there are some organizations out there, and I just use this as an example. Obviously, the name stands for many, many things you can put in place for that. The Spotify model, I just want to touch on that. I think in a previous podcast, I did talk about that a little bit. But just for listeners, I have met people from Spotify engaged with them. But what's interesting is the Spotify model as some blog post, actually, from Spotify, people actually came out, they actually say that the model does not really exist within the organization. It's not a it's not a topic of conversation, right? Exactly. Something the rest of the world is talking about. And now we're making copies of that model. Now, not to go into the specifics of Spotify itself, right on the model. But there is this tendency there of organizations trying to look at something like this and say, like, I want to do this

Klaus Leopold 9:04

Now. That's and I think, as you said, it's not just like the Spotify model, I think it's it's almost, I mean, all numbness are big words, but in many frameworks, they give you this promise, like okay, if you just follow these rules, then everything will be fine. Kind of an like from a perspective of the one who is buying something. So we are buying agility, right? So it's really like there is a market of agile coaches and everything and we buy agility. This somehow makes sense. I mean, it's not working, but it sounds like okay, it makes sense. So I ordered this, and I think it's this mechanistic view of an organization. Our organization is a machine, something is broken here. So I call in a mechanic and they are fixing it to kind of and they have the recipe they do it and then everything He's running smoothly again. But that's unfortunately not reality.

Joe Krebs 10:03

Right. And that brings us back to the change management process, right? You just mentioned, right, it's like something that can address these specific needs or and so not to think holistically as an entire organization. Go punctual into like, certain areas of your, of your organization. So maybe because you talked about Scrum, a little bit, but your capacity on Kanban, right, maybe one group might in more benefit from Kanban. And other teams and more can benefit from Scrum. And like, just like the drop down kind of approach might not be might not be a suitable approach. That is, that is awesome. Can I Can I just ask you, because I have no idea. Are you a pilot?

Klaus Leopold 10:41

No, not really.

Joe Krebs 10:43

Not a pilot. Okay. But you, you are the creator of the flight levels model. And I'm just curious if you were like flying through the clouds and landed and kicked off and started

Klaus Leopold 10:55

I am flying drones actually.

Joe Krebs 11:00

Different, we have different you have reached different flight levels.

Klaus Leopold 11:02

That is true. And I spend quite some time in planes in my former life in my pre COVID life. So yeah, there is some kind of affiliation with this.

Joe Krebs 11:14

You're the creator of the flight levels model. As far as I can tell. There is a book in the making to be released somewhere in the June summer timeframe. First in German and in English,

Klaus Leopold 11:28

yes. Because German is much easier for me than English.

Joe Krebs 11:31

Okay, here we go. And tell me a little bit and I'm pretty sure there's some listeners out there was like, alright, flight levels have heard of. But I'm also sure that there are some people out there listening to this and say, What are flight levels? What are flight levels? And how did you can have with the term what triggered that?

Klaus Leopold 11:50

Yeah, what triggered that is actually nice story. So it was really like back in, I don't know, 2010, 2011, something like this. So one two years ago. And I was, as he previously said, I was, so my roots are somehow in the in the company world. And there was this company, and we were talking about 340 pitch teams or something like this. And they were like, Okay, make these teams agile, we want to become an agile company. And I'm like, sounds great. Maybe I can, I can buy my Porsche finally. Right? Because that's really that's a great job. But then I was like, Well, maybe it's good for me, because I can really sell quite a lot of billable hours. But for the company, it doesn't make any sense. And I was struggling to get this message across. Like what I said before, it's not about making the single parts agile, it's the single teams agile, more about make sure that the right team is working on the right stuff at the right time. And this is where I was like, Okay, we need to fly a little bit higher. So the team is like the flight level One, we are close to the ground, right? We see how people are working, what are the technical problems and so on. But when it comes to deliver value to the market, we need to fly a little bit higher. This means we need to see exactly what we've said before about the backlogs. Where are the backlogs filling up, what is the sequence of the teams, how they have to collaborate, and so on and so on. So we need to bring the teams together and fly higher means zoom out a little bit. This means this is flight level two. And this is actually how the flight levels came up. So in the beginning, there was just like flight one and flight level two. That's it. And then later, there was also the flight level three, which is like, okay, it's great that we know how to fly now. Like how to work, but Are we flying in the right direction? So this is flight level three, where we're talking about strategy? And these are the three flight levels flight level one is the operational work of the teams, flight level two is the coordination of the work between the teams make sure that the right team is working on the right stuff at the right time. And flight level three is strategy are actually flying into the right direction.

Joe Krebs 14:03

And three would also be as far as I can tell portfolio, right?

Klaus Leopold 14:07

Yes and no. So it would be the strategic portfolio management, that would be flight level three, and operational portfolio management would be flight level two. So I'm not sure if this if these terms are widely established, but this is how we are using them in the flight levels community. One thing is like the operational management of multiple value streams have multiple flows. So for instance, a good flight level two system could be a product or a service that's directly on the market. And sometimes it's the case that there are dependencies between products, I think you notice right you change something in this product, then you need to change something in another product and they need another product. So we can build another flight level two system to coordinate these dependencies. And this will be the operational portfolio. And on flight level three, we can align actually our portfolio to the strategy. So this is why we try to distinguish it. So because in big organizations, we often don't see this mapping to the strategy, we just see an operational portfolio. Here are our 500 projects, make portfolio management with it, whatever this means, right. And this is a purely operational point of view. And we would like to link it to the strategy, actually, because then our portfolio makes more sense. And this is why we try to distinguish these two terms.

Joe Krebs 15:31

But by listening to you, I have to say that is absolutely clear also based on other conversations, but just it becomes clear that our concerns in the Agile space are shifting to other conversations, right? So not so much about the what you just said, the operational level, we might might be good at this point of introducing agility into a team always room for improvement. Right. But it we're elevating business agility strategy, portfolio management, these are super hot topics. Now, while you were talking, I was just thinking about one of the airlines I very often fly with. It's very interesting, because they have like on I think it's like a certain channel on audio, they have the cockpit conversations with ground.

Klaus Leopold 16:18

Oh, really?

Joe Krebs 16:19

Listen to what the pilot is getting. That's pretty cool. And what's interesting is there is a lot of conversation on takeoff and landing. There's a little bit once they are cutting through coordination, and once they reached altitude, there is hardly any conversation it is having handshakes in and out. So I felt like it's also the communication level right? on level one, there's much more going on in terms of communication frequency. Now, I'm not saying accordance way, but frequency check in check out and some more coordination, necessarily, then when you reach other flight levels, I just thought I would throw that out.

Klaus Leopold 16:53

Yeah, I would think so. Although I think on flight level three, especially on flight level three. So it doesn't make sense to have a daily stand up meeting or something like this on flight level three. But nevertheless, I see that sometimes the other extreme is there that they're having. I mean, they call it a stand up meeting, but it's something we meet four times a year. So that's not a stand up meeting. So even our flight level three, or especially in flight level three, actually, I would like to see a weekly check in. Because flight level three, it's about the future. And when there's one thing which is really uncertain, then it's the future. So it makes sense that we check in on a regular basis. I'm also a fan of flight level three to break down the outcomes to let's say, your quarterly granularity. So we want in the next quarter, we want to achieve these four things or something like this. And then it just makes sense to check in on a weekly basis. Because I always focus on the outcomes, right? And after one week, if I don't see any movement in terms of progress or confidence, like then, okay, I'm relaxed. After two weeks. Yeah, I'm still relaxed, maybe. But if I don't see any movement in progress after four weeks, or after eight weeks, I mean, someone could ask, can we help? What's? What's going on here? Right. So the thing is, I don't want to wait a quarter to see Oh, we didn't meet our goals, our outcomes. I want to react before I actually see this. And that's the whole point of agility. It's not waiting half a year and then see Oh, yeah. Didn't make it react before. It is. Too late.

Joe Krebs 18:35

It's cool. Yeah. So that's what I noticed Ed rail interaction between them right on level three, as you said, right, every time they entered a new airspace, they said hello, and goodbye, and so on. So this is things like, just as you said, it's really cool. Now with your background in Kanban talking about flight levels, and a lot of people think Kanban and I know it's not necessarily the only thing in Kanban is but people think WIP limits . How is WIP limits in general, which is obviously a positive thing right. To limit with how does impact your your flight levels, or does it not have any impact? Positively?

Klaus Leopold 19:21

Of course, yeah. I mean, limiting work in process is, is a cool thing, right? So what we want to achieve is we want to value finishing work over starting work because starting work costs money finishing work brings money. So yeah, let's focus on earning money and not spending money. That's like the main idea behind it. And but in the flight levels community, we would talk about creating focus so we WIP limits like working process limits is one way of creating focus. There are multiple ways how you can create focus. And like the main ideas always the same, but like different ways work differently on different flight levels. For instance, WIP limits work great on a flight level One on the flight level two, on flight level three static WIP limits doesn't make a lot of sense, because there is something like, Yeah, time boxing is much better. So that's another way how to create focus, right? So we have started policy. So there are different ways of how to create focus. And yes, from the Kanban world, work in progress limits make a lot of sense. And that's also flight levels is not Kanban. If you're doing like, flight levels on the flight level one, you will probably do sprints or, like WIP limits on a flight level two, it's not always so clear, but whip limits is a good shot. But in flight level three, it's different.

Joe Krebs 20:55

Okay. Interesting, right. So, so these, these concepts are not just going to be stuck in like it's like on a team level. Right. And I think that's also important that the agility is shining through and different in this particular case and your ideas here on flight levels, which is, I see quite a bit on LinkedIn. Now when people are saying like flight levels and learn about that. So I'm, I'm super thrilled to see that Agile is elevating right in the community. You also said like business agility is not a team sport. It's a company sport. Right. So, so interesting. I'm always walking by that from a from a adoptions perspective, right, one of the things you're sharing is that business agility, transforming to business agility, transforming to flight levels, I would assume in the same way starts at the top.

Klaus Leopold 21:51

That's not a bad place to start. Yeah.

Joe Krebs 21:56

Why is that? The reason I have to ask you this is because the grassroots movement of agility in the early days, when I was, you know, like, way when the manifesto was was released at that time, it was very often you're on the opposite side, like with teams and everything using like, nowadays stuck with all the way that we have learned, I would assume, right? It's actually a good place to start on the top.

Klaus Leopold 22:21

Yeah. And I think the reason is, more or less the summary of what we've talked so far. Because when it comes to like creating focus, I think creating focus is one, not the only but one key element that makes an organization agile, like shifting the thinking from starting work to finishing work. So from like, yeah, achieving outcomes, compared to starting starting starting, right. And the thing is, if you if you only create focus on the team level, exactly what we have talked before is the thing that happens, they probably create focus in their doing part, but the backlog stay are unlimited, and they are full. So this means you don't create focus in your organization, you still have full backlogs, I mean, you have empty team columns on the board, but all the backlogs are full. And usually the team, yeah, they can decide about doing part in an agile organization, but not so much about the backlog. So work is coming into the backlog. So we need to like, yeah, slow down this this backlog growth. And this is something that you can like, so somewhere in flight or two or unflappable, three. And in most organizations, there are different kinds of responsibilities. I mean, on a flight level two, you probably reach, I don't know, 200 people, 300 people, something like this. So there are different responsibilities. And it makes sense that they understand the power how we're actually what they can do in order to improve everything that's going on in your organization. And that's why I want to start here.

Joe Krebs 24:05

Yeah, it's also interesting why it is fascinating, right? Because we are seeing more topics popping up at conferences just around the world, right? there are conferences that focus really on cultural, agility culture, and it's always leadership that's coming in and struggles and these are the challenges and, and you would actually say, if we start on the top, I'm gonna tell you the top level way better than seeing the top in, let's say in an organization, like however you want to see that from an org charts perspective, right. But its leadership would have be very, very impactful. That was very different in the beginning.

Klaus Leopold 24:42

And I think the important thing is when I say we start on top 10 I don't mean in terms of sponsorship, because that's what we've seen quite often. So there are some sponsors on top and they're like, yes, we are. You are becoming agile. This has nothing to do with us, right? So, become agile, you have our permission, kind of Yeah, but that's not what I want to see when we are talking about. Yeah, starting on top, I think senior management is, it's an it's an it's an part of the game. So they are they are not the one who are like, giving the money. The other one who have the levers in the hand who are really like, can take the right decisions that, yeah, agility, actually, is this done

Joe Krebs 25:30

adapting to a new leadership style as well? Right having? Right, it's, it's not about writing the check, it's about exactly being part of it. And in also understanding and learning how to, you know, create that organization that we want to call agile at the end, because otherwise, you're absolutely right, which is going to have islands of agility within an organization. And you know, and that might be beneficial for an organization, but just not to the full extent.

Klaus Leopold 26:00

There's another thing, another observation that I have. So when when when, like the to check leaders, right, who just write the checks, when they write the checks, it's often that they expect, okay, now we have invested this amount of money, now we can start even more projects. But what you're doing in a case like this, you are again, just filling up the backlogs. And it's the opposite most of the time, when when when you only think like Team agility. Because the behavior is like the expectation is we get more things done. So we can start more things. And this exactly goes into the wrong direction. So in these situations, usually the performance goes down, although you invest all this money. So that's really the tricky part.

Joe Krebs 26:51

that is awesome. I'm just at the end of our conversation, which I really, really enjoyed, I have to say, is this great connecting with you. You are releasing this book, which has talked a little bit about or the announcement that there will be something coming out this summer about flight levels. Is there anything like a sneak preview anything you can share what this book will be about?

Klaus Leopold 27:14

So I'm actually not writing it alone. I'm writing it with my partner in crime Siegfried Kaltenecker and I also wrote the first Kanban book actually with him together Kanban change leadership. And yeah, so it is about flight levels, actually. So what we are doing there, we are basically presenting the latest set of misunderstanding when it comes to the body of knowledge of flight levels. So we talk about flight, what is flight level One, flight over to flight level three, how you build flight level, flight level two boards, how you build flight level three systems, how you do like change leadership, that's actually cities, cities part. Yeah, how you bring managers on board, how you bring the people on board, so that the change actually sticks. We also talk about the actual change process, and all these kinds of things that we actually teach in flight levels Academy. So it's kind of the reference book of the stuff of the workshops that we teach in flight levels Academy.

Joe Krebs 28:17

Wonderful, that's awesome. And for everybody who can speak or read in German, they will have the opportunity to enjoy that book a little bit earlier than the English speaking audience will which be slightly delayed.

Klaus Leopold 28:31

So I think so I guess the publishing date is June 17th for the German one and we will kind of like incrementally publish the English book chapter by chapter and hopefully the first chapter is also done already by June. Let's see.

Joe Krebs 28:47

Sounds like an agile approach.

Klaus Leopold 28:49

Now, how crazy is that?

Joe Krebs 28:52

Thank you, Klaus for spending a little time with me, the listeners, agile FM and I'm looking forward to the release of the book and the development of flight levels in general. Thank you so much.

Klaus Leopold 29:03

Thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me. It was fun talking to you.

Joe Krebs 29:06

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.