117: Mark Kilby
Listen to full episode:
Joe Krebs speaks with Mark Kilby about the experiences of distribution during the pandemic and what we have learned and can use for the future. Mark is the co-author of the book “From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams: Collaborate to Deliver” released in 2018. Mark also shares some insights on his next book with the working title “Exploring the Open Space Mindset” which will include stories and experiences from practitioners like him about the Open Space Technology.
Transcript:
Joe Krebs 0:10
Agile FM , radio for the Agile community, www.agile.fm. Welcome to another episode of Agile FM. Today I have Mark Kilby back to Agile FM. Because Mark was already here on the podcast in 2017. We spoke about remote teams at that point. And we're doing something very, very similar today, or at least we're going to kick it off this way. Mark, if you are not familiar with his work, is the author of from chaos to successful distributed agile teams, which was co-authored together with Johanna Rothman. Welcome.
Mark Kilby 0:55
Thank you so much. I can't believe it's been four years. Yeah, yeah. The time has flown. Yeah, you know, we did our little pre conversation, and I didn't even make that connection. It's like, wow, it has been that long.
Joe Krebs 1:11
Yeah. And the book has been out that long.
Mark Kilby 1:16
The book well, so the, the ebook version came out in fall of 2018. The print version came out in early 2019. And, yeah, it's been doing well. And, of course, we saw a spike in March and April of 2020. Why? Yeah. So yeah, it's, it's, it certainly has been an interesting year for remote work. I'll summarize it that way.
Joe Krebs 1:52
Right? Well, the book is filled with practical tips of how to work in a distributed way. So there's the word distributed is in the title, some teams just refer to it as virtual, some say remote. You chose distributed, they're not really interchangeable, right. So there's, there's a little bit something behind it. Some people are very, very specific and say it should be remote, because it's still in person, because you look at each other on video.
Mark Kilby 2:21
So to be honest, and in Johanna and I have had this conversation, we just, we finally had to settle on something for the title. I don't like any of those terms. Because it sets up a bias. So if you say remote, within who's local, if you sent a virtual, well are some people real or not real. And, and the way we treated remote work or distributed work before 2020, that's that those biases were very much present. There was very much in us versus them. Then in 2020, us and then became all of us. And the big difference was very few people had a choice. Were those before 2020. Many of us chose to work remotely, we chose how to work remotely, we had a lot of time to develop that. Were, you know, this time last year, everyone was just trying to figure out, you know, do I need to work remote for a month, two months? No one, no one I don't think except for a few of us thought it was going to be, you know, over a year. And we're still in it as as the time of this recording, although there's light at the end of the tunnel.
Joe Krebs 3:46
It's definitely light at the end of the tunnel. But I think there is there's a lot of learning that came out of these last 12 months, right? So we're recording this in March 2021. We have seen 12 months of distributed work. Let's just settle on this term here for for this podcast, right? So we have 12 months of distributed work. What is it? We we learned from this? I mean, there was a general misunderstanding or misconception about remote work was like remote teams don't deliver, right. So they're in their home offices and who knows what's going on in their home offices? Are they are they actually working like whatever its underlying kind of mistrust and
Unknown Speaker 4:30
well, remote teams don't deliver, remote teams aren't innovative, remote teams can't respond well to change. So I heard many different myths around remote teams. And, and the funny thing is, it's really more around the organizational culture. So if the organizational culture supportive people kind of slipping through the cracks and not really producing it would matter whether you've remote or not. With remote work, because people are doing it by choice, they're coming in with a tension of, I want to do my best work possible. That's how we've recruited people. So when when I was working at as a full time internal coach, for the prior company I was at, we actually screened for that. So if somebody if somebody was wanting to work remote, just because oh, I can work at home. And again, this is pre pandemic, they were out if, if we heard, I want to work remote, because I want to work with a top level team, I want to do my best work, I want to be able to do my best work when I work at my best. That's what we listen for. And that's what we recruited for. When we when we heard that that's who we brought in, all those remote first companies are, that's who they're recruiting. That's who they been recruiting for years now. And these are not just small companies, if you look at companies like automatic, which produces WordPress and many other products, if you look at GitLab, and others, these are companies that are well over 1000 people. I mean, these are these are large companies that work completely distributed. No offices. So
Mark Kilby 5:19
you see, all right, no, if you're just all or remote, it's actually very interesting, right? Because you just said like one of the myths is change, right, and being adaptable to change as a distributed team. And I mean, this change we just faced 12 months ago. I mean, it couldn't be a bigger change than that. I mean, it's like it proves that these that we are able to adapt to the situation, right?
Unknown Speaker 7:01
Yes, yes. And those, those who were able to adapt well are starting to go, Hmm, this could work for us. Those that may. And I'm not generalizing this for everyone. But for those who are a little more resistant to change, they're probably going to ready to go back, although going back is going to be completely different. It's not going to be what they think, yeah. But the other thing is, on the emphasis around choice, some people need a separation between work and home life. Some in I totally understand that. And now having everything in one place, and when when it's hard for them to have that separation, they need the office, some need, who are more on the extrovert side of the spectrum, they need that constant interaction with others. There was one coach I worked with several years ago. She was brilliant, but she worked at her best when she talked through concepts. That's that's when the brilliance came through. And, and so I recognized early on, some people need that interaction, I did not, I'm more on the introvert side of the spectrum. That means I get more energy from ideas than interactions. So so if I so coming on the podcast, great giving a talk or even better being an open space, like we talked about earlier, I get tremendous energy from that. Because I can I can go through all kinds of ideas and share them and pick up new ones. But some, some deed that ability to vocalize instead of write and do other things. So they they need a different kind of choice. Where some be the choice of I need more control over my schedule. I don't need office hours, I need my optimum hours. So I think a lot of people are going to think about more about their choices as they have the option to go back. What are we going back means?
Joe Krebs 9:19
So that's interesting. So you're getting your energy from in person the same way as you would get them from distributed kind of
Unknown Speaker 9:28
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. The funny thing is, I was first Yeah, first week of March of last year, I was speaking at info Q London. And I was in invited by some other colleagues, Judy Reese, Lisette Sutherland. I had only met Lisette once. Before that in 2015. I had only met Judy once. There were two others there that I had never met, but we had conversed several times ahead good working relationship online for three to five years. And, and I'm able to do that, and I realize not everyone is so I don't think I am not on the remote is the future bandwagon. I don't believe it's for everyone. I think it's going to be an option moving forward. And so, so, so you so your listeners can, can breathe, breathe a deep breath, I'm not here to say remote is the way that's not what I'm here for.
Joe Krebs 10:32
So Right. So it's interesting that you said over the remote guys. So there are folks that have pre pandemic, they had a nine to five job, let's say, right. And, and that there's nothing wrong with a nine to five, right?
Mark Kilby 10:44
No, no.
Joe Krebs 10:45
Right. So but then when they worked in, in a distributed way, the nine to five didn't exist so much anymore, right? So it was a different it
Unknown Speaker 10:56
was, it was, it was more difficult to exist? Yes. Because now, especially during the pandemic, when some of us had kids at home, and kids at home trying to do schooling at home when they weren't set up for that they weren't prepared for that. When you had spouses, or significant others, you know, trying to figure out, okay, who has the maybe the one computer in the house, because maybe not everyone has multiple machines, or they maybe didn't have enough bandwidth. So they're dealing with all these challenges of timing, and resources, because they've been forced to work at home. And so the nine to five became near impossible for many people.
Joe Krebs 11:42
Yeah, so and they might not go back to a nine to five to a point, right. So when they come back to find a different environment that's like, why am I here? And those office hours, so to speak, right, I could be doing something very much personal right now. And I'm going to add the hours at the end of the day when, you know, when a document is signed, and comes back from overseas, or whatever the business situation is like, it's the flexibility that that is very interesting that has this changed everything a little bit. Obviously, it came in from, you know, just hit us, you know, full speed, last March with the pandemic, but you also said something about productivity, they don't deliver and stuff. These are like the typical myths. Key. Can we roll this out? After 12 months? pandemic? I think we can, right?
Mark Kilby 12:29
Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Well, even even before the pandemic, when you when you have teams that look at, how can we work best together? And how can we work individually at our best? How do I, if I'm a if so I'm a morning person. So I know, for me getting up early five o'clock in the morning is a great time for me to start work, because that's where I'm gonna get my best work done. So there's a block of time where I do some solo work, because I can concentrate and get a lot of writing done helped develop the courses. And then there's time later in day for collaboration, where I can talk to you I can talk to partners, I can I can, the people I need to collaborate with, and I have those hours of overlap with that I set aside time for that. And then I block out other time for family, for exercise for other things that I need to also take care of, it's just not contiguous. Like in a nine to five job,
Joe Krebs 13:33
that's fine. And there's definitely productivity, I think we see the companies are delivering products by software products coming out, I didn't see any kind of delays, or new releases or anything from something I think we just manage. I mean, yes, there is. Obviously this is maybe the psychological impact here with a pandemic where rather than the distributed world the for separating the two things that people feel like hey, this is not really working for me, I'm sitting in my house, but the thing is, you might be on a lockdown or you might be on you're just more isolated right now let's just fast forward a few years and and hopefully we're out of this pandemic by then. And we can free roam again in in offices, but we have a working model like this, we might come back to this and say like, you know what, this is actually pretty good if I'm not isolated if I'm not in a knockdown situation. So this model might be seen more positive right than it is right now.
Mark Kilby 14:28
The pandemic was even difficult for me. So while I enjoy remote work, I also enjoy being in my community. So there's things my wife and I do to volunteer. I'm also active in the local Agile community. And that's been difficult because of things being shut down. Now fortunately, the local meetup has has adjusted well to online but some meetups completely shut down. Some it just like other services completely shut down. It just It just depends on who could support keeping going, who could support the social infrastructure. And and that's that's been the bigger stressor, I think over this last year for many people. So don't take that lack of connection as this is what remote is like all time. It's not.
Joe Krebs 15:23
Yeah, exactly. Right. So the other thing is, like, I see I work with a lot of teams out there, they have back to back zoom meetings, right, one hour, another 30 minutes, zoom, another 30 minutes. By the end of the day, they had massive amount of zoom meetings with other tools, not saying Zoom is the problem here. But what I mean, obviously, there's a lot of online meetings, and they're all like the same, it feels like you're going from one segment after another after another. But you wouldn't really be able to tell from the outside that this the agenda has changed, right? It's just a continuation of the same topic.
Unknown Speaker 15:59
What right because, well, they haven't they haven't stepped back, and really looked at what's the best way for us to communicate, what's the best way for us to stay in sync, what's the best way for us to move forward toward a goal. So those that have worked remote for a long period of time, realize there are times that we really need to be together. In a gathering, I'm not going to say meeting it for now, just say we need to gather, to decide on something we need to gather to debate something, we don't need to be together to give status to each other. We don't need to be together to to just give back and forth information. Some of that remote teams have figured out ways we could do this a synchronously, we can still carry on conversations asynchronously through any kind of medium, there's multiple ways to do that. And for the times that we really need to work with each other. When do we need to pair develop something so not just pair programming, but pair writing Pair? Pair creation, I've done lots of that over the last several years. And that's where you need to be in sync with the other person very closely. When When do example, from my last organization, I mentioned, the Senior VP did an excellent job of mixing asynchronous and synchronous communication. If there's any big change happening, he'd usually put a blog post out Sunday or Monday, there'd be a Wednesday all hands, and then he would have some asked me anything sessions after that. And he'd also have a special chat channel that people could reach out to him. So he had both ways of communicating so that people could say, Okay, I don't understand the implications of this change you just mentioned. Can you say more about that? So you, people who have worked remotely for a while realize you can use both asynchronous and synchronous and bounce that for number of things,
Joe Krebs 18:11
right? That is awesome. So there's a lot to be even improved, right? Even beyond this. And maybe in a shared model where we do a little bit of both. Maybe there's a spin on it. Now we probably work this way.
Mark Kilby 18:24
Even even retrospectives I've done a mix. I've actually I've done entire asynchronous rector's retrospectives. Awesome.
Joe Krebs 18:32
Yeah. Cool. Yeah. And the technology. Alright, we have great tools. Just curious. Without you endorsing any tools, is there anything that stands out like on your on your list where you would say this is a really cool tool to work with in a in a distributed fashion?
Mark Kilby 18:51
Well, boy, the tool set has changed so much in the last year. So you know, most people have seen zoom and all the changes happening there. I will say there, there is a wave of zoom contenders coming up out of the startup community, that will be interesting to watch, that will look nothing like zoom. So one in particular, I find, well, actually, there's there's a couple that are related. So if you look at tools like spatial chat, or wonder.me, both of those, take away the the walls of the breakout room. But you still can have breakouts, you could just move to different parts of space and just talk to people in that space. Or you can broadcast across if you have if it's a large conference, say several 100 people in these different small circles and say, Okay, I need to get something out to everybody. Here's, here's the keynote, or here's the announcement for a you might want to not miss this next presentation. So those tools have the way of reaching out individually small groups and much larger groups. or even even for conferences in, though you probably seen this one, hop in, has made huge strides. And they've had several acquisitions this year, too. So they're they're very much looking at how do you support hybrid events? And they're there. They're making some interesting moves there. So there's, there's, I think there's some interesting technologies that are happening and evolving. And the startup community, I think, is going to provide some, some, some interesting ideas over the next couple years, right. We'll see. Yeah, yeah. So still on top in two years.
Joe Krebs 20:46
What's spatial? Just as an example, I've played around a little bit myself, but super interesting, because you see who's there on one screen, right? You don't hear them talk until you move closer to them. So it's like this. It's an audio thing that has changed, which is obviously extremely intriguing to for networking, etc. So really cool. Thanks. Now, I want to switch a little bit because you're working. Currently it is my understanding on a new book. And yet, the new book is about open space, exploring an open space mindset is the is the working title. I don't know if that's going to be the publishing title.
Unknown Speaker 21:27
That's, that's the working title for now. And I'm co creating that with April Jefferson. So I say co creating because there's more than a book there. Yeah. So what we're doing is we're looking at some of the concepts, the principles, and the law of mobility. And how does that occur outside of the theater of open space? Where do people see that influencing how they work, how they interact in their communities. So we started sketching out several chapters, and we, we caught ourselves, putting many of our own stories in there. And we said, you know, this is about open space, we need to open this up. And so we started interviewing others, some in the Agile community, several outside of the Agile community. So we have some interesting, I will say the stories from outside the Agile community are probably even more intriguing. And how, how the law of mobility has showed up how the the right people have showed up, how the only thing that could happen, you know, what, what happened was the only thing that could happen for these particular people in certain situations. So we have many, many stories like that. We're also doing a series of workshops, we call them journeys, because we we go with them on the journey. So April and I are not, we don't see ourselves as instructors, we see ourselves more as guides, and we go on the journey with him. So we have we had a three hour reflection journey. What are different ways that reflection might look like for you? How will you step back and look at what's happened? And how you might reflect on different things that have happened? How did it happen? And how will you learn from that? So whether it's journaling, different types of grounding, we have some other unique things in there as well. We've got another one coming up soon on purpose. We've had some others on exploring options to think about your marketplace in an open space. So how do you how do you put the options out there to to see, and how do you how do you navigate those options? Right? So those those kinds of things we're curating for the folk in the project.
Joe Krebs 23:50
It's also connect to your previous topic about distribution. Open Space In a distributed world. Open Space, it's very personal thing, right? When people sit next to each other shoulder to shoulder but I don't see that happening in 2021, necessarily, right?
Unknown Speaker 24:06
No, no. But but it can also it can also help people explore how might you either work remotely or work with others who want to work remotely. So that that's were April, and I both have worked in person and remotely many, many different times. So that there is a bit of a theme under that as well.
Joe Krebs 24:33
Right? So the the book obviously, is all about the the mindset of stories it's journey. Is there anything else you can share about the book are you in addition to that, like the structure the size because I've had Harrison Owen here on my podcast before. Creator of open space, right? What's interesting about this is that I feel like the Agile community took hostage of open space because Harrison himself, he came out of a very different camp, right? He came out of a different camp. So what you're describing in your journey stories is going back to the roots. Right?
Unknown Speaker 25:16
We're we're very much trying to go back to the roots of open space. There's, and that's why I will say there are some, some agilists interviewed, but we were really trying to get a much broader set of stories. And where we're getting into those now. And it's it's interesting to see how the same principles show up in different ways for different communities.
Joe Krebs 25:46
And it's my opinion here any any story to be shared, this is good. Why because open space is so eye opening, if you as a listener, listening to our conversation right now might not have experienced open space, give it a try. There's a lot of right now, obviously distributed open spaces around the world with different kinds of technologies. But it's it's liberating, right? Yeah, well, not surprisingly, it's a liberating structure.
Unknown Speaker 26:13
Yeah, so and it's, it's in a way to emphasize, if you experience an online one, try to visit one with a different technology. So because then you'll realize it's not the technology. It's really about the space, how people curate that space, so that everyone in that space can freely share and learn from each other. That's really what that law mobility is about. If you're neither learning or contributing, you go somewhere else. And that is that is really a major element to any open space.
Joe Krebs 26:49
Right? As awesome. So I'm looking forward to that release. When do you expect this roughly coming out for...
Unknown Speaker 26:57
we're looking at the fall where we we still have chapters in in a bit of an outline mode, where we're going through the stories, figuring out where they will fit in some of the chapters. So it'll probably be an early draft here in the summer. And then hopefully get the final version out toward the end of the year,
Joe Krebs 27:17
into the 2021. People can register already newsletters, etc. For that book and get announcements at MarkKilby.com.
Mark Kilby 27:29
If they go there, look for books, they'll see the book listed and they can get on a special newsletter just for that book.
Joe Krebs 27:35
Awesome. Cool. And if somebody wants to get in touch with you on Twitter, that is MKilby that's your Twitter handle. All of that stuff will also be on the show page, I have some links to the material, etc. That was a great conversation. Thank you. And I hope we get out of this pandemic soon. And see another version of distributed development following that and maybe a shared one, mixed one, whatever, whatever that is being called. But
Mark Kilby 28:05
yeah, we could we could talk about this hybrid situations next time. That's a whole other set of conversations.
Joe Krebs 28:13
Let's do that. Exactly. Awesome. Thanks Mark. Thank you for listening to Agile FM, the radio for the Agile community. I'm your host Joe Krebs. If you're interested in more programming and additional podcasts, please go to www.agile.fm. Talk to you soon.
