← Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
BONUS: Flawless Execution — Translating Fighter Pilot Precision to Business Results | Christian "Boo" Boucousis
00:42:58
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- [00:04]
A
Hey there, agile adventurer, just a quick question. What if for the price of a fancy coffee or half a pizza, you could unlock over 700 hours of the best agile content on the planet? That's audio, video, E courses, books, presentations, all that you can think of. But you can also join live calls with world class practitioners and hang out in a flame war free and AI slop clean slack with the sharpest minds in the game. Oh, and yes, you get direct access to me, Vasko, your Scrum Master Toolbox podcast. No, this is not a drill. It's this Scrum Master Toolbox membership. And it's your unfair advantage in the agile world. So if you want to know more, go check out scrummastertoolbox.org membership. That's scrummastertoolbox.org Membership. And check out all the goodies we have for you. Do it now. But if you're not doing it now, let's listen to the podcast. Hello everybody. Welcome to a special bonus episode. And joining us for this bonus episode we have Christian Bukosis. Hey Christian, welcome to Bucho.
- [01:23]
B
How you doing? Wow. Bonus episode. I feel very privileged to be part of that.
- [01:27]
A
Absolutely. We do want to bring every now and then some in depth topics to our audience and these bonus episodes are the perfect vehicle. So let me tell you a little bit about Christian. Christian is a former fighter pilot who now helps leaders navigate today's fast moving business world. As a CEO of Afterburner and the author of the after the Burner Advantage, he shares practical people centered tools for turning chaos into clarity, building trust and delivering results without burning out. And today we're going to talk about his Flex model. More on that in a second and we'll explore how the principles of flawless execution translate into our own context. Agile leadership. Helping teams align, adapt under pressure. Of course a fighter pilot would have some tips on that obviously and collaborate with precision to deliver high impact results in our fast changing environments. But of course we have a guest that perhaps some of you have heard of and some of you might not have heard of. I find his journey very interesting. So I'm very curious to ask Christian before we dive into the details of the Flex model and the Afterburner advantage, how does a former fighter pilot turn leadership? Author and consultant?
- [02:49]
B
By accident is the answer to that. And I mean I was in Australia. You don't have to go to college to be a fighter pilot. You can go straight from school. So. So I joined up straight from school. I did my 12th grade, my last year in high school twice because I didn't get the, the marks I needed and I found out a couple of years ago I have really chronic adhd. So that explained that. But you know, I always wanted to be a fighter pilot since I was a young child, since I was five. I think I was really lucky to have that, that belief system in me because that helped me conquered some neural, neural wiring problems that I, that I had. Well, I call them neural superpowers now, but probably from an academic perspective, not so, not so good. So I was a fighter pilot for 11 years. Seven of those was in Australia and four of those were in the United Kingdom when I was an exchange pilot. And whilst I was in the United Kingdom I was flying a mission, a dog fighting mission. And I was looking out the left hand side of the cockpit, looking at the, the other airplane and as it maneuvered underneath me I couldn't move my neck, it got stuck looking out the left hand side of the window. So I was like, well this is not good, turned myself in my seat, I had to fly the airplane home with my head over my left shoulder, landed the airplane, did a whole bunch of medical tests and I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition called ankylosing spondylitis, which explained a lot because for my whole life I've lived with a lot of pain, a lot of pain in my spine, my hips, my legs. It was, and I just thought it was being a fighter pilot because being a fighter pilot is quite painful. A lot of fighter pilots have problems. And with that medical condition I couldn't fly fighters anymore. I'd now just turned 30. I joined when I was 18, started flying when I was 19 and from that point onwards I had to make a decision about what to do next. I was offered a job to fly politicians around the VIP flight that every country has. I couldn't think of anything worse than spending the rest of my life with politicians. So I left. And when I left I thought I would be an entrepreneur because that was kind of like the fighter pilot thing of business, right? And at the time I didn't know what to do. And when I looked at starting a business in Australia at the time I thought, gosh, it's going to be challenging because there's so many people here already in business, a lot of businesses, They've already got 11 years head start. So I spoke to my best friend at the time who lived in the United Kingdom and we decided to move to Afghanistan. We knew Iraq or Afghanistan didn't matter what you did, you'd probably Do Okay. Because everything, you know, we just spent 10 years, you know, blowing the places up in the military and it was all getting put back together. So we went and set up a reconstruction company in Kabul in Afghanistan, and that grew rapidly. It grew like a quarter of a billion dollars in four years. It was very successful. And what I learned about business, and it translates into leadership in any role is it doesn't matter what you do, if you're always curious and you're always intentional and you're always asking questions. And at the time we didn't have any product or services, but we were quite good at finding problems and, and aligning them to the aspirations of the people in Afghanistan. And for me, it was the debrief that I learned as a fighter pilot. When you're really skilled at debriefing, if you're really skilled at asking people what are you trying to achieve? How's it going? Why is there a gap between where you want to go and where you are now and what are you going to do about it? All of a sudden you're approaching the world with an agile mindset. And I'm sure most people realize that you Agile and Scrum were co created by John Sutherland, who was a fighter pilot. And its origins sit in the OODA loop and iteration, which is why it's a circle. So through that I started that business, sold it, moved into Papua New guinea to try and help with corruption and a few other things that were going on there, moved into hotel development, we set a world record for building a 17 story tower in Australia, went into publishing and about 10 years ago I found out about this company called Afterburner which was using fighter pilot techniques and translating them into business. And Afterburner was founded in 1996 and the Flex model that we use is an Agile model. And it was started around the same time as Scrum and Agile. But it's even more simple than using Agile to run things. But really when you look at. So when I, when I saw my first Afterbender keynote, I saw two worlds coming together. It was a friend of mine, he was a fighter pilot. He was on stage talking to a big insurance company and talking about this plan, brief, execute, debrief method, which is how we plan missions and fly them and debrief them. And I just had this moment. I'm like, gosh, I'm meant to do this. This is 11 years as a fighter pilot and 11 years at business at the time. So I bought the license for Australia, then Asia, and three years ago I Bought the whole company and I moved to the US So now my whole life is all about bringing those two worlds together. Fighter pilot thinking, fighter pilot ways of working into business. And I've worked with multi billion dollar companies that profess to be agile. I was doing this way back when scaled agile was just starting. And they're like, oh, if we do agile in technology, we can do it everywhere. But what you learn very quickly is agile as a way of working is very different to the way human beings think. And that's the challenge.
- [08:12]
A
The challenge is not we will dive into the challenge, but I think it's good to set it up by explaining what this flex or flawless execution model is. So introduce that for us and then we'll dive into why that might be difficult for many of us.
- [08:29]
B
I mean, you think about everything in life. Everything in life is about getting something done, right? You've got an objective, you've got a product launch, you've got a profit number to hit, you've got a sales target. Like everyone in business has a job and the job is normally measured. So flex is designed to help people accelerate to those goals. And it uses the accelerated learning curve the Air Force uses to train and develop fighter pilots. So if you think of the fighter pilot has to fly a mission, right? So it has a start, a middle and an end. And what we found with flawless execution was if we help people and companies think iteratively instead of linearly, and I guess I've learned over time that's the difference between waterfall and agile. Then all of a sudden what you realize is people become far more curious. And afterburners work with nearly 3,800 companies and nearly 2.8 million people over 30 years. And not one of those companies that we've, that we've worked with has ever been able to work and deliver results like fighter pilots. Now fighter pilots get a $15 million training program. So that's kind of useful. You know, most, most training programs are about one or two thousand dollars to skill someone up. But what's really unique about fighter pilots is the way we train, the way we fight, the way we problem solve, the way we do. Everything is the same. It doesn't matter whether we're planning, communicating, executing or debriefing. It's always iterative and it's always starting with, hey, what are we trying to achieve here? So, so flex is the ultimate simple agile model. And in the book, John Sutherland the wrote the forward for the afterburner advantage. And he's a, he's a We did used to work with John for many years. So the DNA of Agile is the world of a fighter pilot like it's baked in. That's what it is. I think though, what has happened is we've taken a simple model and we've added human beings and turned it into something that's a little bit more complicated than it was originally intended.
- [10:37]
A
Okay, so we've touched on so many threads here that I would love to follow and I'll try to be structured here to try to follow this logically. So first, the idea of, or the ideas rather that you learned while training to be a fighter pilot became over time obviously also useful in world where even though you might be very good at planning, reality doesn't follow the plan. The business world, in short. And then you found out about afterburner and their flawless execution, which you then became part of, eventually bought. And this model that you describe, the flawless execution model, you talked about the four stages already, plan, brief, execute, debrief. And you've also introduced the idea that these are all iterative. Now this, and as you said, it's very close to the OODA loop. I'll put the link in the show notes for people to check it out. Which is. Which came from the military as well. But when you think about business specifically Christian, this plan, brief execute debrief cycle, explain that to us and then walk us through why is it hard for most people, especially in the corporate world, to accept that that's an effect and efficient way to go about executing on a goal?
- [11:55]
B
Yeah. And it's important to highlight that UDA came from a fighter pilot. It didn't come from the military because fighter pilots operated the same way the military operated up until the Vietnam War. And in the Vietnam War, the losses and the technology advantage that America had at the time was not yielding the results. And it wasn't until someone introduced the idea of iterating both during a mission and after a mission that the results immediately jump by 400%. So when we talk about iterative thinking, it's not a natural human model. That's important. It is not how people think. Most of the time we learn from mistakes. We don't learn as a habit. And when we talk about why it doesn't translate into business is because business leadership models still hark back to Frederick Winslow's Taylor's book the the Scientific Principles of Management, which dates back to 1911. And we bring industrial era leadership, which is I've got to build a building. All right, so there's no building Then there's a building at the end. I need foundations, I need to build up steel structure. So everything tends to mimic time, and time is always lineal. And then also the way that humans lead is not much different to a village. You have a village chief, the CEO. You've got the warriors that go out and do the high risk work. You've got the gatherers that do the low risk work. And it's very political. And the Air Force is still political. But what we create is a parallel system where when we're not in a mission, the politics and the relationships and the empathy and all the soft skills of leadership still exist. But you can't afford in the execution of a mission to have a personality clash halfway through a mission. You can't be asking, what does this button do in your airplane halfway through a mission? So as a fighter pilot, we make sure that we invest in what we can control and we put a lot of work in the things we can control. Because even as a fighter pilot, we say plan, brief, execute, debrief. But we know the plan is the best idea of the mission based on what we know. Now once we're airborne, everything changes. I mean, you never know because the enemy doesn't go and do what you want it to do. They're doing stuff to get inside your decision making loop. So it's this aerial ballet. When we talk about plan, what we're really talking about is getting everyone on the team together to start to build a collective consciousness, to start to build a collective idea around the art of the possible, not the science of the possible, because it's the future. So there's no science in the future. And really what we're doing is we're saying, how do we take the standard way we do business and adapt it to today's mission? And as an F18 pilot, you might have a mission which is defending an air base. Then the next day you might have a mission which is penetrating enemy defenses. And then you might have another mission which is dropping a bomb on a target that you already know. Then you might have a mission which is being airborne and dropping bombs on targets you don't know. And you're just gonna have to wait and see what happens. It's called time sensitive targets. So you're always doing something different when we move into the brief stage. And remember, in business, most people plan in their head or in front of a spreadsheet by themselves on their computer, right? And that's not, that's not planning at all. That is not planning that's basically an individual collecting their thoughts. And what happens is if you plan without the intentional collaboration is everyone's immediately on the back foot. You spent a week, you've built a great strategy. This is what we're going to do over the next. We've got two sprints. We're going to do this amazing release or we're going to do this change. And you surprise everyone because they're like, oh, okay, well, I'm already busy. Or Vasco's on leave this week. And all of a sudden, all the time you're just spending. Planning is a waste because you planned it based on the idea of the future, not the reality of today. And then when we go into briefing, what we're saying is there's this. There's this point in time between planning and execution, which is about as accurate as the plans ever going to get. So when we talk about briefing, what we're saying is, hey, we're all playing this together. We all know what we're going to do. But here's some changes on the day. One of the airplanes might have a problem. It might not work perfectly. There might be some weather that we weren't anticipating. There's always going to be something. And in the brief, and it's called brief for a reason, because it's really short, is we're checking everyone understands the plan in the context of today. Then we go out and fly the mission we execute. And during execution, there's no distraction, there's no notifications. I'm completely focused in the mission bubble. If someone, if. If I'm going from the brief and walking out to the jet and someone comes up to me and goes, hey, Boo, I want to ask you a question about something. It's like, no, no, I'm in my mission bubble. No. No distractions. Or, you know what, I'm feeling pretty comfortable. I know what's going on. I'll let you distract me for five minutes and I'll. And I'll attend to you. Because what we understand as execution as a fighter pilot is you need this 25 minutes of focus before your brain really, really focuses on the task. And you, you program your brain for the mission at hand. We walk to the jet. We start the jet, the 228 checklist items of an F18 to turn it on and operate it and turn it off. You learn all of those off by heart. When we talk about execution, we have checklists. If it's routine, it's the same every time. We know it by heart and we create a mission bubble. So we go and execute. We fly the plan up until the time the plan doesn't work anymore. So something's happened we're not expecting. And when you're flying a mission, and as a mission commander, I might be leading 70 airplanes, you have no idea what's going on half the time. I mean, you cannot keep track of 69 other airplanes. It's humanly impossible. So we create during our execution particular times where I need to know awareness. So we create gates. And we're saying 10 minutes in, everyone should be here, right? So if at 10 minutes, let me know you're in the right place and it's like. And then boom, boom, boom. Within about 10 seconds you're like, right, everyone's where they need to be. Then we plan for everything to go wrong. We plan for chaos to, to, to. To ensure, to, to ensue. And as chaos is unfolding, as everyone starts to have enemy aircraft hitting their targets, we just create at more points in time where we're generally on track or we're generally not on track. And we just make decisions based on what we call the big picture. And in our, in our world, we have an airplane with a big radar on top and it's keeping tabs on everything. And during the planning process, we have told the people in that airplane, as long as everything's generally going here, just don't talk to us, I don't want to know. But if something is happening we're not expecting, then you need to let us know. So what we do is we reduce noise. And you think of how much noise is in the digital space today, right? It's ridiculous. Like it's. We're distracted every three minutes, right?
- [19:03]
A
And phone calls, sms.
- [19:06]
B
But it's kids, you know, our own dopamine, needing to go and read a social. You know, if you've got a watch on. All my. All my notifications are turned off. Say for the last four years, I've never, ever had a notification. Not an email, nothing. Because I know if something beeps or buzzes, my primal programming is to look at it, right? So what? So that's an important part of leadership. So if you're a leader that needs everyone to have their notifications on to run a business, you're doing really bad job at planning. If, if you're flying a mission with 70 airplanes and every time someone changed direction and you had a notification, you would be overwhelmed and you would be, you would not be able to function.
- [19:48]
A
You said something interesting. So what you said Is if. If every time something is not going according to what you expect, you get a notification, then you're going to be overwhelmed and you're doing a bad job at planning. So you also have this idea that planning is shared agreement of what are the key things that need to happen. And the expectation is that something really needs to be going wrong before I'm interrupted in the work that I need to do, even as the leader of that. That group.
- [20:19]
B
And there's degrees of things going wrong, there's a little bit going wrong, a medium amount going wrong, and then everything going wrong. And when everything's going wrong, we stop, we turn around. Like, we don't keep going. And I think we have this concept called the abort criteria. And if a certain amount of criteria are hit, we abort, we abort the mission. Which I think is a massive opportunity for business to have abort criteria. Because so often in business we press a bad situation, right? And people stop talking, you lose transparency. Everyone starts, we go into survival mode, which is, I'm going to protect myself and blame everyone else. We don't have that. As fighter pilots, it never, ever happens. If something goes wrong, we take accountability for it. We make best decision. Plus. Also, the most potent combination we have as fighter pilots is four airplanes, four people on the team. There's a leader, number one, a deputy leader, number three, and then the wingman. But as a fighter pilot, we have this rule, we call it subordinated leadership. And what happens is, even though I'm on paper the leader and I'm responsible for delivering the mission, any one of the other three wingmen can step in if they've got more awareness. And if I hear them call some awareness to me, and it might be 20 miles away, there's a threat, it's pointing straight at us, and I don't have awareness, I immediately tell them to lead the mission. I go press, press, which means you take the lead. I got no idea. But because we planned it and because we have criteria to do that, we know that person's. What they're saying is exactly what we planned to happen.
- [21:55]
A
So what I'm hearing here is that there's different techniques or approaches in the way you, you execute the mission. That kind of build in the ability to iterate, right? Like you just gave one, which is, you know, if, if a wingman has more awareness, I'll press. So he takes the lead and I'm just going to follow. That's one iteration, right? Like, because at that moment that other fighter had a better situation. To become the leader. And that changes. Right. Very often in software we talk about shared leadership, but that's a great example of shared leadership. Right. Like anyone can be a leader at any time if the situation so, so requires. And that's yet another form of iteration.
- [22:39]
B
Right.
- [22:39]
A
Even the shape of the team is being iterated throughout the mission.
- [22:43]
B
Yeah. And we talk. That's the difference between control focused leadership, which is I need to control everything, and awareness based leadership. And the reason we have so many meetings is because the leader is trying to control the situation and own all the awareness and it's not humanly possible to do that. And when you look at really great software teams, and I've seen them, you know, you see them and they're more oriented in a startup culture which, which is more iteration focused and it's, it's more of a build mindset from the start as opposed to enterprise software where you're trying to shift a very big system and there's so many connecting parts that most of the time it's chaotic. And I've worked in companies like that, companies that, that have 2,000 applications that they're trying to, that the CIO is trying to manage and you can't do it like no human can manage that much stuff. Every one of those were a good idea at the time. But when you have 2,000 applications, you've got 20 doing the same thing over there, 15 doing the same thing here, and no one actually, they just sit in the ideas phase. They never actually get into the execution and delivery phase. So as a fighter pilot, that concept of my job is to always be aware not to exist. That's trained into you from the age of 19. If you walk past a piece of litter, pick it up. If there's a footpath on the grass, walk on the footpath. If you see something that doesn't look right, speak up and imagine a world in a fighter squadron and there's 200 people. In a fighter squadron is about 15 to 20 pilots in the support team. Whenever you walk past someone, you've got 100% confidence in that person. If they say they're going to do something, it's going to get done. Or they'll say no. And you'll be like, okay, you're saying no for a very good reason. And we say no a lot in, in a fighter squadron because human nature is to always say yes and add things. Oh, here's another way we can do it. Oh, here's another way we can do it. But we've used the same model for 60 years in the Air Force. This plan, brief, execute, debrief model hasn't changed, hasn't changed at all. We trademark those four words, but that's the culture. We always plan, we always brief, we always execute, we always debrief. So the most important part of the fighter pilot world that translated into Agile is the retrospective, right? It's to constantly come back and ask ourselves, is where we're at now, where we expected to be, if not, why not, and what can we do about it. But the biggest mistake I see in technology doing this is they do it as technology. They don't do it with the business. They get a brief from the business, they build a product, two months later they go back to the business and the business is like, what is this? Like, this is, this is not what I was expecting. And technology will explain the whole two month journey and the business will go well. If you told us that like right at the start, we probably wouldn't have done it or we would have told you don't do it that way. So what happens is, and particularly because Agile is such a tech driven initiative, you have a total disconnect. One of the big packages of work we've done in afterburner over 10 years is technology. Teams ask us to come in and say, the business doesn't trust us. We want you to help us build trust in the team. And we say, well, that's super easy because every time you're having a scrum, every time you're coming together to talk about the product, just have the business there with you. It's easy. And people get confused because they think, oh, only fighter pilots do this plan, brief, execute, debrief. But during the Gulf War, that model, the Prometheus model, General Schwarzkopf and the team and John Boyd who created all of this, they brought that mindset into large scale military planning. So now the military for the last 30 years has used that, that model. So I might be a fighter pilot, but I'm probably working with the Marines on the ground. I'm working with Special Forces, I'm working with the Navy, I might be working with a CIA agent, a government agent. So we end up working with everyone and everyone is part of the plan. So we've got a baseline in which to iterate off. If one person's missing from the planning process, the execution falls over. It doesn't work if there's someone on the ground that doesn't know how an F18 Hornet works to help them. We're just a very expensive Decoration. So a big part of the planning process is also learning what everyone else does. How do I support you best? Whereas a lot of planning in business comes from this is what I do and this is how I'm going to do it, which is completely the wrong way. You've got to agree on what you're.
- [27:33]
A
What you're trying to say, if I get you right, is that in your context as a fighter pilot, the plan brief execute debrief is always done with the whole team, everyone involved in the mission, not just the fighter pilots and everyone. And in fact, if I'm thinking about it, one of the biggest problems I see in software organizations or organizations that build software is exactly that. They build this separation from the start. Somebody will come in at some point and tell us what they want and they'll go away. And then the team or sometimes even just individuals will do the plan brief execute debrief. We might call it, you know, Sprint or Kanban or whatever, but we do it ourselves. So we create that separation. And if I hear you right, what you're saying is when we are in the mission, everybody needs to know what the plan is so that we can deviate, right? Like we can iterate.
- [28:35]
B
They need to understand the effect of the plan. And one of the things I see particularly with Kanbans, particularly with the way in which technology meets the business, is technology brings an overwhelming amount of information. It's a, here's what we've been doing, here's what's happened. They kind of bring all the baggage along with them so the business understands how hard we're working. And there's a really, this is human, right? So this is not technology. But a lot of humans spend a lot of time telling people how much work they've done and all the problems they've solved. We don't even bother with that as a fighter pilot because that's all in the past. All we care about is how we're going to go forward together. And when I do this, this is the effect on you. And when you do this, this is the effect on me. So it's almost like you plan on the other side of your eyeballs. You plan based on what's going to happen and what you're going to deliver rather than how most people think of planning. And we still do this. But planning isn't all about sequencing actions. That's not planning. That's the byproduct of planning, which is collectively agreeing what good looks like at the end. So planning is all about the destination, not the work to get there. Think about when you hop on an airplane on an airliner and you might be flying from, from Helsinki to Amsterdam. The pilot doesn't tell you, you know, took me 20 minutes to get to work today. I got caught in traffic. The airplane, they don't tell you the whole story. They go, welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen. Our destination today is Schiphol. There's a little bit of weather on the way, and we're going to be landing, you know, five minutes early. All you want is the effect on you based on all the work that they've done. That's a brief. I've never seen that. I've never seen anyone say in a meeting, hey, this is the destination. Here's the things that are going to get in the way. Let's go. It's all this backstory all the time. And that's why meetings take an hour. It's just 55 minutes of backstory and five minutes of, well, let's have another meeting to figure out how we're going to go forward. It's crazy.
- [30:42]
A
So one of the things that I'm really interested so in the work that you do with the afterburner advantage, I imagine you meet a lot of people, very diverse organizations, and one of the things that we always have to kind of deal with and of course prepare for is how do we help teams keep that going once we leave. Right. Like as scrum masters, agile coaches, as leaders, we're not going to be there all the time.
- [31:05]
B
So what have you learned?
- [31:06]
A
What are some tips you can share with us about going into these organizations, talking with these people, and actually helping them to really absorb and keep those, those ideas, those approaches with them once your company lives.
- [31:21]
B
Well, the first one is the idea of a retrospective, right? So a retrospective isn't a ritual. It's actually a way of thinking. It's a cognitive model. And if you approach everything as a retrospective, right, you approach everything in terms of what are we trying to achieve? How's it going? Why is it not going where we want to do it? What's the one action we're going to do to get it back on track? That alone is the. That's the key to carry it forward. So we, in November last year, I launched a new idea, and it's called flawless leadership. And it's how do leaders lead agile, or how we call it missionizing a business. And when we talk about flawless leadership, we talk about the three M's mindset, method and moments. So if you think of agile as a Method that's actually only one of the bits you need to be a good leader of agile. The second is to understand that the method is actually a mindset, it's a growth mindset. By acting in an iterative way you start to think in an iterative way. And when we talk about mindset as a fighter pilot, it's not the things you're prepared for that cause the accidents, it's the blind spots, it's the things you're not aware of. And it's no different in software. It's not what you plan to do that causes the problems. That's not the problem. So part of the mindset is the biases, beliefs and behaviors that a human brings to every situation. So a bias might be in technology. There's still people in technology that pre agile, they use the word agile but they still think waterfall, they still think old fashioned, they still think the method is right but the mindset's not. And the mindset is well what am I, what are we, what am I personally trying to achieve? What, what's getting in the way? What baggage have I got like what, what's my biased belief and behavior and how do I and get curious about it? So bring curiosity in there and say is the way I'm showing up fit for what we're trying to achieve or not? And then iterate change a little bit like be open minded. And the biggest thing as a leader in particularly in software because it's so fast is once you set up the plan your job is to, is to turn your ears on. You should not be directing, you should be facilitating. Right? Because your job as a scrum master, as a leader and you might be leading a division of people, doesn't even matter if you're any leader is to be aware. And you're only going to be aware by listening and you're looking for divergences from the plan that other people aren't seeing. So a big part of mindset is moving from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. And the great thing about agile is it's the method that creates a growth mindset. Then there's understanding the moments that you show up as a leader and there's people leadership which is political. That's the hard part of leadership. That's the personality stuff, it's the, it's the fatigue and overwhelm of working in a noisy environment. Then there's the impact layer and that's kind of the agile layer. That's the results driven layer of leadership which is very Scientific. But those two, the people leadership and the scientific leadership get mixed up, particularly if you've got a really experienced and capable person on the team. That kind of shuts people down. And I've done this before and rolls their eyes and that type of person, that's a people leadership problem. Right? But in impact leadership, everyone has a voice, okay? Everyone is involved in the planning, everyone is involved in creating awareness. And then you've got the leading in the moment layer, or leading now. And leading now is the reaction. That's the amygdala, that's the panic layer. When things go wrong and it's like, oh, we're off track, something's gone wrong, there's a bug in the code and all of a sudden everyone panics. And when you panic, you move from, it's called the amygdala hijack. You go from thinking with the prefrontal cortex into the fight, flight or flee response. And often that happens due to bad planning because people don't actually know. How much time do I have? What does good look like? It's not that big a deal. And it's only a big deal because we don't know how to problem solve quickly. We don't know how to have a five minute meeting to solve it. It all goes back, we all go back into the people leadership mode of oh, there's a problem, I need to escalate the problem, I've got to go speak to the bit. And it just becomes this highly reactive, knee jerk, chaotic way of leading. So, so we've got to understand those three layers of leadership. Don't try and be a people leader when you're, when you're executing, that's, that's not the time for people leadership. But if you're really good at impact leadership, you're really good at planning, taking a, you know, like an epic and turning it into a story and then getting it down into a sprint. Then you, all of a sudden you become high trust, high credible because you start to get the work done. And when you start to get the work done, people leadership becomes easy because the excuses start to disappear because you're actually succeeding. But during the impact leadership, watching a project in its execution phase is where you can start to see the personal traits of the individuals. And as a leader, your job is to. That's where the one on one comes in. The one on one is about helping someone with their blind spots and their biases, beliefs and behaviors and using a retrospective mindset for the person. Hey, look, Beskar, I can See, you're frustrated here, you know, and just like the project has a goal, we say what, what, what does good look like for you? What, how do we get to a point where you're not frustrated? And then you start to learn about them and you start to learn more about what they need to win as an individual. And then you get really good because all of a sudden you might have a team of 10, you might have a team of a hundred, but you start to know the individual drivers of everyone as well and all of that emotional energy starts to reduce. So part of being a people leader is being. And this is really hard for technology. I mean I see technology leaders, right? I see, I see CIDOs, CIOs who are in front of their people and they're on their phone, they're tapping on their watch and they're not present and I'm watching them like you're losing these people. Like you're part of the problem. You're a leader of leaders. You should not be on your technology when there's human beings in the room with you. That's not your job. And if you need to interface with technology, you should be interfacing with the human being that owns that, that, that, that result or that. But you got to understand as a human being that's we're fundamentally engineered to be distracted, to, to survive. And it's those fundamental behaviors that are trained out of fighter pilots. Because if, if you go into normal default mode as a fighter pilot, you're going to die like you will. Like if you, if every system, everything that goes wrong in a fighter pilot world and you have an emotional reaction to it, forget about it. But part of the conditioning and why Agile is such a beautiful model to help with this is just operate in the world of fact. Just everyone be factual, use your okrs, which I don't like. Because an OKR is actually, if you, a student of the English language, you can't have a result in the future. The word result means now, so you can't. It should be an okt, a key target, not a key result. So even we help companies with that, we're like start calling them okts. Because if you call it a result subconsciously, what you're saying is I only need to get the result at the end and that's totally wrong, that's too late. You've got to get the result, you've got to understand the results now, measure it against the target and iterate to get there.
- [39:01]
A
That's the retrospective mindset that you were referring to. Right? Like what does good look like? How far are we from there? What could we do right now to get us closer to where we want to be? I really like that approach because even for the as you also described, even for the specific human relationship and human behavior topics, it's a useful thinking model. So Christian, I know that we could follow a bunch of threads from this conversation, but I'm sure a lot of those are explored in more depth in the book the Afterburner Advantage. The link is in the show notes for everybody to go and check it out and it's been really a pleasure to have you here. But before we go, Christian, where can people go and find out more about you and the work that you're doing?
- [39:51]
B
Afterburner.com is the best place to go. My personal website is calledmeboo.com but we've built a new interactive AI tool that people can use with real natural language to help use this model to solve some of their real time problems. It's called AI Boo. It's on the website and we find that's the best way of learning. The reality is with human beings you can sit in a room, you can learn something, but it's not until you apply it that the learnings actually stick.
- [40:25]
A
Absolutely. We'll put the link to all of those in the show notes. Christian, thank you very much for your generosity with your time and your knowledge.
- [40:33]
B
Thanks for having me on the bonus episode. Vasco. I really appreciate it.
- [40:41]
A
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