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Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
BONUS The Evolution of Agile Leadership: Embracing the Therapeutic Turn with Ari-Pekka Skarp
00:49:46
BONUS: Beyond Process, How Psychology is Reshaping Modern Leadership with Ari-Pekka Skarp In this BONUS episode, we dive deep into the evolving landscape of Agile leadership with , an experienced Agile Coach, Psychotherapist, and Organizational...
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- [00:02]
Vasco Duarte
Hi there, Pasco Duarte here, your host. I wanted to share a story with you. You know how sometimes Agile just feels like following another checklist when like processes and frameworks feel more important than what we are trying to achieve and sometimes even like handcuffs. I was talking to a customer of the Global Agile Summit and he used a term that kind of stuck in my he said, I have Agile fatigue. And I've heard that a lot from people since then. But here's the thing, it doesn't have to be this way. So we started thinking and at the Global Agile Summit, which is happening this May, we're bringing together practitioners who've actually done that, who've broken free from this, you know, install the framework kind of mindset. We want to focus the summit on real life, first person stories of Agile all succeeding that inspire you to action. We're talking real experiences, practical solutions, and of course, amazing insights from leaders like Gojkoacic, who will be one of the keynote speakers, and Jurgen Apelo, who will be one of the keynote speakers as well. If you're ready to leave the Agile fatigue behind, just join us in Dalit. The early birth tickets are now available@the globalagilesummit.com and mark your calendar. We will have workshops on May 18th, that's a Sunday. And then the conference itself will happen on May 19th and 20th of 2025 in Tallinn, Estonia. So let's make Agile exciting again. And remember, go to agile globalagilesummit.com that is, and get your early bird ticket. Now, it will only be available until early March, so grab it now. And now onto the episode. Hello everybody. Welcome to one more bonus episod episode here on the podcast. And today, joining us to talk about Agile leadership and the therapeutic turn, more on that term in a second is Aripeka Scarp. Hey Aripeka, welcome to the show.
- [02:21]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Hello. It's nice to be here with you, Vasko.
- [02:25]
Vasco Duarte
So Ari Pekka is not only a very experienced Agile coach, but he's also a psychotherapist and organizational psychologist with over 20 years of experience working with organizations as an author of several books on topics such as Comple the Mind Mindfulness, Aripeka blends deep psychological insight with practical expertise to help leaders and teams navigate the evolving landscape of work. And we're here to talk about a topic that Aripeka brought to my attention a few weeks back as we are recording this. So the term is therapeutic turn. But before we dive into that, Arupeka, you've been working with Agile adoption for many Years, I mean, I know at least since 2008, which is when I met you. What do you see are the key trends that you have seen affect software and the adoption of Agile over the last 16 years?
- [03:25]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Well, I guess there are at least two developments that we could see. Some of those are more in the technological side, but then the other that I'm perhaps more interested nowadays is in this social complexity, interactions between people, how we kind of define work and relationships between different roles in the organizations nowadays. So I think that there has been quite a lot of things happening during the last few years.
- [04:10]
Vasco Duarte
We know from Agile Manifesto that it's individuals and interaction over processes and tools. And you just mentioned that maybe the biggest shift has been in this realm of social complexity and interactions between people. What do you mean by that? Can you give a concrete example of what you mean?
- [04:31]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Well, like we know in Agile we actually introduced different kind of already like 20 years ago when I was learning to be a Scrum Master, for example, you know, we replaced this kind of auto retractive leadership with more kind of coaching and being in parallel in the hierarchy with the other co workers there. So I think that there has been transformations happening in that sphere, at least in these years. That was quite revolutionary idea, at least in my experience in those days, to have this kind of a flat hierarchy in the organizations. But since then there has been of course quite many famous examples of companies that use these kind of hierarchical strategies in their business. So that would be at least one concrete thing that we don't have just this kind of unified understanding of how to build this kind of hierarchical relationships in our workspaces.
- [05:52]
Vasco Duarte
Okay. So I think we need to explore that a little bit more. So as a Scrum Master, what I'm hearing is that Agile and Scrum in particular, with the role of the Scrum Master, introduced this concept that hierarchy is not what drives success in teams, although it might still be there and it might still serve some important functions for the business. The way we drive success in software teams is actually through other means like shared understanding, shared responsibility. We had a term at the time, shared code ownership. These days we would go beyond the code, right? We would say even shared product ownership. Is that what you're saying?
- [06:45]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yeah, that's at least one viewpoint to it. I would say quite specifically that there has been an advent of new kind of understanding of these relationships in leadership. You are quite familiar I'm sure with for example this, this teal organization idea where we have these different color organizations and one shift in this different of Organization is how they test this relation, what are the hierarchies and how those are established. So I've seen that there's a lot of movement from this, let's say a little bit conservative command and control style of leadership towards shared leadership, coaching leadership and all these terms that are describing this. In essence, the different relationship of the leader and the other work in the companies.
- [08:07]
Vasco Duarte
Okay, so these different perspectives that you talk about, obviously a lot of it has to do with what Agile and Scrum, given that it is the most popular agile framework, have brought to many organizations. But we've been talking about agile leadership and how that has evolved and what agile leadership is. And when we were talking about that, you mentioned the concept of the therapeutic turn. And I think it's important for you to introduce that term, the therapeutic turn to our audience because I think it will, it will help us explore that perspective that you just introduced. So what does that mean? What does that term therapeutic turn means?
- [08:52]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yeah, well, there has been a change in our society, at least in this modern western societies that I'm more familiar with that. If you think about, for example, what we were expecting from the leaders like 20 or 30 years ago, I would say that quite many people who have been working at those times can see that we were expecting leaders to be some sort of commanders, you know, who understand everything that is happening and have a clear vision of what everybody has to do and then they kind of control that these things are done according to some quality standards, et cetera. But if you think about society nowadays, I can see that the expectation is shifted a lot towards this kind of understanding of leader as almost some sort of a therapist.
- [09:58]
Vasco Duarte
Okay, can you introduce that a little bit more? Because not all of us know what a therapist is or does.
- [10:05]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yeah. So we are expecting that leaders also have quite good humanistic psychological skills also to be very empathic understanding of people's not just what they are doing, but also what they are feeling, the emotional things that are happening and how to help with them. Nowadays we have quite a lot of increase in these mental health problems in everywhere. There are probably quite many things affecting it. But it also means that this is highlighting in the leadership work we have to understand what is happening emotionally and psychologically with our employees because it can also affect quite a lot to this, how we are managing our business, what are our capabilities of producing services or products or what we are doing. So the demand for the leaders is nowadays more and more in this humanistic side to understand people and little deeper also, not just in this way of what they are kind of doing in organizational chart or this kind of understanding.
- [11:31]
Vasco Duarte
Okay. That I think for me establishes.
- [11:37]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Kind.
- [11:37]
Vasco Duarte
Of the scenario of what we are talking about. And if I understand you correctly, the therapeutic turn is this turn from a leader as a manager of work tasks through the people that they managed to a manager of people and interactions by understanding how people relate to each other and to them as leaders. Is that what you're saying?
- [12:02]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yes, yes, that's one part of it. But the therapeutic turn has been quite a lot larger in our societies nowadays. The amount of people who are using therapy as their kind of tool to manage their own lives have been increased dramatically. And nowadays it's not kind of a taboo. It used to be like 10 years ago even, you know, people wouldn't talk about their therapist or anything like that. But nowadays it's something that you can discuss over lunch that the person has been in like occupational psychologist office or in a therapy or.
- [12:49]
Vasco Duarte
And we've discussed that here on the podcast as well. I mean, I've been quite open and vocal about the benefits I've gotten from long term therapy. Not just short term, one off kind of sessions. And if I understand you correctly, what you're saying is that because we accept that there is this profession that we can benefit from, right? Like therapists and psychotherapists and so on, then we are also, when we look at our leaders, we are also expecting them to take some sort of role like that. Is that what you mean by the therapeutic turn from society towards the workplace?
- [13:28]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yeah, I don't think that that's. People are not perhaps very conscious of it, but I can see that there is a kind of hidden demand for that also. It's perhaps not speaking aloud, but a lot of these things that leaders need to understand and learn nowadays are concerning these kind of things. You know, how to handle conflicting situations, how to speak about some hard personal issues of the people that are affecting their work. And because we have also more of these therapeutic resources in our society, I guess these are, These things are more on the table nowadays in this kind of ordinary work related situations also.
- [14:30]
Vasco Duarte
Yeah, I mean, this is of course not a new thing. I'm holding a mug that says a leader is a coach, not a judge. Deming said that that was many, many years ago. Deming passed away, I don't know how long ago. He was already pretty old, but decades ago. So I can see this trend. I also can see the trend that there are specific workplace situations where a coach or therapist perspective would be Helpful like performance reviews, handling of conflict, et cetera. And I can also see how through the introduction of the role of the scrum master, which was originally called a servant leader way back when. These days they call it a leader who serves. I don't know what the difference might be. I'm sure there is some, otherwise they wouldn't change the term. But then when I think of all of these trends, at least I'm tempted to think that this therapeutic turn that you mention is not only about the acceptance of therapy and the acceptance of our emotional aspects being important for our work, but perhaps also a deeper trend which is understanding that we are indeed many businesses at least working through people and not machines anymore.
- [15:58]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yes, you know, you mentioned dimming and I started to think about this expert work because this is a big shift in the organizations. Also when we are talking about experts, it's a different thing to lead them than if we are doing easier tasks that the leader can have expertise also on. So that's probably part of this is that our technological development is kind of went forward so much that we have to have a lot more different kind of experts in our organizations. So this is a big shift in itself. And that leads inevitably towards more coaching style of leadership. Because you can't tell people what they have to do. You don't know it as a leader. You just can help them to do cooperation with others and achieve the things that they have to. You know, this is the one thing there, but this therapeutic turn into society. I think that behind it there are even more deeper things happening. I have seen that it used to be so that if you were a manager leader, you have to have this quite good skills in natural sciences, you know, physics, mathematics, chemistry or these kind of things. But nowadays also in the universities there are more and more like humanistic courses and trainings for the leaders. You know, psychology, some social psychology, perhaps some sort of sociology and all these. And this is because the social complexity in the workplaces has increased a lot. We are now more and more networked to bigger and bigger groups of people who come from different cultures, for example. And it affects the interactions inevitably. So we have to understand these kind of dynamics more and more to be leaders, to understand what is happening in these bigger organizations between people. And also we have lots of groups working together. How do we help groups to cooperate? And when the diversity is so huge as it nowadays is, it means that we have to have deeper and deeper understanding of these basic elements of how people relate to each others as individuals and as groups and that is the reason I think, that we have this demand for this humanistic training for the leaders and the organizations.
- [19:14]
Vasco Duarte
Okay, so this is a good point. So we introduced the concept of social complexity. We are all networked and there are patterns that emerge, cannot be predicted or controlled because they are natural aspects of people being networked. And there's this other concept which is this more humanistic leadership. Right, okay, so you talk about the need for more humanistic leadership and I think we need to define that a little bit more. Like, can you give either an example or even talk about your own experience, how that has happened in your own work as a leader and as a coach within the organizations where you work? What does this more humanistic leadership look like in practice?
- [19:59]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yeah, that's a good question. Great question. Well, of course, I've seen this a lot in my work as occupational psychologist when I was helping many different kind of organizations where they have, where people have had issues in their work, you know, probably like work fatigue or these kind of things affecting how they are performing in their work, but also different kind of conflict situations between people that make the cooperation very hard because people can't, you know, talk with each other. They, you know, all this very hard dynamics that come from these kind of situations. So in order to solve those, it's not, you know, enough to just, you know, clarify people to what your role is in the organization. This is your role, these are your tasks, Just do it, you know, and this is your colleague. You have to have a cooperation, meet twice a day and, you know, discuss things and all that. It doesn't work if you have huge conflict, lots of emotions, you don't want to see that person at all, you know, and all this. So how do you solve those? You have to have skills, you know, people skills, humanistic skills to understand the dynamics, what is happening, what are my kind of tools to use in these kind of situations, how to help these people to solve those issues so that our team can work and achieve what they have to achieve. You know, I'm not sure if we are now in the enough concrete level here.
- [21:51]
Vasco Duarte
So I think that's a great example. Right. And conflict does come up very often in the role of a agile coach, scrum master or an engineering leader as one topic to focus on. And you introduce something that I think is important, which is that sometimes the conflict has developed so far that it is no longer about the essential aspects of the task at hand. It is about the personal dynamics or interpersonal dynamics and how those affect the ability to function of the people involved. Right. It's not just that there is a conflict, it's just it can be as far as people can't see each other, like they can't look at, literally look at each other anymore, right?
- [22:34]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah.
- [22:39]
Vasco Duarte
And when we think about the tools that we need, then your perspective is, okay, so in order to handle situations like that, which are very normal in human systems, they are not novel or unexpected, they are entirely predictable and expected to happen in human systems, we need to have a different perspective which steps out of the essential work of a manager, so organizing work, distributing work, and steps into the role of even a psychologist. Right, which is understanding interpersonal dynamics, how to resolve them, how to create safe spaces and all of that.
- [23:17]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yeah, exactly. And you mentioned this, that these things are very natural in human systems. And what are more natural human systems than families and tribes and all that? So what we are nowadays, what we have been utilizing in the leadership nowadays is also tools from, for example, family therapy, systemic family therapy, you know, cognitive behavioral therapies, all these different styles of therapies because they have been developing this kind of understanding and tools already many decades. And nowadays when we are, you know, I think that the one one thing is that quite many organizations are functioning already quite well. So in order to compete, you have to have a very well functioning organization. Not just something that happens, you know, automatically if you put people together, but you have to have people who are working and interacting better together than the average. So there's lots of need for this kind of understanding, how to help these dynamics and also these conflicts and all these sort of negative sounding things that are happening in these human groups, they are very natural and also many times very necessary also for these groups to develop. So as a leader, how can you understand what is happening there? How to help, how to provide something if you can't help yourself. These are basic skills in these kind of situations.
- [25:09]
Vasco Duarte
This is a great topic for us to dive deeper from a slightly different lens. So I'm reminded of an episode we recorded with Martin Gonzalez called Bonfire Moment Leadership Lessons Learned from Successful and not so Successful Startups. I'll put the link in the show notes for people to check it out because I think it tackles that point that you just mentioned, which is companies fail all the time and one of the reasons why they fail is because people inside the company can't work in a way that allows the company to succeed. Right. So it becomes a key asset for the survival of a company to have a leadership group that is able to work through these difficult topics and help their team succeed. We actually started talking about this agile leadership in the context of a trend that is going on every now and then, of course, which is agile, is that what's next for agile? So I want to take that from that perspective. What's next for Agile, Aribeka? So when you look at this therapeutic turn and how important these people skills have become for the success of companies who work through people like the software industry, we're part of. What can we learn from that as we look forward and ask the question what's next for Agile?
- [26:33]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Well, this is a quite demanding question also to look at the future. What will it be? Well, from this perspective I'm thinking about this things like what is the mental health culture of an organization? I mean, you know, I'm just shooting in the dark, I don't know what will happen. But if I try to kind of pick up some things that are not so obvious, this could be something that we haven't used to kind of think about organizations as much from these psychological lenses as we nowadays are kind of beginning to do. So that could also mean that we have to look at the bigger organizations, not just these organizational structures and the processes, how the works are done, but also how these more deeper structures of human mind are kind of developing in the organizations. I don't know if you understand what I'm getting at here.
- [27:58]
Vasco Duarte
I think you will explain it in a second, right?
- [28:00]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yeah. So the kind of personal growth aspect of people and not just professionally because we are talking about, talking about here people and interactions also in the level of dynamics that can be quite emotional and you have your own life histories that you bring with you in the workplaces, also your family histories, all these things. So could those things be in the future, for example, in the competitive advantage that if you can help people to deal with these kind of issues and form more constructive relationships with other people in the organizations that might be something that would be a game changer in some, some situations at least. You know, this is just idea that I just had. I haven't been thinking about this a.
- [29:02]
Vasco Duarte
Lot but I mean we do, we already have, we already have examples of companies that have been able to create an environment where the focus on people and how they act became a competitive advantage. I mean, I'm reminded of the book Maverick which is a transformation of a leader from a mechanistic predictive worldview into a more people centric, non predictive and also generative worldview. Right. Like allowing people freedom to create their own Business within the main business. We know about Gore, the company that created Gore Tex, that has this idea that whenever a unit gets to about 150 people, they split off and become their own unit. We have the example of Zappos before they got bought from Amazon and I'm sure our listeners will have other examples in mind as well. So we already see that the people aspect of how companies are structured and organized can have a significant impact on the success of the companies, right?
- [30:16]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yes, that's true. And I was thinking that this, to kind of form the, the processes and, and the, the business around purpose is of course something that we have seen, you know, you know, the millennias, I guess. But what is the purpose I'm now thinking about? Because this might be something that we could go a little deeper also. If you think about this therapeutic turn, for example, this is something that people are seeking when they come to therapy, psychotherapy, quite often what is the more deeper purpose of one's life? And I guess it would be quite difficult for any organization, at least nowadays, to go so deep in these, these things. You know, we have more superficial purposes in our organization and those could be quite fine so that we can, you know, have, have goals and all that around those. But now that I'm thinking about what would be the next steps, perhaps it's more deeper understanding of these things and, and how people can commit to greater purposes that are really, really important for themselves as individuals.
- [31:53]
Vasco Duarte
We've already talked about the change from mechanistic to a more humanistic view, the therapeutic shift and also the understanding that the structures we are usually looking at in companies like you know, the org chart and also how work is structured and so on, might not be enough for us to create competitive advantage. We might need to look at other aspects which are, I think as Kokilpi defined it, the conversations that are happening within the organization, which is another aspect. But I want to bring this back to the original topic that we started, which is like Agile leadership, right? Like we're talking about the evolution of leadership in the context of adopting and accepting that Agile is an important part of what we do. So are we kind of like within the Agile community perhaps, or at least within our circle here, trying to, or even maybe already defining a new leadership paradigm. Or are we just using some ideas from the past and kind of evolving them forward? Like how do you see these trends in leadership with the agile perspective?
- [33:18]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yeah, like we started this conversation. I think that agile was actually in some ways pinpointing developments that were already happening there it was kind of a protest wave to this more traditional view of organizations. And it started with the software because it was more fast. The iterations and all these things are happening more fast. It's very high expert work and there are many things affecting it. So they were kind of pinpointing already some things, developments that were happening there. And the picker wave, I think, was this, that we were shifting from this mechanistic worldview towards more humanistic worldview, which is more about humans and their relationships, how they are affecting the, the product making and all that. Can you repeat the question?
- [34:32]
Vasco Duarte
Yeah. And the question is, are we through the agile work that has happened and also through these other shifts you just described, like from a mechanistic to a more humanistic and the therapeutic, therapeutic turn, are we actually at the cusp of discovering a new leadership paradigm? Like, I mean, we're calling it Agile leadership because that's the world we're in, but it could be named something else. Like, are we actually trying to define a completely different approach to leadership?
- [35:02]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yeah, yeah. So like I was saying, I think that we have been utilizing existing knowledge quite a lot here and just kind of applying this, this knowledge to this organization that, that we are working with. But is there happening some kind of paradigm shift in the leadership? If there is, I think that it relates to this thing that we have been discussing here, where to kind of, what would be the next steps to understand even better as leaders, how these people's people and interactions work, how to enhance those. And I think that there is quite a lot of opportunities and possibilities to go deeper in those realms because like I said, there have been developments in family therapy, systemic, systemic family therapy and these fields for many decades already to understand this basic dynamics and how to help resolve different kind of issues that naturally emerge in these human groups.
- [36:36]
Vasco Duarte
Okay, so I have a proposal. Maybe this is completely wrong and I'm willing to accept if that's the case. So we've been talking about agile leadership and we've been talking about the trends that are behind what we are now looking at and trying to define as agile leadership, because that's an important aspect, right? You and I are coming from that agile perspective. Of course we have different backgrounds, but we are, you know, agile is a shared background here. And I'm thinking that what we might be trying to explore without knowing it yet is a form of leadership that focuses not on the essential aspects of the work. So the leader as an expert, as you mentioned before, but rather on the essential aspects of. I think we could Call it maximizing human potential. And I don't mean human as individuals only, but human as in groups, teams, organizations, businesses, and ultimately customers. Like one of the things that we talk about, I mean, this is, I don't think that he's necessarily the greatest example, but Jeff Bezos talked about very early on with Amazon about customer obsession. Right. That's another aspect of the focus on people. It's not necessarily going to help inside the company, that's another topic, but it is another aspect of this focus on people. So in agile, trying to make this very, very concrete, in agile leadership, we start by accepting that value is created by people, not by planning processes. And if we do that, then the planning processes need to be designed to support the people and not the people being shepherded through a design, a planning process. And I'm thinking, and I'm sure you have seen that many times, for example, in the annual planning processes that many companies go through, people are kind of shrunk into the process, right? Like you have X weeks to come up with a plan that will somehow transform the company. Oh, and by the way, you have to know exactly what you're going to do, how much it will cost and when it's going to be ready. Like that's the opposite of using a planning process to enable people's creativity. That, that is shrinking people into a formula that was created from a mechanistic worldview. Right. That you need to know exactly everything that's going to happen and how all of the parts interact in order to decide what to do.
- [39:18]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yeah. Yes. I was thinking, listening to you, that the things that we are struggling the most nowadays, and perhaps even earlier also is the cooperation with people, between people, and the things that we use to try to solve these issues. They are usually some kind of control mechanisms, how to align people towards some predefined call or something like that. And we have lots of different tools that we can use in this. But perhaps the thing that is missed quite often is that we are in a really complex situations quite often and we are trying to use these tools of alignment that are kind of designed to more simple environments. And then we are kind of trying to understand how to use these tools to have this alignment or more control, because this is the only thing that we can see could help us to achieve more and faster and be more efficient. But what you were bringing on here is this different look. What if we don't look at these things as a kind of group of individuals, but more kind of social processes that are forming things like Individuals forming things like Herposes, that could be one key change in our perspective.
- [41:23]
Vasco Duarte
So I am a very big fan of Esku Kilpi, as you know, and the work that he did before he passed away, may he rest in peace. And one of the things that he was very often talking about is this work happening in interactions or value being created in interactions. Right. And then he uses this concept of the conversation, which is kind of this long term interaction format that drives the creation of knowledge and also eventually the creation of value in organizations. And you just used the term social process, which I think a conversation within an organization is a social process as well, Right? Like, for example, we start talking about strategy, whatever that is, in say, I don't know, October, and then we end up defining a strategy for the next year, say in November, like that. That is not just whatever three or four meetings that happened about strategy. That is a lot of conversations that happen, implicit email discussions, corridor encounters that ultimately lead to what is then being defined as a strategy for the company. Right. And I really like the idea of a social process because it might give us the perspective we need to start creating different leadership tools. Right. Like I was talking about the planning process as one example, but there are others, right? Like one of the things that we need in organizations is creative experimentation, right? Because we don't know what value is until we actually see it happening. We need somehow an approach that allows us to be creative, that allows us to experiment with ideas and then gain the knowledge and then iterate again. That would be, I think, an agile characteristic for leadership and creative experimentation requires clear boundaries and requires a lot of management effort, but not in a linear planning fashion. So maybe that is one key difference of what we are now calling agile leadership is that, and I think Jurgen Apello called it the Gardner metaphor in his Management 3.0 book, right. That we look at the organization as a set of opportunities and options that we have to somehow grow or foster rather than, and I know that this is a limited metaphor, of course, rather than from the perspective of organizing, controlling, which is the other perspective you talked about.
- [44:00]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yes, we use metaphors psychologically to have a different perspective to things. And this is why it's very useful to have metaphors. And actually when we are trying to solve any more complex problem or situation, what we are actually trying to do is we are trying to understand it from a different perspective to form a metaphor of what is happening. And when we do this metaphor, if we are able to kind of form some metaphor that is very fitting in that Situation, that is when the situation starts to kind of start solving. So I like this idea of conversations as a social processes. I think that the conversations are something where we can somehow grasp the social process. It becomes visible. So if I would be a gardener as a leader, my plans would be these conversations. It would not be the people or groups or teams. I wouldn't garden those. I would garden the conversations. There's a beautiful rose blossoming there.
- [45:35]
Vasco Duarte
And that totally changes the perspective of leadership. Right. Because now you need to be aware of those conversations and you need to have the tools to help help the conversation grow and somehow at some point also crystallize into something.
- [45:48]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yes, exactly. Because they are essentially living things, the conversations. They are not fixed. And this is the thing that we often kind of go wrong because we try to reify things to fix them. And we know how they are because they are fixed and that doesn't change. But the conversations, they are ever evolving, living.
- [46:17]
Vasco Duarte
This just made me want to invite David Marque back on the show and get the three of us to talk about conversation because he always talks about language and language is of course the tool we use for conversation. So I think that would be a great, a great get together. All right, Aripeka, we're getting close to the end, but before we go, what is one resource could be a book, a blog, a video, whatever that you would recommend for people who want to dive deeper into to this, these different ideas and of course agile leadership.
- [46:51]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Well, the last topic that we were discussing, this like a conversations, you know, I really like this Ralph these days, books, for example, what was the book called? This. Let me check.
- [47:12]
Vasco Duarte
And he goes to his, to his shelf.
- [47:18]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Yeah, so this, yeah, so this complexity and group processes. And I think that he was quite spot on defining these ways of understanding social processes emerging in the organizations and actually seeing organizations as a social process emerging there. So that would be one of my favorite resources. And if you want to, you know, study a little bit of my thinking about these things, I have some, some books also, unfortunately only in Finnish, but Millen Laboratorio and also Mindfulness, which is only available nowadays as audiobook because it's sold out as a paper version.
- [48:15]
Vasco Duarte
And we'll put the link to all of those and also to Aripeka's famous blog in English, Fractal Sauna. A lot of history of agile is in that blog, so you may want to check it out if you're interested in these topics and where else can people find you and the work that you're doing?
- [48:33]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Ape Well, I have also podcast Mielen Laboratorio. It has both Finnish and English episodes, so if you are interested in these different topics concerning human mind, that could be interesting thing to check out also.
- [48:56]
Vasco Duarte
Absolutely. And we'll put the link to all of those in the show. Notes. Thank you very much for being with us and sharing all that wisdom with us.
- [49:04]
Ari Pekka Scarp
Thank you Vasco and your questions were really difficult, so it was nice to be challenged also. Thank you.
- [49:16]
Vasco Duarte
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