The 90-Day Rule—Building Trust Before Disrupting the Status Quo | Joel Bancroft-Connors

Summary

Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile Storytelling from the Trenches

Episode Summary: "The 90-Day Rule—Building Trust Before Disrupting the Status Quo | Joel Bancroft-Connors"

Release Date: June 4, 2025
Host: Vasco Duarte, Agile Coach, Certified Scrum Master, Certified Product Owner
Guest: Joel Bancroft-Connors, Agile Practitioner and Change Leader

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Introduction

In this compelling episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, host Vasco Duarte welcomes Joel Bancroft-Connors to delve into the intricacies of leading change within an entrenched organizational structure. Titled "The 90-Day Rule—Building Trust Before Disrupting the Status Quo," Joel shares his firsthand experience of introducing Agile methodologies in a traditional manufacturing company.

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The Challenge of Leading Change

Joel begins by recounting his first role post-certification, where he was hired as a program manager at a longstanding hard drive manufacturing company. Despite his background in program and project management, Joel was eager to apply his newly acquired Scrum and Agile knowledge.

Joel (01:22): "I was being hired into a decades-old hard drive manufacturing company. They had bought a startup to lead their branded products group, essentially building consumer hard drives. My role was to bridge the traditional enterprise with the agile startup."

The company's rigid adherence to Six Sigma processes posed a significant challenge to implementing Agile practices. Joel recognized that a direct, forceful introduction of Scrum would likely face resistance and failure.

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Building Trust Through Patience and Listening

Joel emphasizes the importance of trust in facilitating change. Drawing inspiration from a principle he learned from ManageTools, Joel adopted the 90-Day Rule, which advocates for doing no harm in the initial phase and formulating a change plan subsequently.

Joel (08:35): "In the first couple of weeks, I didn't try and do anything other than sit down and listen. I scheduled interviews with every single person I'd be interacting with, asking the same questions to understand their perspectives."

This approach allowed Joel to build credibility without making immediate disruptions. His methodical listening and understanding fostered a sense of trust and openness among team members.

Joel (09:58): "I created trust because they didn't try and change stuff right away. About three weeks in, my boss noticed that everyone was happy with my approach, even though I hadn't implemented any changes yet."

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Streamlining Communication Processes

One of Joel's early initiatives involved overhauling the company's cumbersome reporting process. The Vice President of Product Development was spending excessive time updating a massive PowerPoint presentation for weekly status reports.

Joel (03:00): "I turned that 100-megabyte PowerPoint slide into a single Excel spreadsheet that could be printed and distributed. This streamlined our communication and focused our discussions on actionable items rather than mere status updates."

By adopting principles from the daily Scrum meetings, Joel shifted the focus towards achieving tangible results, enhancing both efficiency and effectiveness in team communications.

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Introducing Scrum and Achieving Remarkable Results

After establishing a foundation of trust and streamlined communication, Joel identified bottlenecks within the software team responsible for adding value to the hard drives. Recognizing the need for structured Agile practices, he proposed Scrum training to enhance the team's commitment and delivery capabilities.

Joel (06:30): "I suggested bringing in Scrum training to help the software team meet their commitments more effectively. My boss trusted my judgment, so we proceeded without prior Agile mentions."

The introduction of Scrum transformed the software team's productivity, reducing product development cycles from six to nine months down to just three months. This significant improvement underscored the effectiveness of Joel's strategic and patient approach to change management.

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The Importance of Purpose and Ownership

Joel underscores the role of purpose in motivating teams, referencing Dan Pink's "Drive" which highlights autonomy, mastery, and purpose as key motivators.

Joel (10:28): "Purpose connects us back to 'Start with Why.' If people don't know why they're here or why their work matters, the initiative will fail."

He echoes John Doerr's sentiment, advocating for creating missionaries, not mercenaries—individuals driven by understanding and belief in the organization's mission rather than mere obligation.

Joel (10:45): "If you want to build a ship, don't tell people to cut down trees; inspire them with the longing for the endless wonder of the sea."

This philosophy fosters ownership and intrinsic motivation, leading to a more engaged and productive team.

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Key Takeaways and Insights

1. Patience is Crucial: Building trust before implementing changes ensures smoother transitions and greater acceptance of new methodologies.

2. Listen and Understand: Engaging with team members to comprehend their perspectives lays the groundwork for effective change.

3. Streamline Communication: Simplifying reporting processes can lead to more focused and productive meetings.

4. Introduce Change Strategically: Timing and method of introducing Agile practices can significantly impact their success.

5. Foster Purpose: Ensuring that team members understand the 'why' behind their tasks enhances motivation and ownership.

6. Continuous Learning: Emulating practices from experienced Agile practitioners and ongoing education are vital for sustained improvement.

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Conclusion

Joel Bancroft-Connors' journey highlights the essence of leading change with empathy, strategic planning, and a deep understanding of team dynamics. By adhering to the 90-Day Rule and prioritizing trust and purpose, Joel successfully transformed a traditional company's approach to product development, showcasing the profound impact of thoughtful Agile implementation.

Listeners are encouraged to adopt similar principles in their Agile transformations, emphasizing patience, communication, and purpose-driven leadership to achieve meaningful and lasting change.

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For more insightful episodes and actionable Agile practices, visit scrummastertoolbox.org and explore the Scrum Master Toolbox membership.

Transcript

[Vasco]

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.

[Joel Bancroft Connors]

Hello everybody. Welcome to our Wednesday the Leading Change episode this week with Joel Bancroft Connors. Hey Joel, welcome back.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Thank you, Vasco. We're halfway there.

[Joel Bancroft Connors]

We're halfway there indeed. So Wednesday is change day. I like to call it change leadership day here on the podcast. So we want to hear a story of a change process you were involved with and tell us a little bit about the context. Maybe small company, big company, what kind of change was it? And then walk us through the steps right like this happened and that happened so that we understand how the process unraveled. And also as you go through that highlight for us, some of the tools, the tips, the tricks and the techniques you learned back then that you still applied today.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yeah, so for this one, I actually ended up going all the way back to my very first job after I got my CSM from Chris Sims, as I thought we talked about on Monday. And I got a job working for a hard drive manufacturing company. I was hired on to be a program manager for their branded products group. And I'm still very much steeped in my program and project management background. I've got this, this new Scrum knowledge and Agile Knowledge and I'm just diving into it. I'm going to meetups and I'm reading book and everything. And fortunately the San Francisco Bay Area agile community had some really great people. Still does, but I mean, Ron Lichti, Chris Sims, Ainsley Nees, Roger Brown, some really, really great people. And I learned a lot of patience and a lot of don't just go in guns blazing. And so I get this new job and it's like I could have just been this idealistic and just come in and just tried to change everything and and that would have just fallen completely flat. I was being hired into a decades old hard drive manufacturing company. Very stayed in its ways. They had bought, they had been trying to get into consumer products for a while and they ended up buying a startup to lead their branded products group, their consumer products group basically building hard drives you'd buy in a, in a store like Best Buy or whatever the equivalent is in Europe. And they then promptly handed that company, they bought their entire Six Sigma process and said here we want you to be agile and innovative and here follow all these processes. And so I was ostensibly hired to basically be the interface between the enterprise and this startup so the startup could just keep running the way it wanted. Well, that's what I started with. But even the startup was having had challenges and I realized they need a lot of help. And I realized I couldn't just go oh well, you need to use Scrum. That wasn't going to work, especially with a lot of hardware stuff. I focused on principles and I literally went to the how do I create greater transparency? And I streamlined the meeting structures, I streamlined our reporting meeting. My boss, the VP of product development spent literally a day, a week updating a 100 megabyte PowerPoint slide. This is 15 years ago. And to do these weekly status reports. And so I took that and I worked on streamlining that and I turned it into a single Excel spreadsheet that could be printed out and handed out to people. And we really refocused how we were communicating and I used principles from the daily Scrum in our weekly status meeting and kind of changing it to things like what do you need from somebody? What does anybody need anything from this person? And really focusing on getting to done as opposed to talking about status.

[Joel Bancroft Connors]

So it was a little bit like changing the conversation from here's what we've been doing to okay, how do we get to that end result that we all want?

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yeah. And in fact doing a little bit of stuff I'd picked up already from Luke Homan because I discovered innovation games early on. Luke went on to become a mentor of mine and future perfect thinking and so going let's describe the end state and then let's back up one step at a time until we're here at today. I was really starting to make progress and I mean I was even trusted. I got to go to Taiwan with my boss and look at the manufacturing process and understand it and really learned A lot about the roots of Lean by looking at actual factory production. About six months in, I went to my boss and I said, look, I think we've been doing great here, but we're still being really bottlenecked by some of this stuff happening in the software team. Because we had this small software team that was building the software that would go on the hard drives to add some, some value add. And I told him, I think what we need to do is bring in some Scrum training and help them to really get better at making and meeting commitments. He looked at me and said, I have no idea what you just said, but let's do it because I trust you based on what you've already done. And so it was six months in before I ever uttered the word Agile or Scrum. And at that point I then went back to Chris Sims, hired him and brought him in to teach the software team Scrum. And we were able to continue to do things where we took production development that could take six to nine months. And we actually built a product, a full product with hardware, hardware case, electronics, boards, packaging, everything. We did it all in three months time. Yeah.

[Joel Bancroft Connors]

And that's the kind of value we should be able to talk about. Like we were just discussing on Monday, right? And one of the things that kind of struck me from, from that story is this. Okay, first of all, you came in knowing the, let's call it old language, right? Like, because you had your project management background, so you had been, you know, knee deep in that kind of thinking and language, but now you had this insight from the CSM course where you thought, okay, maybe there are things here we can streamline, like going from 100 megabyte PowerPoint to a small Excel sheet we can distribute and discuss and so on. Today, probably that would be Jira, maybe, I don't know. But then kind of transforming that into, okay, there's certain things that we can do much faster if we just bring in more training, right? Like help all of these teams kind of get the ideas and apply them in practice. And for me, this ability to wait for the right moment is critical. Now, we don't know when the right moment is. So I want to use kind of air quotes here when I say right moment. But certainly the right moment isn't the first day you talk to your boss who doesn't know you yet, doesn't trust your ability to deliver. And of course, in that case, just as he very clearly illustrated, he doesn't know the language either. And that's the easiest way to Alienate somebody is to speak in a language that is foreign to them. Right. So when you, when you think about that, like, what were the things that were in your mind that allowed you to keep that patience but still that clear focus on helping the teams get to a point where the next logical step would be training?

[Unnamed Speaker]

Well, funny enough, one of the things that helped me was something completely outside of agile. It was called managertools.com they did a podcast series, they've been podcasting for almost 20 years now on good career and management advice. And one of the things that I learned from them was this principle of, in the first 90 days, do no harm, but in the next 90 days, you better have a plan for doing it. And so part of this was, for the first time ever, in the first couple of weeks, I didn't try and do anything other than sit down and listen. And I scheduled interviews with every single person that I, that I was going to be interacting with and working with. And I asked them all the same questions and I just tried to understand. And then on all these meetings, I'm sitting there and I'm just listening. I'm writing down notes so I can go look up. Because, I mean, I had a BlackBerry, but literally it's like they're throwing out three letter acronyms. I have no idea what they are. I'd go back to my desk and I'd sit down, I'd start typing them in to figure out what it was. But it was that part of it was, it's. I created trust because they didn't try and change stuff right away. I remember about, about three weeks in, my boss came and said, I don't know what you're doing, but everybody's so happy you're doing great. Just keep it up. And I hadn't done anything yet.

[Joel Bancroft Connors]

Well, you had done something that is very important. Right. You had started to listen.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yeah.

[Joel Bancroft Connors]

And one should never underestimate the importance and the impact of giving somebody the feeling that their thinking and their ideas matter.

[Vasco]

At the end of the day, we're.

[Joel Bancroft Connors]

In a people business.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Yeah. And I think that's the big thing is the. As I like to, opinion breeds ownership. Asking people what they think gets them more involved in the process.

[Joel Bancroft Connors]

Yeah, absolutely. And when people feel valued, they then want to contribute even more. And it's a positive cycle because the more they contribute, the more they own. The more they contribute and get listened to, the more motivation they have to contribute even more.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Right. Which then ties us right into one of my other favorite books, Dan Pink's. Drive, autonomy, mastery and purpose. And I think so many people over index on autonomy and mastery. But let's not underestimate purpose because that connects us right back to start with why? If people don't know why they're there, they don't know why what they're doing matters, then it's going to fail. And so John Doerr from OKR Fame always talks about we want missionaries, not mercenaries. People don't know why they're doing the work. They're going to show up, they're going to do the work, they're going to go home. But if you tell them why, then they're going to do everything. There's a great quote by Anton Saint Dupre, same author for the Littlest Prince, and I'm going to horribly ruin the quote. But basically it's if you want to build a ship, don't tell people to cut down trees and direct them on what to do. Instead, give them a longing for the endless wonder of the sea.

[Joel Bancroft Connors]

Yeah, absolutely. That's a great way to put it. Thank you for sharing that with us, Joel.

[Unnamed Speaker]

Thank you. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm really passionate about these things and just starting with why, and then listening can just do so much.

[Joel Bancroft Connors]

Totally.

[Vasco]

All right, I hope you liked this episode, but before you hit next episode, here's the deal. This podcast is powered by people like you, the members who wanted more than just inspiration. They wanted real tools and real connection to people who are practicing agile. Every day we're talking access to over 700 hours of agile gold, CTO level strategy talks, Summit keynotes, live workshops, E courses, Deep Dive interviews, books. And if you're into no Estimates, we got the pioneers of no Estimates in those Deep Dive interviews as well. Agile Business Intelligence, creating product visions, coaching your product owner courses, you name it. You'll get invites to monthly live Q&As with agile pioneers and practitioners, plus a private Slack community which is free of all of that AI slop you see everywhere. And of course, course without the flame wars, it's a community of practitioners that want to learn and thrive together. It's the best place to connect with community and learn together. So if this podcast has helped you before, imagine what you will get from this podcast membership. So head on over to scrummaster toolbox.org membership and join the community that's shaping the future of Agile. We have so much for you, so check out all the [e-mail] membership because listening is great, it's important, but doing it together, that's next level. I'll see you in the community. Slack.

[Joel Bancroft Connors]

We really hope you liked our show.

[Vasco]

And if you did, why not rate this podcast on Stitcher or itunes?

[Joel Bancroft Connors]

Share this podcast and let other Scrum.

[Vasco]

Masters know about this valuable resource for their work.

[Joel Bancroft Connors]

Remember that sharing is caring.