Latest / einfach gelöst / #16: Tobias Mayer – Let team emerge
Transcript
- Urs Reupke: Hello and welcome to Einfach Geloes, the IT Agile podcast. I'm Urs and today's guest did Agile way before it was fancy. He has done social work. He's been a programmer, a coach and a trainer. He's worked with corporations independently and he has seen big Agile from the inside. As a thinker and author, he's a man of clear words, inspiring and outspoken, one of Agile's greatest enthusiasts and greatest skeptics at the same Tobias Mayer: Yeah. Urs Reupke: time. I'm happy to welcome to the show Mr. Tobias Meyer. Tobias Mayer: Thanks, Des. Urs Reupke: Tobias, would you introduce yourself Tobias Mayer: Good to be here. Urs Reupke: to our audience in your own words? Tobias Mayer: It's always hard, isn't it? Well, my name, you can see on the screen there is Tobias, Tobias Mayer. I'm from the UK and I spent many years living in the USA and that's really where I started my agile journey when I was living in Palo Alto, California on the edge of Silicon Valley. Probably quite a good place to be at that time. So I live back in the UK now. I've came across Agile in 2003, something like that. The term Agile that is, you know. So before that I was familiar with XP from around 1998 and had craved to be on a XP team that actually practiced it, so never was. It was my beginning of my own software development journey actually 1998, 99. first in research and then in application. And I worked at some companies in California, including Yahoo. And Yahoo was the place where I discovered Agile And then the Agile Manifesto, and then it all kind of like pieced together with what I already knew. And that was the first time I tried any kind of implementation of Scrum. And that was 2004, going into 2005. So it's been a journey of 20 something years now and it feels like it's winding down to be honest. The heyday has peaked I think with Agile and there's a dispersal, there's a sense of dispersal happening within what was once a very tight community. But yeah, I don't know what else to say about me. I'm a software developer, I came to software. much later in life than most people do. was 35 when I discovered coding for the first time and I'd had a sort of very spotty career before that doing various things in the theatre and in publishing and youth and community work, social work. So I was a bit all over the place really and discovering code was like a wake up for me. I recognised it was where I belonged. So I dived in head first and went and got a degree and off I went running. I joined a research team for a year looking at software process and that's where I came across XP and it just kind of touched my core really because it was a non-processed way of dealing with process. It was very light touch, was Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: very immediate, it got rid of all of the nonsense that I could see surrounding software process and the methodologies that people were using at the time and it just sort of cut to the chase and it created great code. So I strived to work in that kind of way but was never lucky enough to be part of a proper XP team. Urs Reupke: Wow, thank you. you're very humanist in your approach from what I've read and from what I know from speaking to you. So I Tobias Mayer: Yeah. Urs Reupke: fully see that XP your heart is. Despite that, you went on to work for big corporations in software development. Corporations are not humanists to put it bluntly. Tobias Mayer: I mean the ethos of large corporations is not human centric, that's true, but within the pockets that you find yourself in, there is team, know, team exists. And one of my advices I always give to people when they ask me how to start a team is, the first response is please don't. Let team emerge, know. So open your eyes and look around your organization and where do you see team happening? Because it is happening, you know, and people naturally gravitate together, testers and developers and designers, they talk to each other, they have lunch together, they figure problems out together. Where do you see that happening? So where are the people stepping outside of the silos? That's where you'll find Agile Teams. So, you know, these things exist in the organization. I worked for Yahoo for about two and a half years and then I moved on and I came back there for another two years, about 10 years later. It was interesting actually because they laid me off and then they laid me back on in a different role. Urs Reupke: Hahaha Tobias Mayer: Funny world. They laid me off because I was a bit too outspoken about the changes that I felt were necessary in the teams that I was working with and they wanted to have a... present a common front about agility and I said, you know what, it's not really about that. It's about doing the right thing. So I was kindly asked to leave and that's when my consulting career really took off actually. It was the beginning of the Agile movement really, 2005, 2006, about that time and I had been given the ability to teach scrum from Ken Schwaber. In the old days, there was no process to go through. was basically Ken said, hey, you'll do and co-teach a class with me and then start doing them on your own. So it was very easy to become a CST if you knew Ken Schwaber. So I've been doing that on and off for the next 20 years. Every time I stopped doing it and came back, I had to go through another bunch of barricades to stop people coming in and jump through a few more hoops and things. But I've enjoyed the actual teaching part of very much. It's been a way of kind of opening people's eyes to new ways of working. I'm not a big on Scrum by the Book, that kind of idea. I think that the ideas Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: in Scrum that found their way into the Agile Manifesto, many of them, are really old ideas from craftsmanship. They go back thousands of years essentially and this is how craftsmen have worked for, this is the beginning of time really and we've forgotten it. That's all it is really. We've forgotten how to be craftspeople and Agile has reminded us that this is what we are and when we're making things, we're making new things which is what we always do in the software where we make new products every time. So when you're making a new thing, you work like a craftsperson. You you work like Urs Reupke: Right. Tobias Mayer: an artisan, you don't work like an engineer. That's not, it doesn't fit, the paradigm doesn't work. Certainly not manufacturing either. So we've got to be careful where we draw our analogies from, I think. And craftsmanship is great. So it spoke to that aspect of me, know, the part of me that was, I was raised by artists, you know, so both my parents were artists. And so I just had that in my bones in some way, I suppose. When Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: I first wrote, when I first discovered, bit embarrassing really but when I first discovered writing code I felt like a poet and ⁓ I thought the code was beautiful and I used to print it out and put it on my wall so I could just look at it and a buyer ⁓ it felt like you Urs Reupke: Wow Tobias Mayer: know and the art of like making programs as short as you possibly could like it's almost Urs Reupke: Hmm. Tobias Mayer: like haikuing you know how can I turn this this you know eight stanza poem into a haiku which is really what what great developers would do. That's what I've learned over time. This competitive spirit that he talks about in the book Hackers was about how do you get one byte less in your code and make it still compile and still work. There was a whole trend in those days. Yeah, everything's bloated now. Urs Reupke: Yeah, and that's so lost time, right? So like, mean, today we have gigabytes just for a single text editor because it's easier to include all the frameworks, stuff like that. It's so weird. Tobias Mayer: Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So the art of writing code back in the early days before my time really. But I there's a lovely I brought a few books along actually. And I'll bring them up to Urs Reupke: cool, let's do it. Tobias Mayer: the screen. As I mentioned, this is what I'm talking about now. Hackers by Stephen Levy. It's it's an absolutely wonderful book. It gives you the history. of the software industry really going back to the 1950s. and bringing it up till the start of 2000s. I'm not sure when this was written actually, probably late 90s I imagine. Urs Reupke: cool. Tobias Mayer: But it was a book that really influenced me in, before I came across Agile actually, oh 84, was written in 1984. So was really old by the time I read it. I read it in 98 I Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: think, so it was already old by then. Yeah, it's a lovely book. Urs Reupke: Cool. So going from there, you discovering Agile and coming from your XP background, as a consultant, you probably have seen lots of enterprises, lots of medium businesses on all the range that business has to offer. What's your impression over these past, let's say 20 years? How has work and the world and the way we work developed over this time? under the influence of agile. Tobias Mayer: Well, I think things have generally shifted on the whole. know, the companies that were able to adopt agile ways of working are more the mid-sized to small-sized companies. The really big ones struggled. Although having said that, you know, one of what I consider the biggest success in my career, or certainly the most enjoyable piece of work, and it was successful too, was working at Business Week. in New York, which is a very old fashioned, very staid company. Very large and bloated and thousands of managers and senior managers and managers of senior managers and big hierarchy. And yet we found this little pocket. This is the thing I was saying earlier, there are pockets of brilliance in any organisation. You just have to look for it. And we had this amazing team, a mix of employees and consultants who had been brought in. And we did this project that allowed Business Week to be sold, in fact, on the back of the product that we made. So I think it was owned by McGraw Hill, wasn't it? And then it got, now it's owned by somebody else. don't know. I don't keep up with these things. Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: But it was surprising because it was such a strain, know, a culture that was the antithesis of what we were bringing. And yet when they saw it working, they embraced it. And our reviews were marvellous. We had people from all levels of the organisation coming to see this working software and being amazed that we could produce stuff in two weeks that actually could be demonstrable. And then they would get ideas of, can you do this? Can you do that as well? So they just loved the process. And it did, Urs Reupke: Cool. Yeah. Yeah, but... Tobias Mayer: to respond to your question more generally, did... I think it has, in that 20 years or so, has shifted the way people think about work and it really needed shifting. I think the shift was beginning to happen anyway. I Agile was, Agile Manifesto, should I say, a, I don't know, what do you call it, like a point, a foundation, a mark in the sand that said before this it was that and after this it's gonna be this. But it was already happening. It's not a hard line like that. There were lots of people doing really great stuff. If you look at the history of in Craig Larmann's book, Agile, I think it's called Agile Management, written around 2001, 2002, around that time. In that book he talks about Evo. A lot of people still haven't heard of Evo. Evo was formed by Tom Gilb in the 1970s and Evo stands for evolutionary software development. Everything about it is agile. There were short seven-day cycles. was the customer sitting with the team working on it. It was an agile process but it was never acknowledged as such and his way of working didn't really catch on. It took another 20 years for people to catch up with him basically. Tom's still around and his son, Kai Gilb, is still teaching and practicing Evo and they've developed it to some extent. I remember when I came across Craig's book and I reached out to Tom Gilb, because I looked at the list of the names of people at the Agile Manifesto meeting and I wrote to Tom and I said, I'm surprised that your name isn't there, why did you not go? Urs Reupke: Mm. Tobias Mayer: He wrote back in just a few words and said, I wasn't invited. Who knows why, you know, who knows why. Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: But it was nice that Craig acknowledged him and his work in that book. we invited Ty Gill to do a session on Evo at one of the Scrum conferences. I did a full day workshop on this. Urs Reupke: I never heard of that myself. So I'll look it up when we're done here. Yeah. Tobias Mayer: There you go, that's what I mean. It's one of the unknown cornerstones of the agile industry really. back then is that no one else is doing anything like that. It was in the 70s. Urs Reupke: Yeah. Okay, because it was in the 70s. Tobias Mayer: It might have been the early 80s, but it was way before the manifesto was written, way Urs Reupke: Yeah, cool. Tobias Mayer: before Scrum came along. Scrum came along in 1993. That's when Jeff and Ken started talking about it. They presented it in 1995 they presented the first Patrons paper on Scrum. Urs Reupke: right. Tobias Mayer: And then the manifesto was seven years on, or five, six years on from that. So there was a lot, you know, a lot happened before the manifesto, but the manifesto was significant in that it was a consolidation of ideas, essentially, you know, people like Alistair Coburn, Kent Beck. Ron Jeffreys, know, these people that have been practicing these ideas in one way or another for many, many years, were finally able to sort of have their voices heard. Urs Reupke: So speaking of... Tobias Mayer: I lost track of the conversation. Urs Reupke: Scrum, you have a long history with Scrum. You mentioned Schwaber and being essentially being knighted by him way back when. I Tobias Mayer: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Urs Reupke: looked it up, you appear to have been one of the first 10 or so Scrum trainers, is that right? Tobias Mayer: I'm not sure if it was one of the first 10, it was certainly the first 20 I'm pretty sure. Urs Reupke: First 20, so really, a veteran of the scene. You've worked with Scrum Alliance famously as their head of creative or head of product, creative director, that's it, right, thank you. And Tobias Mayer: Yeah, Creative Director, I think it was for a year. Yeah. Urs Reupke: split just a year later. So what's your take on the big agile certification industry these days? Tobias Mayer: Oh gosh, it's so mixed, you know. I'm not a certification person. I have almost none myself and I don't strive to get them. But I do, you know, I've come around really, I think. I did it for a while just because I wanted to teach Scrum and that was the only doorway to teaching Scrum. I never really gave it a second thought about certification. I got one when I did my class with Ken and Kurt and didn't really think anything of it. I put it aside and got on with what had to be done. But I started to realise, and I stopped being a trainer for several years and I was quite vocal against the idea of certification. But then I had to eat my words a bit because I was moving back to the UK from USA and I needed to have some sort of income from this. I Urs Reupke: Hmph. Tobias Mayer: was advised by a couple of other CSTs, Alistair being one of them, to reapply and become a trainer again. And so I did. So I had to rethink what do I think about the certification part of this. And I had to recognize that it's important to some people. Some people, it matters. For them, it's their marker. It's like, yes, I reached this place. If someone has got their career mapped out for themselves, they want to reach their milestones and certifications at various levels represent those milestones. And whether that's PMI. which a lot of people then, they mix PMI and they mix up as Agile Alliance and Camban University. They want all of them, they want a big string of certifications Urs Reupke: hehe Tobias Mayer: and good for them. But what I see it as is it's the admission to come in the door almost. The promise of a certificate gets people there into the room. And then when they're in the room, you can actually teach them what I feel is important to teach. which is this new way of working which confronts and challenges the status quo. And so I want them to leave as ambassadors of a new way of working. They got a certificate, that's their goal, my goal is to make you an ambassador. In the same way that I became an ambassador of Scrum after I did the class. Even though I left my Scrum training class by the way. completely bewildered, still not really understanding Scrum and not knowing how to put it into practice. But I had these two or three major aha moments in the class that made me realise that this is how I needed to be working and even though didn't understand it properly I was going to. And you could only really understand it by doing it. The theory is one thing. The theory's got a bit more refined over those years but you have to put it into practice really. So I became, Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: you know, and I remember writing to Ken after I did my class and I got my certificate and I said, it seems a bit absurd to have this paper that tells me I'm a certified master of scrum. You know, I said, I don't quite know what I'm doing. And his response was that he said, because I was working at Yahoo at the time, very old fashioned, top down waterfall processes. In fact, they had just hired a guy to improve their process and he improved it by drawing a picture of a waterfall sideways. So. Instead of going like that, it went like that, but it was a waterfall. Just had to tilt the page. Urs Reupke: No. Tobias Mayer: So he had put all that in place. so, and what Ken said to me, he said, look, you probably know, I'm almost certain that you know more about Scrum than anyone else in your organization at the time, at this time. So your job is to become an evangelist of Scrum and help other people see, see the light, as he would have put it probably. And I said, that's what I did. and it made me quite unpopular. People Urs Reupke: Hahaha Tobias Mayer: don't want to hear, evangelists, do they? So I, I, talk, I use the word ambassador now. It's a little bit more gentle and a bit more relevant, I think. But yeah, so that's what I want people to do. want them to feel it. Like this is a, this is great. I love this. This is how I want to work. You know, that's, that's the parts of Scrum that I think are great. It's not all the... the process and rules around how many minutes you should spend at a meeting and all of that nonsense. You can bypass all of that. In fact, Bob Hartman and I did bypass all of that when we wrote the Simple Scrum Guide. So I don't know if you're familiar with that document, but there's now a new Urs Reupke: I am, yes. Tobias Mayer: one called the Simple Guide, A Simple Guide to Scrum, not The, A Simple Guide to Scrum. And we... just teased out the essence really and got 17 pages of instruction down to a page and a half. Just pulling out what was really important about it. A lot of people are using it now actually in place. Urs Reupke: Yeah. And I heard Scrum Alliance want to do something with it. Tobias Mayer: They do. We are currently talking with them about the possibility of incorporating it in some way. Nothing is different. Yeah, Urs Reupke: Very cool, congratulations. Tobias Mayer: we'll see where that goes. Urs Reupke: Yeah. So you mentioned classes just now. By my experience, classes have shifted over the past 10 years. Like when I started training, it was more like giving people the essence and giving them food for thought and some ideas Tobias Mayer: Mm. Urs Reupke: on what to do and what to adapt and maybe what to drop. And these days it's much more codified. Teach us the one perfect scrum. Is it your experience as well or does it differ? Tobias Mayer: Well, I don't teach that way. I can't obviously I can't speak to other people, but I've sat in on quite a lot of other trainers and some I have great respect for and others to me just feel like run of the mill. know, they're teaching Scrum, but not in a way that I would find inspiring. The difficult thing is like a person coming to this. without knowing anything about Scrum or anything about the Scrum Alliance, they don't know how to find the right person to teach them. So they just go for price or they go for, you know, date or convenience or some other factor. And they think it's all each class is the same, but it really isn't, you know, this is very open to the trainer to interpret how they want to teach the, learning objectives there. And so the styles of training are... vastly different. One trainer might do it with storytelling and pictures, graphic facilitation kind of approach. Another trainer might do it with lots of interactive exercises and someone else might do it with PowerPoint slides. But you don't know what you're signing up for. Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: very occasionally, I get someone on my class who hates it and they get angry that I'm teaching in the way I'm teaching. And so I got now I started, well several years ago I started, being really clear when someone signs up for my class I send them a description of how the class is going to play out approximately and what's expected of them. I said this is a very interactive class, a lot is asked of you, you're going to be treated in the way that you need to be treated when you're a Scrum team member, have to step up to responsibility. So do not expect to be spoon-fed information. If you want that, go and read a book or watch a video. I try to make it as clear as possible. And then I don't get any complaints. If people complain, say, well, you didn't read the preamble, did you? But they don't. Once they've read it, they either come or they don't. And most of them come and they know what to expect. And it's a kinder thing to do, isn't it, really? Just to let people know what they're walking into. Urs Reupke: Yeah, managing expectations. Tobias Mayer: there was a period of time when everybody wanted to become a scrum trainer because it was like a way of minting money almost, you know. It absolutely is not that now, just to be clear. Where most scrum trainers, if they continue this at all, it's quite a struggle to even get enough people on a class to make a class viable. So there's, I mean, you know, the bubbles burst and it's all sort of like dispersing and fading out and people are moving into other areas and... AI is obviously the big thing right now. And scrum is Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: a little bit archaic to be honest. It's like the way of working that scrum recommended was totally appropriate at the time. And we had these very slow processes but now we've got the ability to move at sort of lightning speed. Why would you need to do scrum? Thomas Melosh, started a company called Menlo Innovations back in the early 2000s that embraced XP in a great way. So Tom is very familiar with XP. But his latest project he wrote about on LinkedIn, it's him and Claude. And he said he's set Claude up to do XP basically, to do test driven development and continuous integration and the whole works really. And so... He writes code by describing in English what he wants to have happen and Claude does the coding and then it does all of its checking and everything else. So what he's basically saying is that I've got essentially a 10 person team here with me and a machine and I can produce software at the same rate I could with a 10 person team at a massively lower overhead, massively lower, know, thousands of percents lower. And so why would anyone not do that? If you can learn how to do that and it doesn't, Tom's obviously an expert in this and he's cracked it, I think, in a way that many people haven't still failed to do. there's, you get AI to write your code, it can write crappy code the same way that a junior developer can write crappy code or even a senior developer can write crappy code. Not properly tested, not integrated, variable names that don't make sense. You need to train it to write effective code. Once you can do that, could really, you could really soar, you know. the need for that isn't that agile. That's agile, isn't it? Really? That's about as agile as you can get. But then you don't need these frameworks like Scrum or Kanban to manage the work because it's just kind of managed itself. So anyway, it's a whole new future, isn't it? We don't know where it's going. You know, think that I don't... The sad thing about it is there are 10 developers who now don't have a job as a result of that, if you can map it exactly. You if he said, want to just start this company and create this product, then 10 years ago, he would have had to find 10 developers to do it. Now he has to find no developers to do it. So where are they working? And if this is, you know, scales up, then we're going to have a lot of people struggling to get work. And it... it echoes up. mean, goes, know, so we don't need any coders, you don't need any managers, right, to manage people. And you don't Urs Reupke: Hmph. Tobias Mayer: need, you don't need, probably don't need any designers because, you know, Claude can do that too. So, and then you don't need any trainers to train people and you don't need any coaches to help people because there's no people. Right. So suddenly we find that a lot of people suddenly struggling. In the agile community, certainly Urs Reupke: Right. Tobias Mayer: among very large group of people that I know, there are not many success stories. People are struggling in one way or another to get work, to keep work, to make their work meaningful. You know, it's difficult, really difficult. Some great trainers out there, you know, just can't get people in their classes at all. So we're at a strange place. 25 years on, you said, isn't it? Yeah. Urs Reupke: Is it? Yeah. Right. Actually, I'm a bit surprised. I had expected you to be a bit more skeptic of AI because it takes the human, as you said, it takes the human out of the loop. Tobias Mayer: I was at first. The idea of using AI to write essays or anything like that, I think it does a terrible job at that. Its language is prosaic and dull and very easily spotable, I believe. But for code, it seems to be pretty good. I've done it myself. I played around with it myself. You know, created a search function on my website. because I needed something like that. I needed to look for some information and I couldn't find it. thought I'd just write a search thing. I wrote it in about a tenth of the time using Gemini than I would have done. I could have done it on my own, but it would have taken me a lot longer. So it sort of came around a little bit there and then I started reading a bit more about other people's success stories. I think the danger of it is that a lot of organisations are going to embrace it. to the exclusion of actually having good people there. So I don't know about Thomas's model. He seems to be making it work for himself. But the models I've heard of that I think are probably really good are teams that have one team member as being an AI agent, as a team member, but other people are still human. Because when we start getting too far away from the human element, I don't know where that's going to go, or that's going to mean. It's going to create a massive crash in the economy for sure, isn't it? The thing is, it's Urs Reupke: and. Tobias Mayer: like any of these new things, there's a lot of potential goodness in AI, wonderful things that can be Urs Reupke: Right. Tobias Mayer: achieved. And then there's also a massive danger. It's the God and the devil kind of dichotomy. Urs Reupke: Yeah. Then again, wasn't it always the case with automation? mean, craftspeople were endangered by machines. Tobias Mayer: I suppose they, you know, for yes, in all this, this is what keeps gives me some hope. know, there has been so many changes in automation and the ability for machines to do what humans could have done. And everyone says, Oh, everyone's gonna be out of work because of this, you know, when they started doing automated testing, that what happens to the testers? Well, the testers are freed Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: up to do proper work rather than following Urs Reupke: Yeah, right. Tobias Mayer: a script kind of testing, you know, the machine can do that. Anything a machine can do, it should do. and we do the rest. But the trouble is the machines are getting so smart that they can do almost everything. I don't know what this is, but the history is that these things have not put people out of work. They've actually created of the automaker. The internet created Urs Reupke: In some way or another, That's always been an idea. Tobias Mayer: a massive industry, printing press, a massive industry, give voice to people who didn't have a voice. The printing press did that and then the internet did that to a massive degree after that. So we don't know where this is going to go, what value it's going to provide. But at the moment it does look like it's putting people out of work. That's happening. That is a bit of a reality. Urs Reupke: Yeah. famously said that probably the AI won't do our jobs, but for now AI salesmen will convince bosses that they could do our jobs. So that's the Tobias Mayer: That's the thing, yeah, exactly. yeah. And I think a lot Urs Reupke: Right. Tobias Mayer: of organisations that are throwing everything behind AI, they're doing it blindly, they're it without much consideration, much thought, and I think it's going to suffer for it. AI can't really discern in the same way a human can. And I think some of the decision-making stuff... is really, you we need people in that mix. So hopefully, you know, this kind of like excessive use of AI will level out again and people will start to see that there's value in humans. Urs Reupke: Yeah, let's hope for it. Tobias Mayer: But to go back to my earlier point, you know, if you're talking about agility, the effective use of an AI agent or more, then we don't need more than one, you? But the effective use of an AI agent in new product development is about as agile as we can hope to get, I think, at the moment. We have high quality, we have speed. You know, we've got all of those good things that Agile has promised us. And so... It does threaten the industry, perhaps quite rightly. We've had a good ride, haven't we? So, time to move on. Urs Reupke: Yeah, certainly did. in a way things stay relevant, I guess. I mean, we mentioned XP in the beginning and a lot of the ideas from XP, like modularizing stuff. small incremental steps and so on are very Tobias Mayer: you Urs Reupke: relevant with today's AI systems because the AI doesn't have the big picture or lacks or starts to miss the big picture when we run out of context windows. And it's much Tobias Mayer: Yeah. Urs Reupke: easier for the AI to work with a small module and get that ever better. So I think Tobias Mayer: Yeah. Urs Reupke: the thoughts that is relevant even if the concrete practice we're doing right now will change. Tobias Mayer: Yeah. Do you know what I've always taught about software? And this is my experience of being a software developer is that people think that software developers sit at computer and write code. But that's a really small part of what a software developer Urs Reupke: Right. Tobias Mayer: does. It's probably about, in my experience, for about 20 % of the time I'm coding, actually writing code and maybe 30 coding and testing perhaps. But what about that other 70 % of the time? Well, that's when I'm actually doing the work. Because the coding is just putting into code what you understand. So if you can get an AI agent to do that, that'd be great. And that frees up more Urs Reupke: Right. Tobias Mayer: time to do the other stuff. But it's the other stuff that takes up the majority of the time. The conversations with the customer and the figuring out of how to solve the problem in the most effective way. That's human conversation. So the fact that... You know, I can now speak English to an AI agent and express what I want to have happen and how I want to have it happen and what the conditions are, what the limitations are, and then have the agent write the code. That's freeing me up to do more creative work. But if we think that the AI is going to do the other 70 % of the work, we're very mistaken. It can't do that. That's what it can't do. It can do what it does do really well. But let's have it do that, you know, and then... Software development then becomes, it rises it up almost, it takes it away from this sort of admin function of writing code to the real work, which is the innovation and the idea stuff and the conversations and the collaboration with the people who want the work done, so we can figure out the right thing. And we do have control over, you know, when the code's written, we can rely to some extent on machine review, but we still want to probably like have the final say on this and we run it and we see it and we give feedback and, you know, so there's definitely human Urs Reupke: Suddenly wanted. Tobias Mayer: needed in there. Yeah. Urs Reupke: Right. All right. Thanks for these thoughts on AI and the future of work. So what are you doing right now, Tobias? Is there any Tobias Mayer: Not a lot. Urs Reupke: cool project or any great work that you're working on and that you would like our audience to know about, that you would like people to hear about? Tobias Mayer: I've been focusing a bit more recently on facilitation skills in general and doing some workshops around that. But again, it's very tough to get people to commit to things and to give up their time. Everyone's feeling a little bit panicky about holding on to their job. But I'm actually moving away from this a little bit and moving in towards sort of a different line of work really, which is helping companies focus on values and how they can actually live out their values. Because there's a lot of talk about value statements and mission statements and we value this and we value that. And they're just big signs on the wall usually and I very often don't see them being played out. So I'm trying to forge a place where I can help organizations to live to the values that they claim that they uphold. So to do audits around that really and then identify gaps and see what can we do to fill that gap. If you're saying we value teamwork and yet everyone is sitting Urs Reupke: Hmm. Tobias Mayer: by themselves and there's no sense of interaction, then obviously there's a gap there. We say we value, what are the words people use? We value collaboration is another one, it? But Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: often what they mean by collaboration is cooperation. not the same thing. Collaboration, you know, have to cooperate with me, which means do what I tell you. And then we call that collaboration, you know, because we're doing it together, but that's not collaboration. So there's a gap. So Urs Reupke: Right. Tobias Mayer: there's an awful lot of gaps in between what people say they're doing and what they're actually doing. And I think that that might be an interesting space to move into. Urs Reupke: Right. I think values are very interesting thing because very often we see these five bullet point list of values, like collaboration, focus, value, and whatever else is on that list. personally, I think that values only show themselves in contrast. It's not a list of five great things. Everybody wants to have these five great things, but rather Tobias Mayer: Yeah. Urs Reupke: it's when crisis rears its head, What do we value over the other thing, over the other great thing? Is it quality or is it speed? Is it focus or is it value? When we have to decide Tobias Mayer: Yeah. Urs Reupke: what wins out. Tobias Mayer: Yeah, that's a good point. And also with each of those individual values anyway, we can rate ourselves on how well we're doing it. You if we say we value focus, well, in the last day or the last week, how focused on your work were you? What's the opposite of focus? Distraction. So let's list all the distractions that you incurred and then rate yourself on a scale of one to 10. How focused were you really? You say I value focus, yeah, was actually, you know, I was on Facebook, I was distracted over here and I was called off for another project. And it turns out that your actual focus on the project you're supposed to be working was about three out 10. So then the question comes up and what do want to do about it? And Urs Reupke: Mm-hmm. It's culture thing. Tobias Mayer: you can't do anything about it until you identify it. And so identifying the gaps, I think is really important. I did some quite a lot of work on that with the Scrum Alliance actually around the five Scrum values. and helping people to identify and how to measure themselves against the five values and to measure their team against the five values as a sort of alternative retrospective model. So rather than just saying what works, what doesn't work, what can we do differently? It's like, how well did we perform? If you call yourself a scrum team, you need to be embraced the five values, right? So how well did you perform against those five values and where did you fail? Urs Reupke: That's interesting. Tobias Mayer: Yeah. And I've done some talks at conferences about that as well. I ask people to list their own five own values of what do you care about, what matters to you, and then ask them the difficult question of when did you fail to live up to those values? Find an example Urs Reupke: You Tobias Mayer: of each one of those where you fail to do it and what happened and why did you fail? It's very eye-opening, know, people get kind of... Urs Reupke: It reminds me of one thing Ricardo Semla once did, the Brazilian businessman. Tobias Mayer: Yeah, I know. Urs Reupke: He, in one of his talks, he apparently asked people to write down the company values and then take a break. during the break, he and his assistant switched out the value statements and asked everybody if those are their values. And most people said, yeah, those are just fine. Those are our values. Tobias Mayer: interesting, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. His book Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: is lovely. His Maverick book. That's another, that was a very early influence. Urs Reupke: Maverick ride. Tobias Mayer: That Maverick and I think this book, Artful Making, I've got next to me as well, were the two books I think that influenced my way of working in the very early days of doing Agile. They were the real go-tos for me. There's a couple of others as well, but they were non-software. There's another one called The Empty Space by Peter Brook, who's an actor, director, theatre director, and it has some amazing ways of thinking about creativity that were in that book. But Artful Making, that Lee Devon and Rob Austin is a book I've recommended over the years to people because it's so inspiring. And it is about, the subtitle, if you didn't catch that, is important. Urs Reupke: No, didn't. Tobias Mayer: What managers need to know about how artists work. Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: It's a very powerful book that draws on theatre analogies to help us to produce work better. So if you think about the theatres, theatres, they have an opening date and they never miss it. It's like the publication industry, they have a publication date and they never miss it. They publish on that date no matter what. So whatever's Urs Reupke: Yeah. Whatever's ready is ready. Tobias Mayer: ready is ready. How do they do that? So we can learn so much from that. And theatre of course with ensemble and team. you know, the comparisons there. So that's a great book. That book and Ricardo Semler's book helping me to work with other organizations and inspire them towards this. But it's interesting, isn't it? Neither of them are agile books, nor is Hackers, nor is this other one that I'm going to hold up now as well. This one is Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: one of my favorite books, Software Creativity by Robert Glass. I read that in 1996 or 97 when I was a student and it was absolutely inspiring. It really, again, it challenges the traditional waterfall way of working and looks at self-organization essentially as a creative way of building software. So again, he was another person who was ahead of his time in that. that's another great book. Yeah. So it's interesting. Urs Reupke: Thanks. Tobias Mayer: The books I read prior to Agile and the books I read after Agile were not Agile books. I did read quite a lot of other stuff like Mike Cohen's thing. Urs Reupke: Mm-hmm. Tobias Mayer: and Ken Schwaber's too, but I read all those. They didn't leave me an impression in the same way. They were practical things that you could do and certainly found their way into my teaching, but this is the true inspirational stuff. Urs Reupke: how to take the one thing and apply it to the other thing. That's always looking beyond Tobias Mayer: Yeah, exactly. Urs Reupke: and seeing what's there. Tobias Mayer: Well that's the spirit of metaphor, isn't it? To carry across, that's what it means, you know, and I use metaphor a lot in the work that I do. Get people to think about, you know, how to understand a product backlog, how to understand a sprint backlog. Because they all have examples in their own home, they have to-do lists and, you know, that's basically what it is, isn't it? That's basically what a sprint backlog is, is a to-do list with a goal, with a goal attached to it. Urs Reupke: Yeah, right. Yeah, it's about impact. Tobias Mayer: Yeah. Urs Reupke: Right, okay, Tobias, thank you very much for these insights and for all these great inspirations for my reading list. I will certainly have a look at some of them. Tobias Mayer: Yeah, I'll cut out for you now. Yeah. I think that we've covered most of what you wanted to cover, haven't you? Haven't we here? Urs Reupke: Yeah. Right. Tobias Mayer: Yeah. So, you know, my LinkedIn profile has been updated recently. So you can look at my headline and you can read a bit more about what I'm attempting to do there. It's quite a niche that I'm focusing on right now to see what happens with Urs Reupke: Yeah. Tobias Mayer: that. ties in my work experience with my faith essentially and looking to take it to some new place and we'll see what happens with that.