Roasting Marshmallows

Are you very sensitive to even constructive criticism? Do you agonize over even the smallest mistakes or flaws in your work? Do you downplay your own expertise, even in areas where you are genuinely more skilled than others? The game “Among Us” is all about finding the imposter and throwing it out of the spaceship. When you play as imposter, your job is to sabotage the ship and kill the crew mates. Playing as either role is pretty fun, but it is always a little bit more exciting when you get to play as the imposter. While being an imposter in a video game is good fun, in real life many people feel like an imposter at their job. They fear that others will find out about them, that they are incompetent, that they achieved their success through sheer luck and that voice in their head saying that one day everyone will find out they are useless. As consultant being hired for our expertise, we also sometimes experience imposter syndrome. Can we help this client? What our my help isn’t good enough? Today, we are roasting marshmallows around the campfire, sharing stories of imposter syndrome and how we cope with it.

Way back in episode 13, we discussed mobbing, or ensemble programming, with Woody Zuill. While we think this topic deserves more widespread recognition and adoption, there’s no denying that pair programming is more well known, and is being done more. Of course, pairing is not limited to just programming. For example, studies have shown that kindergarteners sharing an iPad enables them to learn more and score better on certain tests, most likely due to forcing them to collaborate, which in turn emphasises communication and sharing alternative viewpoints. Collaboration and communication are the key words here, and increasing that will eventually yield  significant benefits, such as increased quality, widespread knowledge and improved morale. These things will all contribute to a higher productivity. So today we are discussing these benefits, but also drawbacks, of pairing!

Nowadays, everyone wants to make an impact. Nobody wants to do meaningless work. What it means to make an impact is different for everyone, but it is the driving motivation why people do the work that they do, be it helping senior citizens out of their beds, or maximizing profit for multinationals. Indeed, some of the low points of my career as a software engineer is being part of a project that ends up in the bin. Sure, sometimes a project might fail, which in itself is ok, but if you spend a lot of time on something that ultimately did not even get a chance to make an impact is demotivating at best. If you base an entire business on something like that, you are in big trouble. That is why Tim O’Reilly has been urging people to work on stuff that matters for over 10 years now. He talks about working on something that matters more to you than money, creating more value than you capture and taking the long view. This does not mean everyone should do non-profit work, but it does mean the social value of businesses to be done right. How can you apply these guidelines to your organization? What does working on stuff that matters mean to us? That is the topic of the show today!

Is your startup interesting enough to find investors? What kind of effort does it take to have a startup? Start ups are usually considered pretty sexy. They bring about cool new apps that your friends insist you just have to get. They disrupt the market with innovative new goods and services. They display their awesome company culture in such a way that working there becomes a goal in itself. But what about the Business to Business startup? You don't hear a lot about those being the next hottest startup. Maybe not, but, because they cater to the needs of other businesses, they are really good at making money. Today, we are roasting marshmallows with Alex Cojocaru, one of the co-founders of Licenseware, an open ecosystem of Software Asset Management applications that contains the collective work of thousands of experts, enabling businesses to make the most out of their licenses. Alex started his career as an Analyst in 2011, and has had various roles with a focus on software asset management, data analytics, and software development. In 2020 he co-founded licenseware, with the mission of commoditizing software license management. https://licenseware.io/ Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-cojocaru/

How to stay engaged while working remote? What can offshoring teach us when working remote?  What are Rini's laws? We are, when recording this podcast, in lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The omikron variant is running rampant, so this means most of us are working from the kitchen table, or if you have the room, the home office again. So, entire teams are working remote again, not physically meeting each other for an extended period of time. How do you make sure everything keeps running smooth? How do you make sure communication, coordination and control do not degrade due to increased distance of the team members? Luckily, the software engineering industry has had decades of experience working with remote teams: near- and offshoring has been pretty common, and the lessons learnt from that can be applied to working from home. To help us pin-point the takeaways from these lessons, we are roasting marshmallows with Rini van Solingen, speaker & author on speed and agility of people & organizations. Rini is a professor at Delft University of Technology, and he investigates how to make global teams hyper-productive and how to decrease the impact of distance in global software engineering. Rini wrote several books, on topics about changing leadership, accelerating organizations, agile transformations and scrum. Rini's website: https://rinivansolingen.com/ Rini on twitter: @solingen Rini on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/solingen/

Does the thought of doing a presentation make your stomach churn? Are you comfortable speaking up in front of a group of people? How do you deal with being the center of attention? Fear. We all know the feeling from a terrifying experience at some point in our lives. However, 75% of the people get fearful when having to speak in front of a group of people. Even the idea of doing it is sometimes enough for many people to get fearful. Yes, most of us — even those at the top — struggle with public-speaking anxiety. When people think about what makes them nervous, they usually come up with the same answers: I don’t like being in the spotlight I don’t like being watched I don’t like the eyes on me Some might say the fear will go away as you do more and more talks. This is not always true: our guest today, Thierry de Pauw, has done many talks: about Continuous Delivery, Agile transformations, Trunk based development and so on. However, Thierry has publicly shared about his struggle to start public talks. Thierry is a Senior IT Engineer at the fintech startup PaxFamilia. On the side, he founded ThinkingLabs, an advisory firm in the adoption of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. He is an occasional speaker at international conferences about everything Continuous Delivery. Thierry's website: https://thinkinglabs.io/ Thierry on twitter: @tdpauw Thierry on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tdpauw/

Why is it that anxiety disorders are so prevalent?  Why is it that depression is now the  leading cause of disability?  Why is that bullying is still really prevalent? Most people don’t grow up learning very much about their emotions — what they are, how they work, or how to manage them well. This means there are a lot of people out there with perfectly normal levels of academic or social intelligence, but surprisingly low emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence means the capacity to reflect on and understand your emotional life. Because the clearer you can be about your emotions — what they are and how they work — the better you’ll be able to manage the most difficult and painful ones. Thankfully, we can all improve our emotional intelligence with a little learning and some practice. This is important not just for ourselves, but for our children as well. To help us improve, we have Marc Brackett on the show today. Marc is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor in the Child Study Center, Yale School of Medicine at Yale University. His most recent book, ‘Permission te Feel’ explores ways for our emotions to help, rather than hinder, our well-being and success at home, in school, at work, and in everyday life. Marc's website: https://www.marcbrackett.com Marc on twitter: https://twitter.com/marcbrackett Get the book here

Are you imposing change by decree? Is "the next big change" going to solve everything? Do your people see what is valuable about the future you propose? Even though the world around us is changing faster and faster, it proves challenging for companies and individuals to adapt to these changes. For these, change sometimes comes much slower and more painful than hoped. Changing, or adapting to change, is not simple on any level. Often, there is no right answer, and responding requires trial and error, learning and unlearning. Understanding that you don't have to push, prod, persuade or punish people to create change in your organization, our guest today, Esther Derby, offers change by attraction, an approach that is adaptive and responsive and engages people in learning, evolving, and owning the new way. She is the author of the book "7 Rules for Positive Productive Change: Micro Shifts, Macro Results for Change by Attraction". In it, she presents a set of seven heuristics—guides to problem-solving—that empower people to achieve outcomes within broad constraints using their personal ingenuity and creativity. You may also know Esther as co-author of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great. Esther on twitter: https://twitter.com/estherderby Esther's website: https://www.estherderby.com

Different problems need different solutions. An approach that aids in decision making is The Cynefin framework, which was created in 1999 by Dave Snowden and was born with principles related to theories of how we perceive things. Cynefin (pronounced “kuh-nev-in”) is a word of Welsh origin that means habitat or place of many belongings. Cynefin is a model that can be used in different sectors, at different levels in an organization and in different contexts, in fact context is the key word for Cynefin. Its main use is for effective decision making based on the analysis of the context in which we are inserted. We are roasting marshmallows with Dave Snowden, founder and chief scientific officer of The Cynefin Company, formerly known as Cognitive Edge, a Singapore-based management-consulting firm specializing in complexity and sense-making, to thrive in a complex world. Dave's specialties include: Sense making, Knowledge Management, Complexity Science applied to organisations and Narrative. Dave is well known for his pragmatic cynicism and iconoclastic style, and is a popular and passionate keynote speaker. 

Is the nobel peace prize actually a bad thing?  What about that cum laude degree?  Did your grades ruin you for the rest of your life? Do awards motivate people? Yes. They motivate people to get rewards. You can pretty much bribe anyone to make them do what you want them to. Consequently, the quality of the work or the learning suffers for it. This goes for children, students, but also in the work place, where reward structures might be in place that incentivize destructive behavior. The book "Punished by Rewards" details the trouble with gold stars, incentive plans, grades, praise and other bribes, and we are roasting marshmallows with it's author: Alfie Kohn! Alfie is an author and lecturer in the areas of education, parenting and human behavior. He is a proponent of progressive education and has offered critiques of many traditional aspects of parenting, managing, and American society more generally, drawing in each case from social science research. Twitter: https://twitter.com/alfiekohn Website: https://www.alfiekohn.org/

Does financial incentives promote commitment and motivation? Is your company really doing well when you make the budgeted revenue? Is your decision-making on hold while the numbers for the budgets are being negotiated? Creating a budget is one way to stay on top of your expenses. Most companies spend a lot of time analyzing past performance to come up with budgets for the next year, trying to stick to them as close as possible. However, due to todays rapid changing markets, traditional budgeting might not be the best fit for companies anymore. Beyond Budgeting is the idea of abolishing traditional budgeting processes to eventually establish a highly decentralized organizational system and adaptive set of management processes. We are sitting around the camp fire with Bjarte Bogsnes, Chairman of the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable, and has helped numerous companies globally getting started on their own Beyond Budgeting journey. Bjarte Bogsnes has a long international career, with more than 25 years of Beyond Budgeting experience, having worked in both Finance and HR. He is a popular international business speaker and is the winner of a Harvard Business Review/McKinsey Management Innovation award. He is author of "Implementing Beyond Budgeting - Unlocking the performance potential", a theoretical introduction and a practical guide to bringing such a more empowered and adaptive management model to life. Beyond Budgeting Roundtable: https://bbrt.org/ - sign up for the newsletter! Bjarte's website: https://bogsnesadvisory.com/ Bjarte on twitter: https://twitter.com/bbogsnes

What if you could elect your boss? Why aren't companies run as countries? How does sociocracy fit in with agile? In the age of liberated companies, there are different models of governance where individuals are responsible to undertake actions on behalf of their company. With a participatory decision making process and distributed leadership at its core, sociocratic governance is at odds with the traditional vertical management system. A sociocratic organization allows the individual to express oneself within a group, and allows the group to function in an autonomous and co-responsible manner. Sociocracy produces organizations that are both collaborative and highly productive. The process for decision-making is very different from majority voting that inevitably produces majority rule. As with society, the majority rule easily leads to polarization and promotes competition and dominance instead of coöperation and equality. Using consent and collaboration as a foundation for decision-making and communications, Sociocracy builds a strong governance structure that extends from the mailroom to the boardroom and from the client to the founders. We are roasting marshmallows with John Buck, co-author, along with Sharon Villines, of the book "We the People, Consenting to a Deeper Democracy - A Guide to Sociocratic Principles and Methods" and "Agile Bossa Nova" with Jutta Eckstein Governance alive website: https://www.governancealive.com/ John on twitter: https://twitter.com/johnabuck We, the People book: https://www.sociocracy.info/we-the-people-2/ Bossa Nova book: https://www.agilebossanova.com/

What did John F. Kennedy and Steve Jobs have in common? Would George Washington be a successful founder of a startup? Would we remember Herbert Hoover as the Jeff Bezos of his time had he been elected eight years earlier? The president of the United States is usually considered the most powerful person on the planet. Indeed, the US has the biggest economy, the most powerful military, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood and NASA. How did America become such a powerhouse? With a little imagination, you could compare America's lifecycle to that of a product or even a company. There's the introduction, rapid growth, disruption and renewal. With that comparison in mind, one could imagine the president to be the Chief Marketing Officer, selling us the American dream. What lessons can we draw today from developing the product that is America? We are roasting marshmallows with Jason Voiovich, author of the book "Marketer in Chief: How Each President Sold the American Idea. In it, Jason retells the story of America, but through the eyes of its most influential salesperson - the president. Jason’s favorite way to observe the world is through its history. He believes the people from the past have plenty to teach us about the challenges and opportunities we face today. Get the book: https://marketerinchief.com/ Jason's website: https://jasontvoiovich.com/ Jason on twitter: https://twitter.com/jasontvoiovich

Is it hard to write a book? Do product owners need to be aware of software development practices like Behavior Driven Development? How do you cope with writer's block?  On the show, we have talked a lot about books, and we have even had a few guests that wrote one. It has crossed our minds to write a book of our own a few times as well. Today, we are roasting marshmallows with Wouter Lagerweij. Wouter is currently in the process of writing a book called: "A Product Owner's Guide to Escaping Legacy: how to get back in control and start delivering again". As a developer, manager, product owner, and as an Agile Coach working with people in all those roles, Wouter has been dealing with legacy for a large part of his life. To make that happen Wouter uses the knowledge and skills gathered in over fifteen years of experience applying Agile processes and practices from XP, Scrum, Kanban, Lean and Systems Thinking.

How do you deal with team compositions during times of explosive growth? Are you looking to spread knowledge across teams? What metrics are out there to track team performance? Ever since the dawn of humanity people had to work together and form teams in order to achieve a common goal. These goals could be something as vital as survival, but also, as civilizations were growing to build great structures, or in modern times, building awesome apps on your phone! Like the times teams can and will, change as well. One would expect with all these years of teamwork that people would have gotten very good at adapting to these team changes. Turns out, this is often not the case. Luckily for us, we are roasting marshmallows with Heidi Helfand, a software engineering leader with over 20 years of experience helping fast-growing companies double and triple in size. She wrote a book, Dynamic Reteaming, which details people-focused patterns and tactics to help companies thrive through hypergrowth. She has helped launch Procore Technologies and AppFolio to IPO and Expertcity to acquisition by Citrix. She was on the original development team that built GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. She is currently VP of Engineering Growth at Kin Insurance, which offers affordable coverage to homeowners in catastrophe-prone regions. She coaches software development teams using practical, people-focused techniques, with the goal of building resilient organizations as they experience rapid growth. Heidi's website: https://www.heidihelfand.com Heidi on twitter: https://twitter.com/heidihelfand Get the book "Dynamic Reteaming" here: https://www.heidihelfand.com/dynamic-reteaming-book (Amazon)

Have you ever had an opportunity to make a change, but you chose not to take it?  Did you maybe respond with "What if it doesn't work?"  Or maybe with "Are you sure that's a good idea?" Fear of change is subtle. It operates in your subconscious, convincing you that it's there to protect you. It will keep you safe. Or does it? Embracing change can help bring growth, and with that, fulfillment and ultimately success. Both for individuals, but also for organizations. Today we are roasting marshmallows with Linda Rising, author of several books, including one called "Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas" and it's successor "More Fearless Change: Strategies for Making Your Ideas Happen", which can help you and your organization to bring change. Linda is an internationally known presenter on topics related to patterns, retrospectives, influence strategies, agile development, and the change process. With a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in the field of object-based design metrics, Linda's background includes university teaching and software development in a number of different domains. These include telecommunications, avionics, and strategic weapons industries (probably top secret). Linda on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindarising Linda on Twitter: https://twitter.com/risinglinda Linda's website: https://lindarising.org

Are all your teams dependent on a few key persons calling the shots? Is your organization as transparent as it can be to both employees and customers? When serving millions of customers all over the world, a classic, top-down approach to decision making is not very scalable. This was the realization that the company our guest today works at made, and has since then reversed the chain of decision making to enable the teams to make the day to day decisions by themselves. For the last few years he has been working as Engineering Director at Klarna where he helped build the Klarna Checkout, Klarna Payment, Merchant Card Services and other Klarna products that are used daily by millions. He is active in developing the engineering culture by being involved in the open source program, events organized by Klarna and the marketing activities that Klarna does from an engineering stand point. We are roasting marshmallows with Mite Mitreski: Director, Trust center at Klarna. Mite talks about #fintech, #security, #incidentresponse, #engineeringmanager, and #softwareengineering Mite on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitemitreski Mite's website: https://mitemitreski.com/ Mite on twitter: https://twitter.com/mitemitreski

Is your organization relying on the decision making of one person? What kind of leadership model dos your organization use? Do you need someone else to empower you? Imagine being on a submarine with your colleagues, heading out to open waters, potentially being together in a cramped space for several months. If morale and performance amongst you and your fellow colleagues is low, you would probably be reluctant to go. Our guest today had to deal with this, being assigned command of the nuclear submarine, USS Santa Fe, the ship everyone joked about during their Prospective Commanding Officer training. However, he managed to transform the ship into the best performing vessel in the fleet, and shared the story in his book, Turn the Ship Around. We are roasting marshmallows with David Marquet, a retired United States Navy captain and the bestselling author of Turn the Ship Around and Leadership is Language. Imagine a work place where everyone engages and contributes their full intellectual capacity. A place where people are healthier and happier because they have more control over their work - a place where everyone is a leader. David on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidmarquet/ David on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ldavidmarquet David on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/LeadershipNudges

When should you start selling your product? Is there a difference between Sales and Marketing? How do you stand out amongst the competition? Ask someone what marketing is, and they will often tell you "Advertisements and catchy slogans", and maybe they continue describing a scene they've recently seen on Mad Men. The truth is, the internet has changed how people look at the impact of interruption type marketing, like for example ads or a cold call. When we receive anything that looks like plain old, traditional marketing, it gets thrown before it gets read. So, how should you do your marketing in today's world? Luckily for us, we are roasting marshmallows with Ruth Plater, CEO & Founder at Radial Path, Digital Marketing mastery for the fast-moving global tech and telco industries. Ruth has played a fundamental role in helping small to medium-sized businesses, with a focus on the tech space, revolutionise their brand and marketing activities, scale sales teams, increase customer acquisition and loyalty, and prepare for growth. Helping propel Small/Mid sized Enterprise, but also startups to their next commercial level. Ruth on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruthplater/ Radial Path's website: https://www.radialpath.com/

What if we said that there's a list that will help you with software development, or even with your company in general?  It's called Heuristics for Effective Software Development Organisations: A continuously evolving list, and it contains as of this episode 27 nuggets of wisdom for your benefit. It started out as a way to present the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto in a clearer and more contemporary way, although the author, Allen Holub, has added a few things. Who is Allen Holub? Allen Holub is an internationally recognised software architect and Agile consultant/trainer. He speaks all over the planet about these topics and agile-friendly implementation technology like microservices and incremental architecture, but his bread and butter is in-house training and consulting in how to create highly functional Lean/Agile organisations, and how to design and build robust, highly scalable software architectures suitable for agile environments. Allen's website: https://holub.com/ Allen on twitter: https://twitter.com/allenholub Allen's books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Allen-I.-Holub/e/B001IXRSV2