Larry Coopers' Agility Narrative on getting strategic about agility and innovation

Larry's shares his agility narrative, tells us a story of many aha! moments where he learned the power and impact of innovation in terms of:

• technology 
• work process
• focus on the why? and targeting impacts
• people
• having real conversations. 

Enjoy!  Larry 

Thank you Janet for being the co-host on this event and for your highly insightful questions. 

0:00
Welcome to The Agility Narratives Podcast
2:18
The first time Larry moved away from how projects were done And the Ice service in CANADA
3:55
Speed of delivery through early version of service orientated architecture
5:29
Learned that innovation delivered great results, this time changing how people work together
7:32
More Aha! moments - the importance of why and impact
9:02
Training on Agility and Value management, working with PMI and Prince2 on Agile - Too early
10:41
Cognitive diversity and putting people at the centre of transformation
11:23
The system is the villain and the people are the protagonist
11:49
Change is about engaging with people and creating the environment for it to happen
12:34
The Theme of Larry's Agility Narrative
13:54
Optimizing contribution - Intuitively knowing how best to contribute and the invite
15:06
Constrained innovation and Covid-19. If you are not willing to look at the fundamentals, then you are not serious about change
18:24
What is at stake for government and commerce if they don't take change seriously
19:28
How do you address your villain i.e. "the system"? A fundamental change in how leaders think.
20:46
Learning to be comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity as they have weaned on predictive planning
21:10
Thinking/behaviour patterns, and real conversations
23:32
Call to action - Start small, invite people and see how it works
25:27
We just need to understand how to have a conversation
27:41
Acknowledging the conversation we have had and going full circle.
28:02
Thank you and opportunity to take the threads of this conversation forward.

Transcript

martin: [00:00:06] 

Welcome to the Agility Narrative podcast series. Let me introduce Janet, my co-host today, and then Larry, our guest. Hi, Janet. Welcome. Thanks for co-hosting this podcast with me, please, could you introduce yourself?

janet: [00:00:27]

  Hi, it's wonderful to be here co-hosting with you, Martin. I'm the founder of Taproot Jem Systems. I'm a fellow CPA who is a certified integral professional coach, and I'm also a climate change coach. I use relational systems grounded in indigenous ways in my work. And I recently retired from the executive cadre of the Federal Public Service.

martin: [00:00:53] 

Janet and I are working on the next phase of the agility narratives together where we aim to bring change makers and agile leaders together to co-create and co-evolved agility. We hold this space so that as a community, we can listen to leading change makers and enterprise leaders talk about their personal journeys and agility narrative. Each narrative, we hypothesize, gives us insight to part of the whole Please meet our guest, Larry Cooper 

Hi, Larry. Welcome.

larry: [00:01:28]

 Good morning. Thank you, Janet, for getting us connected, I really appreciate it I've been around it and the government, the federal government, for over 40 years. I've watched as the industry went from the mainframe world and punch cards all the way up to where we are today, where we're walking around with more power in our pockets than we were running the weather service back in the nineteen eighties when I started.

martin: [00:01:38] 

Thanks for that introduction. I see that you've centered your career on understanding constraints to agile responses in some very large organizations like the government you just mentioned, and understanding the value of context specific or organizational specific responses to challenges rejecting rule based approaches. Today, you bring together both lean, agile and strategy to focus on how organizations can optimize value delivery through strategy. And you've written and consulted extensively with major organizations around barriers and agile strategy. We look forward to this conversation. can I ask you about your where you started your journey, maybe where you started focusing on budget value delivery or when you first came across agile?

larry: [00:02:30] 

 when I first started her. Thinking about or moving away from what was the predominant approach in government and certainly in industry around how projects were done that would have been in the early nineteen nineties when I was with Environment Canada. It was with ice services, which is forecasting ice conditions in the Arctic Ice Berg Alley off the East Coast, Great Lakes Seaway. And at the time, we had two aircraft that used to fly around taking Radar images of the ice. And in the early nineteen nineties, it was announced that we were going to be sending up a new satellite called radar set and Radar that was going to give us ten meter resolution of the ice conditions for all of Canada every day. So new imagery every day. And this posed a problem because at the time this was going to be seven and a half gigabytes of new data a day. Now, today, that would be somewhat meaningless, in terms of its size. But back then, when the biggest hard drive you could buy was four hundred and twenty four megabytes, and that kind of pulls a little bit of a problem.

So we essentially had to do a wire, what I called a wire up replacement of everything we had. So our networks were no good or hardware was no good. Our software was no good and we had three years. So we we intuitively knew that if we approached it the way we always had built things and design things, that there was no possible way we could get this done. So that was the first sort of realization that the way of doing things weren't working and would not work. So what we did is we sat down and we analyzed all of our software. We looked at what's common across everything. So we figured out that part and we built it. We called it global services. 10 years later, they started calling that service oriented architecture. Once we had built that, we realized that things that used to take us twelve to twenty four months to build applications, we could now build in three to five. So the idea of very short cycles on software development, we realize we could do that and we could do that based on other things that we did that were fairly innovative. And so it completely changed how I looked at things. And while we were at the beginning of doing that, they brought in a fellow from one of the big five consulting firms to teach me about the PMBOK because as the lead software engineer for the government, they thought, Well, you need to understand projects

he'd come in once or twice a week. We'd go through different sections So this was in about nineteen ninety two, ninety three somewhere around there. And when we finally got through it all, I looked at them and I said, this stuff is pure evil and you kind of stopped and got this quizzical look on his face feel like why? I go, well, because I can see how people can start to think that it's about the project management deliverables and not the value or what you're trying to create. if you look at project management and what happened over the last twenty five years or so with the PMI and others is that it became very follow. The rules produce these plans. It was all about the plans and what they were trying to actually deliver on became somewhat secondary. that was my first start and around two thousand I was an employee for a short period of time at Nortel, I ended up going to a spin out called Bill Me later, and it was a micropayment solution that was later bought by PayPal.

we had thirty five software developers basically in a big pit, And this was around two thousand two thousand one, and they were having a lot of difficulty getting things out the door. And although they were working in an agile way as a team and co-located and we had, architects and software developers and testers and everything, all working together in the same team, instead of working together, they fell into this habit of that they do in projects of meetings, after meetings, after meetings, after meetings. So every day by 10 o'clock, you could. Almost all the developers were in meeting rooms in different meeting rooms. I was brought in as the director of business technology. And after about 10 days or so, I'm looking at this and I'm going like, what is the developer doing in a meeting all day long? And so it means that very little time was being actually spent on software development. It was mostly talking about software development, not doing software development.

  I got everybody into an all hands on deck meeting in the lunchroom. And I asked them, I said, So how many of you have a meeting for the rest of today? Pretty well, everybody tomorrow. Pretty much the same thing Friday, same thing, and I go, how many, how many are meeting with customers? And it was like the handful, so I said, OK, you guys can keep your meetings, everybody else meetings are canceled. over the next three months, we went from not being able to get anything out the door to being able to drop a new software release that was fully tested every 30 days. And it was because of my experience of, in the early nineties that I was able to realize that we could do things faster. We could do things better and we don't have to follow in the same old, routines and ceremonies that we had around project management, So those two periods in time was what sort of really solidified my thinking that there was a better way of doing this.

janet: [00:7:50]

  Larry, I'm curious, you've described what some people would say are, aha, moments and these are at the beginning as you are paving the path. Was there a particular moment later on in the 2000s that you would describe as even more kind of touching and awakening in the work that continue to shift or that shifted the groundwork for you

larry: [00:8:13]  actually, I like the way you describe that as, and those were, in fact, the AHA moments And so there was a couple of others. One was not long after that I was on a contract at DMB It was for the Defense Learning Network and they were doing outcomes management and it was the DMR there. they were the ones who came up with the notion of results based management. And John thought the both the information paradox and this is what became the results management that went into the government and Treasury Board

  they came in to the DMV And that's when I realized like, well, outcomes and results, that notion of what that is and creating impact and the separation between business outcomes and customer impact or citizen if you're in the in the government space. And that was another aha moment, it's one thing to be agile about how you're approaching the work. But it's another thing to realize why you're doing the work and connecting it to the why. The reason for being right out of the organization and why does it exist and who does it exist to serve that was another one of those probably the most influential would have been those three events. There was a couple of other later in the twenty fifteen area

martin: [00:9:22] So can you talk about the those those experiences in twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen?

larry: [00:9:28] 

 I'd been starting to formalize my understanding around agility So I started putting together some courses and started approaching training companies And so there was a local training company here that that signed up. And so I started teaching courses in agility with them. So it wasn't certification like certified scrum It was more general agility and value management.

janet: [00:9:49] 

 I'd like to kind of focus in on the change component. So you've brought up way of being within the conversation and within your learnings and you've used the term meaning What's the meaning for them? So if we can focus in on the change narrative within your journey in agility, who is that main character? You know who you would say is the feature that you're looking at targeting that some folks would say is the protagonist?

larry: [00:10:17] 

 I had tried to work with some of the existing organizations that had sway in the government, the PMI being one of them. They brought me to a couple of their global conferences as an agility expert I quickly realized that, they weren't really interested. And then AXELOS that own ITIL, Prince2, and managing successful projects I got approached there to be the mentor for the author of the Prince2 agile book. And so that led to asking me to look at all of their project and portfolio management suite and looking at how they could Agilize it. I did it, but they weren't ready to go to the next step So that's actually what led me to saying, Well, I may as well just do this myself. So that's where lean, agile strategy came from. about two years ago, I got connected with this fellow named Dr.Scott Hutchinson at a Purdue University, he introduced me to cognitive diversity, I ended up getting certified in doing these assessments. what they do is help you understand where in an organization for an individual, where the contribution that they bring naturally as opposed to the ones we try to foist on them by a role name in a position, It's what their intuitive, innately rather more capable of, as opposed to what they may have been trained in. And it's helped you to figure out what that contribution is. when I started to marry that with, transformation, transitioning to new ways of working

 So that was when I realized that, it's about the people, It's about the people, not the system, that's when it when that part of it came together organizations say they want change, But how do they approach it? It's very systematically It's almost clinical in the sense that, they get together as a small group and in some cases they even hire people from outside to do their strategy for them. then they go away and then they build communications plans to tell people this is good for them and they're going to like it. we all know how well that works

janet: [00:12:11]  

Would you say this is the villain within the story?

larry: [00:12:15]  

the system is the villain and the people are the protagonists? Because, I realized many years ago that no one comes to work with the intent of doing a bad job, so everybody comes with good intent, It's how we harness the intent and how we match their intent with what we're trying to do, if we're not creating the environment for that, that's on us, That's not on them, And there's no communications plan that's going to fix it. So change, if you really want it, it's about engaging with people and creating the environment for it to happen. when you look at organizational strategy and change the more mines you bring to it and the more you bring it in an environment where they feel free to express their honest views the more likely you're going to get a good result. you've got people in your organization that are already capable. The question is, are they in the right place and are they enabled in the right way? that means the system you've created or that you're maintaining is the thing that's going to get in the way or not, That's up to you. You get to decide as to whether that's the case as a leader. to me anyway. It changes completely how we think about organizations.

martin: [00:13:20] 

So, Larry, I think you've defined your theme in terms of people getting them in the right place and enabling them. Can you expand on on how that happens and build upon that concept?

larry: [00:13:35]  there's a lot of things that I don't know if it's instinct or what it is that we all have, and we fundamentally know when things aren't right or what the right thing is And we just sort of do it without knowing that perhaps there may be something behind it, that or something that you could do that's a bit more scientific to to be more consistent about it back to my days at Bill me later. So one of the things I did when, I got the team sort of being better focus they had three team leaders. Two of them came to me. Once we started working a little differently and they said, I really don't like being a team leader and I go, Well, why are you? And they go because John told me, so John was one of the founders, that I was a team leader. so what do you want to do? they both wanted to be architects. I said, then be an architect,But then once sort of people started to see or hear about the conversation, then I got to other people who came to me and said, I'd like to try being a team leader. I said, OK, let's try that. So the two who were team leaders became architects to our developers, became team leaders, and it worked out beautifully. They were very happy in their role. So intuitively, we know that, people given the opportunity. Will do what they feel they contribute the most or where they feel happiest, There's a fellow named David Marquette who wrote a book called Turn the Ship Around. And so he talks about intent based and invitation based leadership. sort of intuitively knowing that if you invite people to participate in something new, you're probably going to attract people who like to do that sort of thing. So again, intuitively so the cognitive diversity assessments bring a bit more rigor or science behind how we can actually sort of start to marry those things up how do we get people into the right positions where they're where they're happiest and where their contribution is maximized?

when I look at most organizations, I see people that are miscast. when I was doing the new thing is when I was happiest, when I was manager of operations, I did the job. I was good at it because that was my job. But it really didn't make me happy. It didn't excite me, And that's the thing is we've got to discover or we can discover what excites a person, what makes them happy and have what they're doing? Be that just get them in a position where they're happy doing what they like and you won't have to do anything else, They'll want to do this.

janet: [00:15:56]  in a change environment to continue the conversation about the change of narrative, you mentioned the system. And being the villain. But you've also just brought out, the protagonist in terms of people, in terms of how to support them. We're now in a time of COVID 19 where there's a lot more in the system. There's a lot more stuff in the system that's causing folks different levels of emotions that we've seen in the past. So I'm wondering how you see, the systematic component and how which areas are particularly constrained at this point in time.

larry: [00:16:32]  let's talk about the work from home, as a way to kind of do this So when it first started and everybody had to start working from home and I found it interesting to watch the social media chatter locally here in the Ottawa area with the people in government around that experience and what it was like getting it up and running what people were celebrating was the fact that they were able to use Microsoft Teams to work from home. Getting that up and running was like a big thing, I was sort of smiling as I was watching all of this stuff because I was thinking, Yeah, but when are they going to figure out that the system hasn't changed? They haven't changed any of the fundamentals at all. All they're doing is they're sitting at a different desk in a different spot. I'll probably hazard to guess and and discovered was true that, the same meetings happen, The same expectation of what I refer to as cheeks and seats. wanting to know that someone is sitting in front of their computer seven and a half hours a day, just like I can walk by and see them. You write So nothing had changed except for working from home. And then what happened was, the people who were working from home were starting earlier and finishing later. so the time they used to spend going to and from started becoming part of their day of work from their desk at home, So they were trying to simply replicate the in the office environment with a work from home environment without realizing that what they needed to do was to start trusting people. And start looking at, And start talking about, what are we actually trying to achieve here? What are we trying to create? What are we trying to do And let people figure out the best way to do it as opposed to continuing on with what they were doing in the office. So none of their processes changed. None of their systems changed. It was just. Now through technology as opposed to being in the office. I realized that at some point and I remember having a conversation with Scott at the same time saying like, at some point they're going to clue into the fact that this isn't working and it's going to start causing grief for people because it's going to become more and more stressful for them because what they'll realize is that now this is literally this whole notion of work life balance. Well, this is literally invaded their home life in a way you cannot imagine. And that's what started happening, At least in what I think I observed is what started happening. if you're not willing to change the fundamentals of things, then you're not serious about change. and from what I saw, they weren't really changing many of the fundamentals other than how they were doing the work through tech instead of being in the office.

martin: [00:19:19] So what do you think's at stake for government, for industry, if people don't take change seriously? Using your words?

larry: [00:19:28] Well, in the government sector, it's relevance. In the private sector, it's survival. And in the third sector, it's donor dollars, and ends up being their survival. people talk about resilience and sustainability, So in the private sector, it's about what your customers want new products in the public sector. It's about the public's perception of your relevance as an entity, as an individual organization or as the bigger entity of government, Which is what we're starting to see that being question. So if you're not able to anticipate and either anticipate things that are needed or to respond very quickly, once you become aware of them, then the result is in the long run, you won't be around. I mentioned Apple, and the fact that since Steve Jobs, they haven't been very innovative. It's all been incremental change, And so organizations that are simply doing incremental, very slow, very small. At some point will cease to exist. Or to have relevance.

janet: [00:20:22]  our listeners today. They hold curiosity And so how do you address your veil in the system? What is your call to action?

larry: [00:20:31]  The kind of stuff that I'm talking about requires a fundamental change in how leaders think. you can't have this everybody participating unless the leaders are willing to facilitate it, enable it. And. What I what I found was this can happen in small areas. of an organization, but it can't really change the fundamentals of the organization unless others start to sort of get into it So there is the ability to start small and grow it. But even with that, it really requires leaders that are willing to take that step. and until the leadership is willing, the likelihood of an individual organization actually taking the step in transitioning to completely new ways of working, it likely isn't going to happen. So I've had, experience where it's happened in the small. I've had experience where, after the fact, it seemed to influence the organization and how they approach things overall. And there was one large federal department where I did an engagement a couple of years ago that where at the time it seemed like it wasn't taking hold. But everything I've seen on social media since then tells me that it has. it takes time and they have to be willing to take the step They need to be willing or start to become comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity because they've been weaned on predictive planning. Approaches give me the plan, tell me what you're going to do when you're going to do it and just go do it now. it does work, but the whole their entire set of systems is set up around that,

janet: [00:22:02]  I am sensing through your narrative that there is something about staying close in. You've mentioned instinct. You mentioned a new way of being to be with. Can you kind of are you able to describe that a little bit more and how that particularly would focus on agility?

larry: [00:22:22]  I guess what I would do is I would ask people to think about their everyday lives versus their work lives when they're not. Like how do they behave? How do they think when they're not at work, when they're not in that structure? And. I'm reminded of a story, that I came across in a book And it was about gore, Gore-Tex and gore and associates.

So he used to work for 3M. He was a chemist at 3M. so this is back in the fifties. they used to carpool. And so we'd end up with, relatively new people in the organization and like the senior VP in the same car on the way to work, carpooling And the way you phrased it was the real conversations happened in the car on the way to work because when people got to work the roles kicked in. They didn't talk to each other. They had to go through channels, And so when he formed his own company, he formed it around that notion anybody should be able to talk to anybody. And no one was appointed leader. They were voted a leader by their by the people who who would they be willing to follow? in the mid early twenty tens, when they got a new president, the lady who came out of nowhere to become the president of the company was through that system. everybody said, that's a person I'm willing to follow, said, OK, you're the president, And so looking at what when people leave work, what do they do? How do they behave? if you're driving to work if the road is blocked, you just detour and you take a different path. You know where you're going. You figure it out, But when we get into work, we have this idea that everything has to be very systematized. Do this do that so what I would do is ask people to just sort of think about those kinds of situations where they don't think that way, they don't behave that way. do things still work out? Well, yeah, of course they do. so why is it we think when we get to work that we have to systematize everything we do and can only do it in a certain way? And if you think about it, I think that's where we start to get into sort of appealing to people's more intuitive way of how they see the world and what they've what they learned from their own experiences outside, as opposed to what they're told to do when they get there.

martin: [00:24:24] So I love that answer. Thank you, Larry. To close this conversation,

you're talking to a group of stakeholders who want to move their organization forward. They've understood what your messages are around uncertainty, complexity, rule based and organization specific. You empathize with their difficult position. Tell us what's going on and what would be your call of action to them?

larry: [00:24:50]  my call of action would be to start small, and try it and see how it works, going back to the to the J Curve conversation we were having, and if you look at how new products get in the market about, there's the early adopters in the laggards when you see things happening somewhere else in the organization and people are enjoying it and it's working. You get others, that initially will be unsure that will go, Hey, I'd like to be a part of that too. And so it goes back to that notion of invitation based or whatever it is right of attracting people who want to do this sort of thing. So rather than telling people they need to do this or you're going to be assigned to this new thing is to invite people to be part of it And as it starts to show and you learn about what works and what's not working and you make adjustments and word gets out, then other people are going to want to be a part of it.

And it's a much more it's a more gradual thing, but it's not about changing the entire organization all at once. That usually doesn't go very well, So it's a start small and grow it, you really are creating a separate organization over here in the sense that it's working differently than the rest. you're doing it in a less risky fashion, So start small, get the experience. And once it's it starts to prove its mettle, then other people will want to join you and eventually, it ends up permeating throughout the organization. that's what I would do is start small, with people who want to be there.

janet: [00:26:20]  Larry, it feels like there are great possibilities for the future of agility, top of mind in this conversation is focusing into intent, which for many is a relational form, which is an innovation. approach. What are the opportunities and threats? Do you see in the next five to 10 years?

larry: [00:26:38]  it. If you look at what what's happening in broader society, and how everything is becoming very polarized,

to your point about it being more relational. And I'll go back to the cognitive diversity thing is actually for this is where it became clear to me. when I was a manager of operations, I was operating more up in the stabilize and control things than I was doing something that was very innovative and exploration and discovery based, And that's where I found I was happiest when I had the assessment done. It validated that this is where I was on the curve, The biggest AHA was it helped me understand why I wasn't able to have good conversations with people who were higher up on the curve. So I was getting brought in to organizations say we want to do transformative change. But the people that I was having to talk to were up here on the curve, We weren't having the same conversation at all. so what ends up happening a lot of times is that gets perceived as personality conflicts. And it isn't It's a difference in how we see the world but not understanding why that is. It's very easy to get into uncomfortable discussions and not know how to deal with them. when I realized that they weren't being difficult. This is how they're innately built and how they think about things and where their contribution to the organization is best maximized. it's they're not wrong and I'm not wrong. No one's wrong, It's a question of understanding where each are at and why. And then we can have a conversation about it because eventually the new things you do will will kind of move up to where they're more stable. And so everybody still has a role to play. so you can't if you look at the system is bad, People will interpret that as you're saying, they're bad. and that's not at all the case. And that was for me, the biggest thing was realizing that we just need to understand, how to have a conversation, and this helps us figure that out

janet: [00:28:35] this seems to be the definition of your call for action, and at this moment, it's that time to acknowledge the conversation that we've had that has taken us full circle here, conversing together and exchanging and diving into another version, another agility narratives story. So we thank you for being with us today, sharing with us to your career, your perspective, your insights that come have come from a couple of aha moments, half my life ago and are still and are questions that we hold today and we'll be focusing on the call for action. I think in terms of, how to profile this podcast. So I have a sense that we'll be gaining other people who like to take the threads that you've brought forward in this conversation towards next versions of the agility narratives. So thank you very much for being here and thank you, Martin, for inviting me to be co-host in this emerging journey.

martin: [00:29:39] Thank you, Janet. Thank you, Larry. Really appreciate it, your insights and enjoyed your agility narrative.