The Harder You Work, The Behinder You Get

Chris Sims: Well, who says we're behind, right? And and and what are we behind? And what was the standard? And who set the standard? And is that even a reasonable standard? This is the Devon Morris: lagging team. Falling behind is a position, not a verdict. Today's episode: The harder you work, the behinder you get. Hey, hey, hey, hey! I have someone here that I probably, I really, really admire. He has gone on a journey that I have pretty much followed without knowing I was following him on my journey. Whether it is went to U of I, become a certified Scrum trainer. You know, I remember reading this book back in the day. But you see his name on the screen, and I'm going to introduce him. So let me just start with the introduction, because every time I start talking, and the next thing you know, we're just kind of going. So first things first, Chris Sims is an agile coach, a certified Scrum trainer. Was a certified Scrum trainer before me, and the founder of Agile Learning Labs, which I patterned my company after. They're the co-author of two best-selling books: The Elements of Scrum and Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction. And before any of that, Chris made a living as a software engineer, musician, an auto mechanic. And I asked Chris here because they spend years teaching teams how this work gets done, and because they're personally started over more times than most people across their entire career. So here's what I keep coming back to, Chris: a team can be doing everything right by the playbook they've actually been handed and still be behind because the playbook stopped matching the actual work. Let's just start by you telling me a time you watched the team, the ground really move under a team. Chris Sims: Yeah, well, thanks for having me on on your show. I'm I'm excited to be here, and you know for as much as you were saying nice things about me and all that, and saying you admired me, it's very much a mutual admiration society here because I've you know crossed paths paths with you so many times at conferences and all of that and seen what you've done and been like wow look at that! So yeah, a time I saw the ground move under a team. So so there's a pattern I've seen quite a number of times. The teams involved are leadership teams, and the pattern looks like this. And I'll tell a specific story, but the pattern looks like this, you know. We're a startup, relatively small company. We've got some really good people on the team. We're executing well. We're doing what we need to do. We have our first success. Big influx of money. We're hiring. We're growing. We're trying to move faster, and everything's like ramping up, ramping up, going better, going faster until suddenly it's not. And the the ground shifting is actually the success and the growth that comes with the success, and the change that you know is needed at that point, the pivot that's needed by that leadership team is essentially they have to make some decisions, right? They've been both the people holding the vision, the people creating the structure and operations and procedures and all that of the company, and the people like doing the work to build the product. Right, they've been doing all of that, and with growth comes a point where you you can't do all that anymore, and while the people on the leadership team arguably are the smartest people in the room at any given point in time, if the folks around them keep leaning on them for all the important decisions, they become this bottleneck that holds the whole company back, and you know there there's early on you're adding people, things are going faster, right? Oh, we got more capacity. It's amazing, right? A little bit like companies are doing now with AI, right? Oh, we start using AI tools. Oh my goodness, we can build stuff so much. Faster! This is great until you hit a bottleneck. Until you hit a limiting factor, right? And for these leadership teams, they hit this point where we're still adding way more people. Devon Morris: Yeah, Chris Sims: we're not going any faster. Devon Morris: Yeah, Chris Sims: right. We're not going any faster. In fact, if anything, we're slowing down because now there's all the overhead of like there's all these people to look after and all of that, and so one team that I had the privilege of getting to work with where there was success was a team where very dramatically the CTO right who had who had been the tech visionary for the company from from day Devon Morris: one Chris Sims: had this insight in a in a training session with you know the other leaders other tech leaders in the organization where they realized that very viscerally that they were the bottleneck and yeah maybe they had the best ideas, but you can't propagate that out to the whole organization, and you can't know what's going on in detail at the on the ground in all of the localized situations that all those people are working in, and and so they realized they needed to step back from making decisions and focus on guiding the people who are going to make the decisions. Right, learning how to empower other people, but also learning how to like coach and mentor and all that while setting a big picture vision, but stepping back from the details, right? And it's hard, right? It's hard. I I had a corresponding failure story where you know the the tech genius finds was a machine learning startup, and this person was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but they couldn't let go of the control of making all of the important decisions because other people would make them wrong, and all the people around them believed that because this person was so smart. And there just came a point where progress kind of ground to a halt, right? They just couldn't get things done. Right, they they had clients who wanted their technology, but of course, you know, the start of every new client needs something a little bit different. We got to change the product, whatever, whatever. And this one person couldn't scale, right? They couldn't they couldn't handle all of that, and eventually, you know that company sadly imploded, right? Just kind of under under the weight of, you know, the the bottleneck effect of of having all the key technology decisions go through that person. Devon Morris: So, so here's here's why I I want to take a step back because one of the things about you, Chris, that I want the audience to understand is that the location where you spent a lot of time working was where in this good old United States of America, Chris Sims: Silicon Valley, Devon Morris: a very very innovative place, a place where a lot of great tech companies came out of, and you're right there in the seat of that. That is one of the reasons why I I love Chris because he's right there where all that innovation is happening, where all those super smart, super techy folks are are right there, and so that's the experience that he had, and that's an experience that I do not have. I've worked with corporate America for sure, but not like those tech giants like you have spent some time working with. And so you threw a word out there. I want to make sure that some people are really clear about. Give me the distinction between machine learning and generative AI, because most people know about LLMs right now and they think that that's everything. But there was a time before that. Can you tell us a little bit about that, Chris? Chris Sims: I, you know what? I'm not the guy for that. I'll be honest. I yeah, I am I am nobody's AI or machine learning or LLM expert. So I am I am not the guy to give a good answer to that question. Devon Morris: Yeah, because I heard you. I heard you say machine learning. I was just like, whoa, wait a minute. Been doing that too, Chris. I've been like, I'm about to I'm about to really tip my hat to you. I mean, I haven't done a lot of machine learning stuff because obviously, I when I became a developer, it was like I went into COBOL and stuff like that, right? So the mainframe languages, so I can replace the old heads. Because my philosophy at that time, Chris, was let me become a developer to replace developers that I think are going to pass away. And so I just had to start in my head that all these old COBOL mainframe developers, these systems ain't going nowhere, so they're gonna be the ones that's gonna actually pass away, and then I'm gonna replace them and get paid a lot of money. Yeah, right. So that's did that. And so Chris Sims: I remember, I remember the mid to late '90s, Devon Morris: there was Chris Sims: this huge resurgence in demand for for COBOL in particular for Fortran to to some extent and all that, right? These languages that had been more popular in years past with the whole Y2K thing coming up, right? It was all of a sudden it's like we got all this old code we've got to we've got an update, Devon Morris: and I took I took an eight month course, Chris, and it got me into it. That's what I did. Nice. So then, here's here's a question for you. So going back to the story that you was telling, okay, when it when it came to the leaders, right? Who noticed the shift first when it came to that situation? Chris Sims: That's a great question. Devon Morris: Yeah. Chris Sims: So I would say that the leadership team, the members of the leadership team, noticed the change. They noticed the symptoms, right? And I often describe this this situation. I've written about it a few times. I call it "everyone is busy, but delivery is slow, right? And the situation is like we look around this place, and everybody's working really hard. They're you know staying late. You know all right. Everybody's like super busy, and yet it's taking longer and longer and longer to get anything done. Yeah, and so the leaders definitely saw the symptoms, right? Because they remember like, hey, it wasn't that long ago when we were doing all the hands-on work, and we got stuff, we got stuff done really quickly, right? Devon Morris: So then, what what is that difference like? Because when you got your hands on it, and those initial founders, they're going through with speed, and they're they're looking to replace themselves because they can't they can't be at that level anymore. What what has to get through a founder's head to make that kind of shift? Chris Sims: So so the light bulb moment I think is when they realize that it's the exact things that got them to where they are, right? The very strengths that have made them successful, Devon Morris: yeah, Chris Sims: are now the things that are holding them back, and that's a really tough light bulb to turn on, right? Because when you have like I've I've made a career out of being really good at doing this, and I do this, and I succeed, right? And and you know I think of innovation, innovative technical solutions, and I implement them, and you know blah blah blah, and like to have the light bulb go on where it's like wait, yeah that got me here, but it's not going to get me to where we need to go now, and that's hard, right? And that's scary because it means they have to pivot from playing to their strengths, but also their comfort zone, to like something new, and and by and large, right? The folks who who get into these leadership positions and and find themselves in this problem that comes with success that I'm describing. By and large, they're pretty smart, adaptable people. So once they wrap their head around it, they can do Devon Morris: it. Chris Sims: But it's still scary, right? Because it's they need to do different things now. Devon Morris: So then the ground is shaking right now when it comes to AI. So, how are some of them thinking about how how do you see them dealing with those shifts now? Because it's happening under their feet. It's new technology that's changing how we think about a lot of things. I mean, I'm I know someone who you know who is working with five developers, and now it's just him, and he's AI, and then those five developers he no longer work with, and and he's super super productive in getting things out, just being a one man shop. But that just changes everything, and so as you started seeing AI come in, what kind of impacts did you start seeing? Chris Sims: So, there's a there's a model that I really like-a change model. It's called the Satir change model, and it basically describes. How individuals, groups, large organizations adapt and deal with change, and maybe I get the image to you. You can share it, you know, at at some point here in the in the podcast, right? You cut it in and post or whatever you cool kids do. But but basically, it's a curve where, like, on the vertical axis Devon Morris: is Chris Sims: what you care about, what you're trying to optimize, right? You know, speed to market, revenue, whatever it is, whatever it is that you want to optimize. And then on the horizontal axis is time. Devon Morris: Yeah. Chris Sims: And so basically, you're you know, you're traveling along at some status quo, right? We do what we do, we get what we get, right? And then you introduce a change, right? And it may be a change that seems like amazing, like oh my goodness, AI! We need to start using AI, and it's going to make everything better. And as soon as you introduce that big change, of course. Performance drops off precipitously, right? And in fact, not only does it drop, but you enter this chaotic period, right? It's the chaos period where kind of the old rules don't seem like they apply anymore. We there's this new thing, but we don't really understand it yet. We don't know how to use it, right? And so I've seen you know a lot of that. I'm seeing organizations now, right, starting to have you know AI governance just because of like all of the ways that AI was used poorly early on, yes, and and some of some of the you know bad things that happen from that, so you enter this chaos period, and performance goes down, and then at some point there's this moment, this transformational moment, where we start to see how this new thing, right these days it's AI, really could work to enable us to do what we were trying to do better, and at that point, actually, the chaos abates, but performance doesn't immediately go up. It still continues to dip a little bit. But then, as we get into this period of integration and practice, we get better and better at using it skillfully, and performance goes up and up and up, and then eventually, right, kind of levels off. And so I think right now most of the places that I'm working with are, you know, definitely the the change has happened, and lots of places are in the chaos. Some places are starting to get into something that's like, you know, we've got our heads wrapped around it. We're doing it well. I'm seeing that a little bit more in smaller shops, right? Where they have a few like really gifted people who like kind of figure the technology out, figure out how to tune it. Figure out how to get agents working well, et cetera, et cetera. Sounds like your your friend is one of those. Devon Morris: Yes, Chris Sims: and but I'm seeing a lot of places where what's happening is we imagined the bottleneck was our ability to make code changes, right? Our ability to generate new stuff, and wow, right? AI is you know Copilot and you know whatnot are like oh really good at creating lots of code, right? Very quickly, and so that's definitely no longer the bottleneck. If it ever was, Devon Morris: the Chris Sims: bottleneck now is figuring out what behavior changes do we want to make, and how can we ensure that what we're building continues to do what we intended to do, and how can we release it safely, and how can we validate our ideas, and like all of that stuff around the the you know the code creation, and and it's interesting. And one of the things I'm definitely seeing as a pattern is, and this and this pattern I'm about to describe has has always existed, but it's getting really exaggerated now with AI, Devon Morris: which Chris Sims: is that the cost of ownership of code Chris Sims: is Chris Sims: way higher than the cost of creation. Meaning, okay, right, we can create lots of code, but do we understand it? Can we maintain it? Right, all of that, and the more we let the tools do it for us, the more the answer is like there's nobody around here who actually knows what it's doing, and when something breaks, it's like hope the magic genie can figure it out because you know, and and so. That's that's increasing, right? The cost the cost of code ownership is increasing, and then you know figuring out what we should do, yeah, right. It's also is also generally a big bottleneck right now. But I've seen someone shared with me a really interesting graph a while back about You know, code commits right the pull requests and whatnot in in and code change in in Git and the the churn like in the last six months has gone up just dramatically right the average average life of a piece of code is is gone. You know, it's like it's created, and then a couple days later it's changed. A couple days later it's changed. A couple days later it's changed, and and yeah, the places that I've seen doing it well on the tech side are places where they're actually embracing, or have always embraced, the classic XP practices, test-driven development, and that sort of thing. Because then you've got this intentional harness around it that basically says this is what our system should do, and then it's a little easier to lean back and trust the AI to like create code that does what we have very carefully specified it should do. Devon Morris: You you mentioned you mentioned this being a shift, and would you say this feels different than previous shifts that happen. Oh, is it the Chris Sims: ah? It's interesting. Yes and no, right? So I, I kind of really started my tech career right about the time there was this thing just starting to happen called the internet and the World Wide Web, and that was a huge change. Devon Morris: Yes, Chris Sims: right. It was a business model change. It was a technology change. All of those things, and this is at least that big. Devon Morris: No, now a lot of that stuff started happening at U of I, right? Was you there at U of I during that time? Chris Sims: I I was at U of I, yeah. Like in the Mosaic had already happened, just happened when I got there. Devon Morris: You know, I was there, right? So that's exciting. So, okay, so that was definitely a big change, and you were definitely right there to see where a lot of that actual change was actually being born and coming out of, right? So that definitely was a shift. Okay, so that shift you experienced. What other shifts have you experienced in your career? Chris Sims: Well, I mean, personally in my career, my goodness, some big shifts. My, I don't know that it was a career. It was my first job, right? I worked at Burger King, made a lot of whoppers. I was a vegetarian at the time. Devon Morris: You was a Burger King. So Chris Sims: something something about like expressing my personal values through the work that I chose to do. It just not occurred to me, right? And so then, you know, frankly, young Chris was doing Devon Morris: that. That Chris, did you have a Burger King job at U of Chris Sims: I? No, no, no. Because I did, I did U of I later in life. So, so I was I was in my I was 30 years old when I got to U of I. Devon Morris: Okay, okay. Chris Sims: So, so Burger King thing. Then I became an auto mechanic, and that was you know maybe a little bit better fit because I was really into cars and all of that. Devon Morris: Yeah. Chris Sims: But I, I personally, I discovered that being into cars, right, being enthusiast, Devon Morris: yeah, Chris Sims: didn't didn't actually mean that I was going to enjoy working on them for a living, right, and and so yeah, wasn't loving that so much. But on the weekends, I was playing, you know, rock and roll, and I didn't like the shop I was working at, so I started looking around, looking in the want ads, because back in the day we had to look in the back of the newspaper to find a job, and so I'm looking for other mechanic jobs, and lo and behold, I saw an ad for a bass player wanted for full time traveling band. I'm like, what? I could make a living at this, and so I went and auditioned. Somehow got. Gig because quite frankly I was way underqualified, but got the gig went on the road, ended up doing music through most of my 20s, Devon Morris: okay, Chris Sims: and enjoyed it. But somewhere in my mid to late 20s, I had this aha moment where I realized that there was something missing in my life. Devon Morris: Okay, Chris Sims: regular income, and so if I kept doing music for a living, right, I was going to starve to death, right? Because I was never going to be a rock star, right? I didn't, I didn't have that level of talent, and I was just good enough to recognize the people that did have that level of talent, right? I looked around me and I'm like, oh, oh, oh, right. That's not me. Devon Morris: Yes. Chris Sims: So, and I realized I was on the wrong side of the supply and demand curve. Devon Morris: Okay. Chris Sims: Right. There were way more people who were at least as good as me, and and not very many places for us to like work and make a living and all that. Devon Morris: Okay. Chris Sims: So thus went back to school. Eventually ended up at U of I, computer science degree. Actually, computer science and math. It was the only way I could get into the program. Was to take that like kind of dual thing. And then I was my good fortune to graduate from U of I with a computer science degree, like as the dot-com boom was like starting to boom. Wow! And so yeah, that's that's how I landed out in Silicon Valley. Had a pretty typical software developer career, right? Developer becomes manager, becomes director, kind of a thing. Yeah. And then started my company, and and there there were shifts, right? So initially, I thought what I was going to do was consult to engineering leaders on you know kind of a variety of like how do you become a really effective engineering leader, engineering manager, that sort of thing, and I assumed that everybody was doing this agile stuff, right? Because I I had picked it up actually before we had the word agile, I'd run run across the folks doing extreme programming in about 1999, 2000, right in there, and it worked so much better than what we were doing before. That you know, it kind of really helped me succeed in my career as a leader. Right? It's like get teams together, get them to be effective, build you know products well that are successful. And so I just kind of assumed everybody was doing that. So I thought that was just part of what I would bring to the table was, you know, coach on that. And then it turned out once I got out out there and started trying to like get gigs, I found out no people were just waking up to this agile and Scrum stuff, and that's really what they wanted help with. And so I pivoted my practice from technical management more broadly to, you know, agile stuff, and so you know, yeah, so definitely, definitely pivots and changes. Devon Morris: So here's the deal: that when you when you talk about you coming into the agile space, period, in that way, where you made that pivot toward changing the company to move in that direction, coaching in that direction. Again, there wasn't a lot of people doing it. Y'all were different over in Silicon Valley. Y'all just right because y'all was a bubble, right? And that bubble had maybe some stuff happening, right? But you was at the beginning parts of even that bubble, right? And so you started to see that thing grow, and then it started spreading to other places, right? Because I didn't come around it literally till 2005, right? And so you were definitely around it prior to me, and when I came around. It just wasn't a lot of, especially in the Midwest. It was dead, no, no way in the Midwest, right? It was on the coast and in Texas and and over there by you. So that's that's interesting. So then, in that, you seen organizations start to shift to a better ways of doing work, and managers trying to find those better ways of doing work and trying to find better ways of being more innovative. Along with that, you've seen the dot-com boom happen, the bus happen. You've seen the internet kind of started to come up, and so now when you look at, and I know you say yes or no, when you look at this fabulous career that you've actually had, because that's a fabulous career. No, there's not too many people on the planet. Chris can say, "Look, I went from working to Burger King, working to Burger King, to being a musician to being an agitist, one of the top people in the in the world doing that. There's not a lot of people that can say that. Right, so with seeing all these shifts happen, what makes this AI shift so different? It's Chris Sims: a great question. So let me start with ways that it's not so different, but maybe it's maybe it's the magnitude of of it that makes it different. So when I was learning to program, I you know became familiar with C and C plus plus. You know I like these languages, right? I learned About object-oriented programming, but they were esoteric might be the right word. I'm not sure, but like it took a while to crack the nut of being able to understand how to code in these languages. Devon Morris: Yeah, Chris Sims: right. And we there used to be a thing that people would say early on, like when there'd be a group like at U of I say trying to learn C, is they'd say you know there's going to be two types of people: people who can you know understand pointers, and those who can't, right? And and it's just weird, you know, geeky whatever programming stuff, but it it limited the pool of people who could do it, right? You had to be able to understand algorithms and and things like that at a certain level. You had to really get the theory at a certain level to even be able to use the tools. Devon Morris: Yeah. Chris Sims: So then along came things like Visual Basic, and Visual Basic made it such that like people the the bar got way lower for like who could get in there and build an application. Devon Morris: Yeah, Chris Sims: right. You could draw your user interface, and you know you start typing, and there was auto complete. So it's like, oh, what I want to do right now is print something. So pr oh it's going to auto complete with print and then show me like the things that go in, and so it it made it way easier, and suddenly a lot more people were were creating software, but the quality wasn't great, right? And in fact, the tools I remember at the at the time, Visual Basic got a bad rap. It was like, oh, it's a terrible language. You know, people write terrible programs with it that are unmaintainable, and blah blah blah. And and I actually love that tool. I use that tool a lot. I don't think it was a bad tool. I think what it did was it lowered the bar so much that people could get in and build things that they didn't know how to maintain, right? Which hey, this sounds familiar. Didn't I say something like this just a little while ago? So at one level, AI is like that. It's it's empowering people who before didn't have the qualifications, credentials, the whatever, right? To to get in and do what they want to do, right? I was I was out camping recently, and there was this person who was you know very much not a tech person, Devon Morris: okay, Chris Sims: right? They were like social media kind of person, and they were talking to us about the app that they just built and you know had released into the app store and stuff, and because the AI enabled them to do that, right? They were like, "I want an app that does this and this and this and this and this, and so it's changing the playing field, right? And I think there are things in the past that have done that. This the scale, right? And what's going on right now is, I think, unprecedented, right? Because the all of the information and material that these these large language models have sucked up, and you know, theoretically, have have immediate access to right in a way that you know most human brains don't right. We don't have the capacity to hold all of that and access all of that. It's interesting. It's also interesting in that it's a big shift in terms of creating technology, creating code, in that code is deterministic; it does exactly what you tell it to. Doesn't mean it's going to do what you want it Devon Morris: to, Chris Sims: but if it's not doing what you, you know, if it's doing something you don't want it to do or not doing what you want Chris Sims: it Chris Sims: to do, ultimately it's because you've told it the wrong thing, right? Where the AI and the LLMs and the agents, they're non-deterministic, right? It's not it's not deterministic code anymore, and it. That's that makes things different, right? It it is in some ways like working with the human, Devon Morris: yeah, Chris Sims: right. Because you can ask it to do a thing, and it's got great capacity to do the thing, but it's not always going to do it Devon Morris: right. Yeah, Chris Sims: and so if you or somebody else doesn't know enough to identify that. Wait, that's not right. You know, it's just like, hey, I had a coworker, and they're smart. They know how to do things, and I asked them to do a thing, and they they did the thing. Did they do it right? Hopefully, more often than not, they did, but not always. Devon Morris: That is, I think the way that you phrase that up is beautiful. It provides a connection for people that they wouldn't quite get, and the magnitude being the thing that is really different because we've had shift after shift after shift, Chris. We've seen them, right? But you, you going back to the pointers, right? And and that visual, see the visual basic, and how it kind of lowered the bar, and pretty much AI had and took the playbook that people had, and just made it more available to other folks that didn't have the skills up there. That is, I never thought about it that way. But when I think about examples from me doing software myself, that's exactly what it is, man. That's exactly what it is, and so then the question becomes: as AI is chomping up everything, you know, what does a person do now? Chris Sims: Such a great question, right? And I think that what the AI tools don't have, at least not right now, is judgment, and what's the word I'm looking for? Something along the lines of I don't know if it's ethics, morals, but like like what's the right thing to do here, right? And so I think judgment and kind of decision making and all of that is more critical than ever, right? Because we can we can do a lot of things a lot faster, right? The cost of doing these things Devon Morris: is Chris Sims: lower, but which things should we do? Which problem should we solve, right? If if our if our product can suddenly have almost infinite features, well, which one should it really have, right? Because the the one a study that I like to point to sometimes is the was it 2019, 2018, or 2019 Pendo feature adoption study, where they found like 80% of the features in the software products they looked at were rarely or never used, and so we're already building a lot of things that at the time we're building it, we think, "Oh my God, we got to have this. This is so important. And then it turns out, right? Once it's out there, it's like, "No, it's actually not that important. And in fact, it's probably cluttering our product up and making it harder to use and harder to maintain, et cetera, and so I think having the judgment about what to build, which features to add, right, and then also the the long term vision because I I don't know that the AI is so good with like long-term vision, right? What are we trying to do here with the product? What are we trying to do as a team? What are we trying to do as a company? Goodness help us! What are we trying to do as a country and as a civilization? So, you know, choosing choosing what problems to solve, I think, is is is going to become so much more important. Devon Morris: So then, as a as a leader, right? When you when you have a situation here that is unprecedented at a magnitude that nobody's ever experienced. How the heck do you prepare your teams? Chris Sims: Yeah, I I think that this is a place where some of the real fundamental. Of Scrum, in particular, become more important than ever. Devon Morris: Okay. Chris Sims: Right. The idea of inspect and adapt. The idea of experiment. Right. The idea of try it. A guy that I I had the privilege of working with for years. Sadly, he's he's he's no longer with us. He's he's passed on. Steve Bockman, I was a member, you know, at Agile Learning Labs for a bunch of years, and his his mantra was, "Let's try it. How can we try it, right? And so I think fostering an environment where people can try things, but doing it wisely, right? Because in the chaos, right, when people are just like you know, it's the cowboy days of AI. Lots of bad stuff happens, but so does lots of good stuff. But it's it's hard to figure out like well what things worked well what things didn't work well and all of that and then take that learning and propagate it and so to the extent that we can just a little bit more thoughtfully and mindfully try things and do them with a you know it's almost like the scientific method right oh this is going to be an experiment. We're going to try this. We're hoping for this outcome, but we don't know, and we're going to see what we get, and then circle back, and then decide what to do next. I think is more more important than ever, and even during the you know this big uptake of of using AI and agents and you know all of that, even things that we think we figured out, six months later we may have to go back and refigure them out, right? Because it's it's shifting so fast. Devon Morris: Wow. So so then, inevitably, a team, an organization, group of people, they're going to get stuck to get behind. And when you start saying let's experiment, and then you have something at the magnitude that AI brings, you know. How does one really deal with that, Chris? Because you know you have people that got to get paid, and people who got to eat, and you know customers that want something, and a team that is behind, and it's the wild, wild west right now. Ooh, man, what do you do when when they're behind? Chris Sims: Yeah. So, couple of thoughts come to mind. Devon Morris: Yeah, Chris Sims: and the first, maybe it even challenges your basic paradigm and premise, which, which is my first response is, well, who says we're behind, right? And and and what are we behind, and what was the standard, and who set the standard, and is that even a reasonable standard, right? So one of the things I've I've found is when multiple times when I've been brought into organizations and they're like, "Oh my goodness, we have these teams and they're behind, I find out that the problem was well, like somebody set them up to fail, right? Somebody set them up with a completely unrealistic you know goal or set of expectations. So sometimes it's not that we're well. Sometimes it's more about like, well, why do we think we're behind, right? And who who set that bar, and is that bar even a realistic bar and whatnot? So that's let me. I'll just put that out there and then I set it aside. Okay. Okay. And then the other thing that I see all the time is when we feel like we're behind. Most people's response-it's a natural response-is work harder. Devon Morris: Yeah, Chris Sims: right. When they put your put your nose to the grindstone-is that the saying? That seems like a bad idea. Putting your nose to a ground. That doesn't seem like lend well, right? I agree. Devon Morris: I agree with that. Chris Sims: So, but but that's their natural response, right? Like, oh, I'll work later. I'll work harder, right? And I think very often when we're in like there's this fundamental shift happening, we're not going to work harder ourselves out of it, right? We actually need to like believe it or not. Very often, what we need to do is slow down, and we need to like kind of look around and go, okay, what's going on here? And what assumptions have we always been able to just, you know, work with that maybe it's time to question because they're not true anymore? And you know, the the for the leadership team I was talking about earlier in my example, for them it was like the assumption was that, oh well, if it's important, we should do it because we're the best and we got us here, right? We got we got this company to where it is, right? So we could get it to where it needs to go. And actually, that assumption is not true anymore, right? And so if those leaders just work even more hours, like that's that's not. They're not gonna catch up. They're not gonna. They're gonna. They're gonna get more and more behind. Right. The. I remember a time I was in this with Agile Learning Labs early on when we were growing, and and Steve Steve Bockman was coaching me, and and he was trying to get me to have this insight. I wasn't there quite yet, Devon Morris: and Chris Sims: I remember I said, "I don't know. The harder I work, the behinder I get. And and for those leaders, it was really true, right? The harder they worked at this, the more they were holding the company back, and so they had to. And this is hard, right? Because assumptions are things that we don't think about, right? They're built in, right? Like we assume there's air here, and we're going to get to breathe it. So we we never think about it. It's like that, right? It's like how do you start to see the thing that you've never seen before, and and in order to do that, you gotta slow down. You gotta start like looking around and questioning things and trying new things, and and that's so hard when you're behind. Devon Morris: Yeah, I'm with you, Chris. I really am with you. No, it's it's in the chest. It don't feel right. So then here's the question, right? Because with the magnitude of AI, and now you're telling me, Chris, to slow down. But there's been some cost here for teams and people because there's an identity crisis as well because my expertise, I got to go back to being a beginner at something with the magnitude of what the AI is doing. So now what you're telling me is I got an identity crisis because I got to go back to being a beginner, and you want me to slow down at the same time, and we got these assumptions that we made to get things out of. How do I get out of this conundrum, man? Seriously, Chris Sims: it's so hard. It's so hard. We need Devon. Devon Morris: No, no, they need they need. Chris Sims: We need you, man. Devon Morris: I think I think a lot of people are having that crash right now, man, and teams in particular, because it's a different way to work together when you have this magnitude of stuff that's just kind of come and hit you for the past three to four years. So, been a very interesting journey, but yeah, that is that slow down thing is is probably what I would say, but it would be kicking me in the teeth, Chris. Me saying that, so I got to wear braces or mouth guard or something because it just doesn't work right. And then just finding ways to deal with that identity crisis is that other thing that's Chris Sims: yeah Devon Morris: permeated the space right now. So if you're a leader dealing with all that stuff, I mean, how do you survive? Chris Sims: Yeah, I I don't know honestly, right? But I do think that some of the ingredients are humility, curiosity, and a willingness to go into that uncomfortable place, right? Because exactly you put your your finger right on it, like, hey, I've done this thing I've done for a long time. I'm really good at it, right? I have a lot of identity wrapped up in it. Devon Morris: Yeah. Chris Sims: Now that thing is maybe not as valuable as it was two years ago, six months ago, last week, and I need to do something different. And it's like, oh, but I'm, I don't know if I'm good at that, right? That's. Scary. That is so scary, but it's it's real, and it it's also interesting to me. I'm seeing certain skill sets. The how can I put this? The perception of the value of certain skill sets shifting and changing in big ways. Devon Morris: Yeah. Chris Sims: So, you know, back in my days of writing code and whatnot, in the organization, you know, maybe we had people who were primarily like the code writers, right? And then they were oh, right, a certain level of status, and you know whatever, and then you know maybe above them, architects, right? Oh, right, and then you know unfairly, but nonetheless, I saw this all too often. Oh, then you know QA people, right? A little lower, and then maybe you know people like you know analysts, right? Down, down somewhere in there, and all of a sudden, writing the code is no longer the magic. Devon Morris: Yeah, Chris Sims: and suddenly, like the analysts and the QA people and folks like that, like those are actually the higher valued skills suddenly, right? It's like, oh my goodness, we have to. We need to understand what problems we need the magic to go solve, right? The magic used to be the people who could code, right? Now the magic is the people who know how to get the AI to code. Devon Morris: Yeah, like it's it's a it's a it's a beautiful thing with us having been in this agile scrum space, because we philosophically think about transparency, inspection, adaptation, building things in smaller bits and pieces, so and then we can get feedback sooner and shorten those feedback loops, which fits perfectly into what we're what's happening today. And so it's like the distinction of adapt versus digging in, right? Like a lot of leaders right now, they're just kind of digging in, and when you say magnitudes happen, you know, there's a value shift, identity cost that's happened. So value has shift on a team in terms of status as well. So, man, what kind of skills do you have to have to deal with teams today? Chris Sims: I I think it's you know more than more than ever. Leaders need vision plus real leadership skills, right? And and and what I mean by that is, we used to be able to get by on, you know, the business leaders got by other business acumen, and the technical leaders could get by on their technical acumen, and all that. And I think when things are shifting, you your core skill area, right? Your subject matter expertise, very often is not what's going to carry the day anymore, right? It's a your ability to adapt your thinking and your approaches, and your ability to influence people around you to do the same, and your ability to sense patterns in the chaos, right? Because during in that chaos period in transition, if we pay attention, there's a lot of gold in there to be mined, right? Because there's this time where the old rules don't really apply anymore, the new rules haven't kind of gotten solidified, a lot of things happening and being tried, and some of those crazy things are actually really amazing and super valuable, but like part of it is is developing the sense to notice that, and and part of it is social engineering, right? Cultivating a culture where. We're going to share these things. We're going to notice these things, and in the chaos, especially, an awful lot of what we're trying is is going to fail. And if we create an environment where you know failure is not an option, right? Then then information. Flow goes way down, and we need exactly the opposite. We need to we need to embrace the fact that yeah, the rules are changing, right? And we're going to try things and fail, and it's going to be messy. But if that's okay, and we can share our struggles and our failures, we only have to do that learning once, right? As opposed to like if we create an environment where no, no, no, it's not okay to fail, then that same mistake is going to happen over and over and over and over throughout the organization, and so, so I think, I think those are the things that leaders need, and and and you know to some extent there's cultivating a certain groundedness that people can look to and say, "Okay, yeah, you know, the the ground is shifting underneath Devon Morris: us, Chris Sims: but you know, our our our leader is remaining grounded, not not not stuck and dug in, but but remaining like kind of present and paying attention and adapting and kind of creating an environment where it's like, hey everybody, this is a wild ride. Yes, it is. Let's go on it together, right? This is exciting. Let's figure it out. Devon Morris: So then, when you think about that leader, those leaders that you're describing there, how do I rebuild my own confidence, man? Chris Sims: I, I, I think this is where again leaning back on on you know Scrum stuff right agile stuff iteration is so such a powerful thing right I try something it fails so I try something different fails try something different oh that worked out a little better. Yeah. So I try a variation on it, right? And over time, we can iterate towards things that are working better and better and better. And the thing that we can hold onto and feel confident in is, in fact our ability to adapt and change, which is a pretty powerful thing to to start to get comfortable with. It's hard, right? You know, most of us don't fundamentally don't like change very much, right? I I think I became a change agent, Devon Morris: yeah, Chris Sims: fundamentally to you know, as as my own recovery as a control freak, right? It's like change, ooh, scary, right? So so maybe I'll learn how to get others through it. You just Devon Morris: this confused me. So a musician that is a control freak, how does that happen? Chris Sims: Are you kidding? All, all of us, all of us, right? I just Devon Morris: maybe I got some thoughts about musicians that's different, man. But I just, you know, just seems so easy for you as a musician to say these things, right? And everybody else is not a musician that can go by that rhythm. You can, y'all can, y'all can decide on a new song, and we think about y'all adapting in a moment, right? You know, that's the kind of thing that you're basically saying leaders need to really be able to do is adapt when shifting around them, yeah, them to understand that. And if they don't do that, how do they build the confidence in themselves. How do they build the confidence back in the people that are all of this stuff, all at the same time? Because it almost feels like it's a one big gigantic human experiment. Is what's happening to us with AI. Chris Sims: I think it Devon Morris: is. It's like every aspect of life, right? I'm over here cooking, man. I'm over here cooking dishes that I would never be able to cook at. You know, because I wouldn't think about it in advance enough for me to go buy a cookbook that would allow me to be be able to do that in the moment, and so it just has had such an impact on our lives, man. That it's been it's been crazy on so many levels. So that being said, we we've talked about everything here, and I think there's so many nuggets that we have that we can actually allow people to take away. But I'm gonna ask a. Closing question, Chris. Chris Sims: All right, Devon Morris: what would you tell a leader whose team is behind right now, and they know it in this age of AI? Chris Sims: I would, I would say, I would ask them, what support does that team need in order to be able to better learn and adapt? And very often it's right. They need some space to learn and adapt. So the like just working harder that shrinks the space, right? You you have less space to learn and adapt. So you got to find ways to like give them some breathing room to learn and adapt, but what other support do they need? Right, there's like psychological, social support. Right, is this a psychologically safe space? Can people experiment? Are we working in ways that support experimentation and learning? Just a little, one little example. Shorter sprints support more experimentation and trial and error. For ages and ages, I was advocating one week sprints, right? And all of a sudden, right? We got AI, and suddenly people are doing one-week sprints. And now I actually know places that are doing one-day sprints, right? But, but you know, the faster the iteration, the faster the learning can happen. But you have to make space for the learning. Devon Morris: All that, right? Chris Sims: You have you have to build in the space for them to learn, right? Because otherwise, people are just going to work harder, and I've coached Devon Morris: just doesn't get them there. Chris Sims: Yeah, yeah, and I I've coached people where you know they're like, oh, right, this team is behind, and we don't have time for a retrospective. We don't have time to experiment with a new piece of technology. We don't have time to like play with the AI. Blah blah blah. And and my response is often, oh, I understand. You've got so much wood to cut that you don't have time to sharpen your saw, right? But it's like it's that-that's when you need it the most. Devon Morris: Yeah, Chris Sims: right. But it-it is counterintuitive. It really is. Devon Morris: I agree. And this-this has definitely been different than what I expected, Chris. You have been absolutely amazing. You know I'm going to have you around again, but here's what I'm going to ask you: Where should people find you, and tell people what's coming up for you? Chris Sims: Yeah, so Agile Learning Labs is my company, so AgileLearningLabs.com, and lots of appearances coming up. I do a fair amount of conference speaking and presenting. Goodness, I'm going to be in Vancouver and Boston, Madison, Wisconsin, Washington D.C. All in the next couple of months. I'm going to be in Prague pretty soon, and then you'll find all of this at AgileLearningLabs.com. So that's probably the best place to go, so yeah, I would I would say go there. Devon Morris: Well, I'm gonna say you have been more than amazing. I you know I appreciate you, man. You know I like I told like I said to everybody earlier, it is always nice to have people that are in front of you, and you can just look and copy a little bit. You ain't got to innovate too much for too much away from. Just kind of copy them a little bit to try to get to where you need to get to. And I would say to you, fundamentally, you are one of the people that I copied. Bearded Eagle would have existed if learning, if Agile Learning Labs didn't exist, because you were one of the people that I saw independently doing it that wasn't with the crowd, and that's the key, wasn't with the crowd, right? And still having success, and so I'm gonna say, man, I really appreciate you, Chris. If you need anything whatsoever, reach out to me, man. Chris Sims: Likewise, and I'm I'm really honored to be on your show, and I look forward to our next conversation. Devon Morris: All right, Chris, you have a good one, and everybody, thank you so much. We will see you next time. Thank you for joining us. Where every Tuesday and Thursday we work toward bridging the gap for teams that are behind. Any questions, comments, or you just want to start? Start your own conversation with us. Go to thelaggingteam.com/start. Otherwise, find us at any place you listen to your podcast.