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Agility for Business | Al Shalloway
Using Thought Leadership to teach agility across an organization
An interview with Al Shalloway about using thought leadership to help organizations become leaner and more agile.
Today’s guest is Al Shalloway, Director of Thought Leadership for Agile at Scale Programs and Founder and former CEO of Netobjectives.
Al joins us to discuss how he is using thought leadership at the Project Management Institute to help teams and entire businesses learn to become more agile. He shares how to scale an idea into a movement, the importance of understanding value stream management, and why leaders need to be in the middle of the pack, not out in front of it.
Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:
- Thought leaders need to help teams to become more agile to help create a business that is agile.
- Sometimes it is better for your thought leadership to focus on the part that the client needs to know and not overwhelm them with trying to take over everything.
- Thought leaders need to step back and focus on the big picture in order to see the problem or they might find themselves solving a symptom and not the real problem.
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And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!
Transcript
Bill Sherman Hello and welcome. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we’re talking about one of my passions, organizational thought leadership. That is the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organization. My guest today is Al Shalloway. Al is the director of Thought Leadership for Agility Scale Programs at PMI Project Management Institute. Previous to that, he was the founder and CEO of Nat Objectives. He earned a master’s degree in mathematics from Emory and a masters in electrical engineering from MIT. Welcome to the show, Al.
Al Shalloway Hi. Thanks for having me, Bill.
Bill Sherman So let me ask you this question here, because maybe some folks on listening in won’t know what is Agile at scale. Give us a quick sort of non practitioner’s sort of introduction.
Al Shalloway Sure. Well, Agile started out at the team level, meaning you had one group of people trying to get something accomplished and the idea was to be really tuned in to the customer and get things done quickly using feedback. So agile at scale, you could just kind of think of it. How does an organization do the same thing? We tend to call it business agility. So work comes in or requests come in, or how do you decide what to work on from a business strategic point of view? And then how do you get the organization to build it quickly? But in the process of doing that, how do they how does the organization respond to the environment and respond to what they learn? So it’s the business becoming agile in a sense. And in doing that, you create innovation, You enable to respond to what you learn and respond to the outside better. So it’s actually quite different than Team Agile because the dynamics are quite different. What the concept of doing or being agile as an organization instead of a team is the essence of it.
Bill Sherman And so it functions as a methodology. Is that correct?
Al Shalloway Well, I don’t really want to call it a methodology. A lot of people use frameworks and they use methods. And my own approach, my own thinking about it is understanding how organizations work and what it takes to become kind of agile. So they’re actually quite a few different approaches. And in fact, agile at scale means different things to different people. So I give you my definition of what it means. What some people think of agile and scale is you get teams working and then you get teams of teams working and it’s a focus of going from the teams on up. I prefer to drive from the organization itself. It’s, in other words, like, I’m not a mechanic, so when I buy a car, I don’t really care about fuel injection and all that. I mean, I kind of know it because I do have an engineering background, but I don’t care. I’m more interested in how does the car as a whole operate so agile at scale really to me means how do you get the organization? That doesn’t mean that you have really big development groups or anything like that. It could be. You just have a lot of little teams working together in concert with each other. It doesn’t mean that you have bigger teams. In fact, that’s one of the differences now is that some approaches actually have approached by glomming together all the teams. So you have these really big groups doing Agile and it’s like large, Agile. So I mean, Agile spread across an organization. So the organization itself can be agile and I’m with the Pie. So our big offering is disciplined, agile and flex. I created flex objectives, which is a way to devalue stream management. Basically the value stream being how do you get an idea and get it through the organization and back out to the customer quickly. So you could say business agility or agility by looking at value stream management is how do you get ideas in quickly and get them back to the customer quickly is value that requires smaller focused value adds done more efficiently. But ironically, don’t look at the efficiency. That’s our normal old business. Let’s get productivity high and costs low. It turns out that if what you do is you focus on removing delays, not going faster, but removing delays to get value to the customer, costs drop as a consequence because that drives waste out of the organization. So business agility, although you don’t talk about waste and you don’t talk about efficiencies and things like that, is actually about getting it, but getting it indirectly by focus on Agile delivery.
Bill Sherman So let me ask you a question, Al. You’ve been an entrepreneur. You’ve been a consultant. You built the Flex framework. When was it that you started to think of yourself in terms of thought leadership? When did that evolution happen and how do you view it? Right? And I know it’s a little bit different of a question, but I think everybody is almost an accidental.
Al Shalloway Yeah. And towards that.
Bill Sherman Your thought leadership?
Al Shalloway I would say that was it for me. I mean, the title I have now was given to me. I didn’t. Yes.
Bill Sherman Right. Right.
Al Shalloway And I think it happened. I’ve always had I mean, as far back as I can remember, I go back into college days. I’ve always looked for smart people and attached myself to them. And I don’t think it was until around, I don’t know, maybe around 2000, 7 or 2008 where I was having some people who had worked for me. That objective started in 99 and some of them would say really smart things. And I would say, Wow, that’s really good. Where’d you get that? And I said, You taught me that. And I’d forgotten I’d said that at some point, you know. So after a while, I started realizing, you know, I’m pretty good at integrating things. I think about 80, 90% of what I do is integrating other people’s ideas. So I think I think what it is for me is when you respect that there are a huge number of smart people out there and you really don’t think you’re leading at all. You just think that I’m just trying to find what’s right and you respect and know that, okay, I’m really good at a couple slivers of things and I’m pretty good at some bigger slivers of things. But there’s so many other people are so much better than I am. The leadership isn’t about leading, really. Like in the thought, in the thought of creating, though, it’s about leading. How do people get together and create amongst themselves? So thought leadership is not being out front, it’s being in the middle and it’s facilitating what other people are saying.
Bill Sherman And I want to pick up on something there. Right. Is I think there’s the myth on thought leadership that the thought leader is the person who is like the Smith at the Forge and they’re taking the wrought iron and just hammering away at it until they beat it into shape. But what you talked about with the influence of the community where you’re putting ideas out there, people are coming back. It’s. Much more like you have a conversation in its ongoing process of refinement. What I think of it instead of forging, is often you’re sharpening ideas and everybody has a little bit of a stone and sharpening a little bit more. Or sometimes you’re welding and you’re taking one idea from over here. You’re welding ideas together to solve real problems.
Al Shalloway You know, I really like what you said because there’s another aspect of this. Like when I go into clients, one of the first conversations I have with them is I’m not here to tell you what to do. You know more about your business, and I will ever know about your business. I, on the other hand, know more about lean and agile and how it fits organizations. Not because I’m smarter. I’ve just been CEO of a company for 21 years and I’ve been exposed to thousands of companies. You guys have been exposed to maybe 5 or 10 companies in your career. I mean, literally thousands.
Bill Sherman And they think that their problems are unique and that they haven’t been seen anywhere else.
Al Shalloway So what I can do is, in a sense, I’m this integrator of what’s going on with them. That’s what I tell them. Look, I expect you to tell me what’s going on. I’ll tell you patterns. And then as a joint partnership, we’ll figure out what to do. So, yeah, I like this leadership. It’s not thought leadership. It’s thought center ship.
Bill Sherman Yes. Yeah. It’s a very collaborative process. And if you’re trying to be the thought leader who’s the guru on top of the mountain and you’re not engaged with people, good luck with that. You’re not going to have anyone using your tools.
Al Shalloway That’s right.
Bill Sherman Let me ask you a question here. Yeah. In your past and this is one of the things that I love is when I talk to folks from different practitioner backgrounds, thought leadership is usually a second or third act in a career. Right? So my question is, you talked about Lean, you talked about Agile. How do those experiences frame how you work in thought leadership? How does it influence how you think, how you act, how you work with others? What advice would you give based on that expertise?
Al Shalloway So it’s kind of like you have to look at what’s necessary. To me, it’s actually it’s not leadership, it’s it’s holistic problem solving. So one of the more embarrassing. Unfortunately, nobody knows this except when I talk about it. Nobody quite noticed it because I’m really quick on my feet and cover my tracks. Well. Well, what are my early webinars? Since I started as a technical guy and I learn design patterns and kind of I started at objectives a lot of technical training, and I remember doing a patterns class. And I had about 100 people there, not a class. I started with the class, but I was doing this seminar when I had about 100 people at this seminar, and I focus totally on the design. And somebody at the end came up to me or asked the question and said, But l you’re talking all about the design. What about the requirements? What about this? And she talked about stuff before and after. And I, I quickly said something like, yeah, I mean, that’s important. Then, you know, I just was focusing on this and that was total B.S. The reality was at that time all I was looking at was design, because that’s what I did for 20. That’s what I done for. At that point, you had a hammer? Yeah, 30 years. I had a hammer. I was good at design. That’s what I did. But the moment she asked the question, I realized, rats. You know, she’s absolutely right. This is such a overly focused notion. So it wasn’t long after that. That’s when we got into Scrum and we got into other things because I had other experiences where the overfocus on design wasn’t helping companies. They love the design pattern training and it did no good for them as a business, as a team. It was awesome. As a business, it was useless.
Bill Sherman So I find a way to work, but not hitting the objectives you wanted.
Al Shalloway Yeah, I mean, they love the design patterns. They love the course. Developers got to be much better programmers, but did the business get more value delivered to their customers? No. I solved the wrong problem.
Bill Sherman And that’s a word that I’m hearing repeated from you value in terms of value for the customer. Close the customer value stream management. Let’s talk about that for a little bit.
Al Shalloway Well, so that’s the so this is these tie together because when you talk about value stream management, think of it this way. It’s like you’ve got a hose and it doesn’t matter where the hose is blocked. It’s what value streams and value streams you’ve got to take metaphorically in a manufacturing physical world, right? Right. There’s a direct services there.
Bill Sherman Yeah.
Al Shalloway In the software virtual world, all interconnects and things. So what you have to do is you have to step back. And to me, this is the leadership. It’s the guy who steps back or the woman who steps back and says, we have a problem. And everybody is looking around and I got to get out of the box and stop looking or I know the solution is and start looking. Or where I even know the problem is and start saying maybe I don’t know where the problem is. Maybe the problem I’m working on is a symptom of the real problem. And that’s what happened is the developers in this group that actually opened up I needed to get into Agile was they were at they looked to be at fault. So therefore I was going to do training to fix them. But the problem was a bigger problem you can only get by stepping back and looking at it. So that’s why I don’t really call it leadership. When you say, how did I get into leadership, I got into it by looking at what is the real challenge we’re having, not what the problem is. Now, this is funny that I say I separate the two. Most people say, I got a problem. But a problem and a challenge are two different things. Even though they sound like they’re the same things because problems sound like it’s really, my God, this is a problem. And you know, like I’m driving along and the red blue flashing lights find me going to sell crap, I’m going to get a ticket. And that’s a problem. You know what? Actually, no. See the blue and red lights in the in the back of my car. I mean, I remember my son was driving his wife to the hospital on a snowy day in February when they had big snow in Atlanta several years ago. And the blue flashing lights were, my God, thank God they’re blue. There’s a policeman back there. They actually drove him to the hospital. And so the question is, well, where did the problem exist? It wasn’t in the blue and red flashing lights. It was that in the case I’m driving and I don’t want to get a ticket, I got a challenge. There’s a problem because I’ve got money I don’t want to lose. So I have a commitment. I don’t want to lose money. Whereas my son, he had a problem in that he needed to get his wife to the hospital. So I like to use the word challenge because it’s something’s in the way of what I’m trying to accomplish. It’s not inherently in what’s facing me. And so, so the, the best thing a leader can do in a sense. Is notice. Are we even working on what we should be working on? Do we even notice what’s going on? And that requires stepping back because most people don’t take the time to step in.
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Bill Sherman So you’ve thought much of your career systemically, right? And looked at scale. And I want to ask you this question. One of the ways that I look at thought leadership is taking you’re using thought leadership to take an idea to scale because no matter how much you say something on your own, you need to create a movement. Like Agile became a movement. You need other people to sign the manifesto, you know, either literally or virtually and rally behind. So in this process of creating a movement with it and taking an idea to scale, what have you seen through the arc of your career? And then if you were a practitioner, what advice would you give on how do you get how do you get an idea to scale and create that movement?
Al Shalloway Well, first of all, I want to put a light, a slight correction in that I’ve done this most of my career. I guess I have because I’ve done it for more. My career spans now, what, 50 years? So I’ve done it for more than 25 years. So I guess it is most. But for years I didn’t do this. Okay. And for years I just solved the problem at hand and something would come up and I’m pretty smart guy. I’d solve the problem.
Bill Sherman Yep.
Al Shalloway And I had two shifts in my life. I would say one shift was in the 80s when I did some personal development work and I learned how to step back and see what’s really going on as an observer of my life, like outside of my body. Look, I don’t mean out of life, out of body experiences, although I’ve had a couple of those, but I mean, just that ability to observe. Okay. And that was part of it. To notice that where I come from has a huge impact. But where I really started saying this, holistic systems thinking it’s not solutions you’re looking for, it’s an approach that thinking you’re looking for. And to me, what’s starting to happen in the industry and it’s very exciting and I think I’m finally prepped or I can even talk about this well, because I’ve struggled with enunciating some of this, is that as we understand that as an individual or as a group, it’s not so much what we’re doing, it’s how we’re working in relationship to the people in the organization. Systems are actually defined by the relationships between the components. It’s very difficult to see these relationships, especially in large organizations. For example, if you look at the big picture, which people are pretty familiar with, it’s like, Wow, everything’s up there. All this is great. They’ve got a solution for everything and I fit here, but you can’t see how anything related to anything else goes. It’s just component, a role role, role. Like in our in our DSA playbook. One of the first things we do is how can you see the value stream in this thing? And we actually redraw it as a value stream. So we leadership to me a good tool is value stream management for this reason. It enables you to see the relationships. That’s nice, but a good systems thinker can do that anyway. But it enables you to point it out to other people who aren’t used to it. In fact, what I’m starting to realize and I think I’ve been kind of, I don’t know, arrogance, not the right word, but I don’t say I’m not arrogant, but it’s a little overly focus on God. I got to teach these people system thinking I’ve got to teach them system thinking. And in the last few days, I realize, No, no, you don’t have to teach them systems thinking. You just have to. What would a systems thinker do and teach them that? I know that sounds funny, but a systems thinker would look at instead of just this, how does it fit into the whole. I don’t have to talk about systems thinking. I could just say, Hey, look, if you don’t have an intake process binding the portfolio and product management to the development teams, they could see that’s a problem. I don’t have to talk about why that’s important. They could look at it from their own pragmatic experience that that here golf is massive. So let’s say well, if you look at it as a value stream, you can see how product managers have to relate to the development team. You can look at how the development team needs to relate to the product management. We’re interested in that relationship, so now they can relate to it in a concrete way. Whereas if I was doing systems thinking training, I would talk about systems being about relationships and you got to attend to it all. And that’s I mean, I just said the same thing actually, but well.
Bill Sherman Yeah, it’s the difference between theoretical and applied and thought. Leadership sometimes can get wrapped around its own axle with theory and you’ve got whether someone in the sales team or someone in marketing and other people in the organization who say, but we’ve got to meet business objectives. How are we tying these ideas to what our customers need? And I think one of the things that resonates to me is in the concept of the value stream, it’s really important to say, okay, what tools do you need to equip the folks downstream from the idea? What do they need to be successful rather than take them through at a graduate unit school level and understanding the idea.
Al Shalloway You know, somewhere in this conversation something showed up for me is kind of a metaphor. So this is something I’ve said for a long time. So people berate waterfall. Okay. And believe me, I go further than most. I actually have written articles saying lean is always better than what? Always better than waterfall. Because even if you could predict it, Lean gives you some tools. It’s lean, to me, is really about shortening delays and getting feedback. There’s never a time you don’t want the look. You don’t want to eliminate delays and get feedback. And if it’s anything you want doesn’t work.
Bill Sherman Well, say I like waste.
Al Shalloway Yeah, yeah, exactly. But here’s the thing about waterfall. If you look at waterfall, we look at the intentions. What I’m trying to do with waterfall, you’re trying to understand what you’re going to build. You’re trying to understand what it’s going to take. You’re trying to understand the risks. You’re trying to understand the costs. You’re trying to understand all sorts of good stuff. What capacities are. There’s nothing that Waterfall is attempting to do that’s wrong. It’s the way it attempts to do it is wrong. Okay. So that’s why I like Agile. It’s trying to do the same things in a better way. And I like Lean because it gives a bigger approach, bigger view and flow and there are constraints, gives me more dynamics. So if you look at kind of systems thinking you could say or non systems thinking versus systems thinking or like frameworks only get a framework that’s always come into my head. So with a framework. What you’re trying to do is good stuff. You’re trying to say, here’s everybody’s role. Here’s what everybody does. Here’s how I do things. And you’re laying it out very pragmatically. And that all sounds like a good thing. Of course, you want people to know what their job is. You want to know what you have to do and all that. But what it’s leaving out is it’s leaving out how things relate to each other. And sometimes there’s complexities at it because you’re not working on the root cause. You’re working on the symptoms of not working on the root cause.
Bill Sherman And I think that’s if I were to tie together some of the themes from what we’ve been talking about in this conversation, it’s being close enough. And to borrow a term from Lean, it’s going to the Gemba and understanding the people who are solving problems, but then also stepping back and saying, what are the patterns and recognition that I can look at and say, it’s the interplay between the two.
Al Shalloway Yeah, absolutely. And I want to throw one other point in this, because this is everybody can be a leader, but not everybody wants to be a leader. So, look, I did development for a long time and I did not want to be a leader. I wanted to develop. I wanted to write stuff. That’s what I had fun doing. I didn’t want to be the guy who was stepping back. I wanted to just have my hands down and dirty and getting stuff done. And you know what? That’s okay. I ended up taking a different route. But you have a lot of people. They just want to be career developers forever. Nothing wrong with that. That’s what they love. You want that? So what we have to do is also and this is not a new thought by me, I think I forget who was that? It was McCaffrey or some book I read 20 years ago. And he talked about this, that you need to honor the technical career path of people who don’t want to go into management, the people who want to get down and dirty and continue that. So I don’t want to have an implication that somehow leaders are better. You know, the fact that I get up out of the weeds and I don’t go down the rat holes anymore and I’m the person who looks and finds other people doing it. The fact is, well, first of all, I learned how to do that because I did it. So I’ve firsthand experience. But I’m not better because I do that. I am in a different role. That’s all it is. Leadership is just a different role. It is not a better role.
Bill Sherman Well, and thought leadership is a tool in the leadership. Absolutely right. And how do you align people? You mentioned the phrase to True North before, and I think that’s absolutely true, is if you can equip people with a shared mental model or vision of what success is, then everybody spends less time in a waste, less energy trying to figure out what do we need to do. That’s right. And more time being productive.
Al Shalloway Yeah. So I got one last thought on this. So I think there’s a two step process. And this it’s funny, I’ve been actually thinking that two step, maybe something more generic because I think of safe as that way they get us going forward, but then they don’t do the next step to keep us going forward. And this is the same thing with the leadership and management. So I talked about value stream management, where you can talk to somebody about what’s in front of them and what’s after that. But what are the thing Don Ryerson does in his work that’s always impressed me is the management aspect of what is what is a manager need to provide to the people at the end as you speak, making doing the work, what information is needed so you can make local decisions that have the positive global impact you want. So in some sense, maybe this whole system leadership, this systems thinking leadership think. Is a two step piece. The first one, I think, would be just how do people relate? How do you get people to relate to the people that they’re working after? You know, like in the value stream, they come after it and hopefully it’s a short delay and all interacting. But then the other one is how do you provide the bigger picture? So all these relationships bind together. And again, I think this is what you use values management for because it is the whole thing. But you don’t need to teach everybody everything you know, It’s nice if you did, but then they don’t get to do what they want. It’s too much.
Bill Sherman And I think that’s a great place to end today. Al Is the connection between taking the big idea and then breaking it down as to what do people need to go forward. Al, thank you very much for joining us. Thank you, Counsel.
Al Shalloway This was awesome. Thank you.
Bill Sherman If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.
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