in it and how to become a great Scrum Master and great servant leader. So first question would be Jeff, for you personally, what are the features and who is the great Scrum Master and the great servant leader? How do you understand it? So we understand the goal that we would like to achieve at the end of the road. So I've set unwittingly, I mean I didn't go out to try and define anything, but I identified a number of aspects that seem to coincide with or at least be common with people who were just really really good at that role in the teams that I've come across. And if I was going to have my time again I'd probably try harder and harder to really narrow it down because nine characteristics is actually quite a lot, especially when you start trying to teach a course based on that you realise nine is quite a lot. But there's basically doing the role and then being the person I suppose. So I mean the first thing that any Scrum Master's really got to get a hold of is to just get into new habits about ways of working. So can they get something set up and working in an environment that's probably not going to be very helpful and might even be quite hostile to agile ways of working and just giving that team and the sort of bubble that they're operating in enough time to just establish themselves without getting swallowed up or beaten down by the system that they're in. And that takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of resilience just to do that. But then if they can do that then they can really start working on getting that team and that organisation to a really collaborative enabling state. So you start seeing a lot of proactivity, you start seeing a lot of you see more of a can do attitude rather than a yeah but we can't do that here kind of attitude. And some of the people that really do that well have this servant leadership ethos if you like. This not lack of ego necessarily but they really want other people to succeed and fulfil their potential. They believe in the capacity of other people. You know they don't take the view that people are lazy. They don't take the view that people are selfish. They genuinely believe that people want to do a good job. They want to be successful and they will do whatever they can to help those people be able to achieve that. And so they need to be quite resourceful. They need to be quite open minded and creative and quite determined and thick skin sometimes as we say here. So you know they don't take things too personally. They're quite resilient. They can speak truth to power but without annoying people too much. But if I was to pick one of the things that I think is the most important it would be their ability to listen with empathy. Their ability to hear things from other people's perspectives and even if they don't agree with them or even if they don't see the same situation in the same way they can understand why other people do. And with that empathy they can then build relationships. They can create a sense of psychological safety. They can challenge without appearing threatening. It opens up all the other things that they need to be able to be good at if they can hear people and hear people as as they are and as they see things. It's a bit of a long answer, isn't it? But also the question I think it's it's not the easiest one that's straightforward so wouldn't expect any other answer. How do you begin the treasure that traveled them the pathway? So once we know the goal where would you advise us to take the very first step become a servant leader? Well I mean first of all I think it's asking yourself that almost philosophical question about do you believe in the capacity of the people that you're working with. You know I've been in organisations where people don't. I often tell this story because it's one of the big stories from my career if you like for me personally it was a huge moment for me. I was relatively young and I was teaching a class of very well-paid very experienced very confident managers at a very successful organisation and we were talking about the concept of self-organising cross-functional teams and how it's not about managing them it's about enabling them it's about you know giving them space giving them problems to solve rather than requirements to deliver and one of the people says but Jeff people are lazy and you know if you give lazy people autonomy it's going to be chaos dreadful things will happen people need to be managed and I was really worried about how to answer that question because I could tell it was clear to me that this person had evidence to back that view up they were just saying it to be annoying they had genuinely seen evidence that people were lazy and people needed to be managed now I'd seen other evidence but why would he why would he accept my world view because he'd seen this at first hand so I think well this is going to be a really quite tough day but luckily for me one of his colleagues from the same organisation says well I've got a different experience to that because my people are pretty good so maybe you just haven't hired the right people and we had a big discussion about if you trust people yeah sure they might let you down but if you don't trust people they can never prove you right they can never prove themselves yeah if the only way you can make someone trustworthy is to give them the chance to potentially let you down but also give them the chance to prove that they are trustworthy and there was an argument of what came first you know was the fact that he didn't trust people lead to the people not appearing to be trustworthy or was the people not being trustworthy lead to his view and in a way it didn't really matter because if he's not going to change his view on that people will know you know I could say to you I trust you but my actions will actually prove that or not and and then what happens when something does go wrong do I then say aha see I knew you weren't trustworthy or do I interpret that as you did your best you couldn't have foreseen that how can we make this better so your question was how do you get started and it's a long way around of saying well what is my view on human nature do I think people turn up to work wanting to do the best they can what is my explanation for someone not doing very well is it because they are inherently lazy is it because they are inherently selfish or trust untrustworthy or is it you know they did their best and they want they would like to learn how to get better and if I I can't prove my point of view but I think if you have that negative view of human nature then you haven't got a chance of being a servant leader but once you have that then it enables you to to actually start from where you are you can start looking at your situation differently does that make sense so uh of course if there are any comments from the audience and please feel free to uh to participate uh me how speaking so uh to recap your I can say elsewhere to be good service service leader we should trust people and say it and see always things from the better side rather than good side uh worse side yeah so so I have a couple of things that I'll add to that I think thank you for summarizing it and playing it back because it's made me think of a couple of things that I want to say so the first is that trust isn't yes or no it's not black or white it's not I trust you or I don't trust you there are different degrees of trust and I don't have to completely trust you to be a servant leader I don't have to fully trust you with everything I don't have to give you all of my passwords all of my keys um sign over sign over legal you know guardianship of my children I don't have to go that far for you to prove that agile can work and we can we can work together so I only need to trust you a bit and then you can prove to me that you're worthy of that trust and then maybe I'll trust you a little bit more and we can get we can and likewise backwards and forwards so we can we can start small and we can we can work this up and part of you know an agile approach is is is to achieve that really it's it's don't put all of your commitment in one big block do something small work out what works and same with trust same with relationships and the second aspect of that is when you said about always thinking positively so I have this view that every dysfunctional behavior that I see is a symptom of an unmet need now what I mean by that is if I see someone being an absolute um not very nice person then that behavior isn't because they are an evil person it's a cry for help all right it's it's because they're lacking something and this dysfunctional behavior is basically acting out because they haven't got something that they need now that could be privacy it could be security it could be achievement it could be recognition it could be anything that they need as a human being that they haven't got and so they're they're they're they're expressing that disappointment in a dysfunctional way in a similar way to you know kid having a 10 temper tantrum because they're not allowed to stay up at night it's that kind of thing right and if you start looking at looking at things that way of it's not that they are deliberately messing up it's not they're a bad person this this is this is a natural response to them lacking something that they really really need then you can start asking yourself so what is it that they need and if I give them that or if I help them get that the behavior will probably change for the better naturally rather than managing the behavior so yes I think to be a great servant leader you have to have a positive view of human nature you have to want other people to succeed all right and you have to learn to interpret things in a positive way because you tend to get what you expect thanks michael thank you the next one may be a little bit tricky but I think it's also maybe a little provocative because the next one and I think a couple of people actually ask about it would be how do you measure if you're a successful servant leader so I think we can summarize those couple of questions to to that one what are the factors and and the metrics of my success as a servant leader yeah and so in my book I give the almost ultimate success metric is not being needed but still being wanted so if you know if I was to walk away from this team they would be upset because they actually like me they're not necessarily as a person but they like the fact that I'm there they like the value that I can bring but actually me being there is an inhibitor than inhibitor to them being even more empowered so I need to I need to give them that space and so in from a incremental metric approach I'm generally looking at if how let me take another way of looking at this basically is how autonomous are the teams and the organization right so I'm looking for self-management capability of the teams and I tend to I tend to think there are three variables at play when it comes to a team's ability to manage itself one is their competence so do they actually have the skills necessary to to to manage themselves are they able to plan are they able to argue are they able to make decisions you know are they able to reflect and adjust inspect and adapt what they're doing do they have those those skills to be able to do that so competence the second thing is confidence so they may be able to do it but if they don't have the confidence to do it either because they're worried about consequences of their decisions or being overruled or getting it wrong then then they won't do that so confidence and competence and then the third is the conditions so the environment that they're in so some or some teams can be really really good at working for themselves as a team but they're only one part of the system and they don't have the ability to to deal with everything else so their definition of done for example or the the recruitment policies or reward policies or contracts with third parties or anything like that all of those things that can affect the team's ability to to influence the overall system so as a scrum master and a servant leader I'd be looking at all of those aspects and thinking well what are they what's their competence level with regards to self-management what's their confidence level with regards to self-management and how how much are they able to affect the overall system with their self-management and those aren't necessarily easy things to measure but you're looking at well how how much decision making can they can they actually take hold of and take control over take responsibility for as opposed to how much are they looking to to it from me I'd be looking at things like asking for permission is one step yeah we think we've done this we think we would like to do this can we do this please and then that's great that's because they weren't identifying things like that before but now later on they're they're not even asking for permission they know it's a right thing they know it's a good thing if they get told that it wasn't the right thing they could explain it and they'd have the confidence to be able to explain their decision-making process their thought process so they don't ask for permission anymore if it goes wrong then they'll just ask they'll say sorry and they will ask for forgiveness and that without wishing to sort of upsell my work if you like that's where the team mastery work came went so I saw scrum masters working with their teams and each team was different okay and they have different needs based on the maturity of that team the confidence the confidence and the conditions and things but they were always looking for ways to get better so they would have regular conversations about well what do you need from me as your servant leader as your scrum master what do you need from me now based on where you are as a team and you know what what commitments are you going to make to each other and how are you going to know you're getting better and they would come up with their own milestones of development as a great agile team and so together the scrum master and the agile team can identify some common goals for that team autonomy that they want to work towards and recognize and mark them off as they are as a team what they need but agile team one and agile team two and agile team three might be at very different points with very different challenges and so saying well these are the the the metrics for every team would be kind of crazy so having that conversation having some kind of common patterns if you like can be helpful but every team needs to work that through with their own scrum master servant leader okay thank you the next aspect of being a servant leader and I again I combine a couple of questions to one Fred uh it's building respect as a servant leader how do you make people respect you I mean the team and then secondly what's the balance and I think we I mentioned it a little bit offline when we discussed how do you find this balance between being leader and servant or maybe it's it's not about finding a balance because it's it's just coherent and then you cannot distinguish these two because what I read from those questions but how do I not get exploited how do how do I not allow people to take an advantage of me as a servant leader how do I not cross this line what we're being taken advantage of look like here uh didn't specify unfortunately in the questions but I can imagine there is this quite often maybe a good example which we just always been taught during you know scrum courses a scrum master is not a secretary of a team for instance or it's not a someone who does things for for the team right it's rather than someone who empowers the team and guides but very often in a bad implemented scrum I think we see this the situation when the scrum master becomes kind of indeed a servant without the without the leader so how do we not allow this to happen how do we build this respect and and the position without you know then again balancing off for the leader perspective and and being in charge okay so I'll take that in reverse order I think so the second part first in terms of not becoming a secretary style servant and I'll sort of play back to my previous answer but emphasize a different part of it so just as the scrum master will often say to their team what do you need from me right now to help you become more self-managing more autonomous and sometimes that might involve a little bit of admin it might involve a little bit of secretarial work for want of a better word and because they've got other things they need to focus on right now and that might be the right thing but just as the scrum team should be saying to the scrum master this is what we want from you the scrum master has needs as well and so that would be a two-way conversation so what do I need from you as a team so that I can be successful in my role and trying to find that common ground of well okay well I'm prepared to commit to this but I'm not prepared to commit to that because I think that would have this kind of impact and having that conversation I think is something that I don't see enough teams having but every time I've seen teams have that conversation it's been incredibly helpful not just between scrum master and development team either development team and product owner scrum master and product owner whole scrum team and wider organization whatever it is just having that open adult conversation about what do we need from each other what do we expect from one another and what are we prepared to commit to one another in order that we can all be successful so that would be the first that would be the first thing there because if we have that conversation and the teams say well what we want you to do with this we want you to update all these things we want to make sure there's enough station we want to make sure that there's fresh cakes in the in the in the team space every day that the scrum master well hold on a minute that's not my role okay we can we can find someone else who can do that if we need to but that's not my job there's a second aspect to this still on this the first part of the question that I'm answering the second part of makes sense to me and that is as well as the scrum team potentially taking advantage of the scrum master there's also a risk that the scrum master i'm not sure takes advantage of is the right phrase but almost sacrifices their own autonomy because they enjoy helping so much and so it's it's it's a nice thing that people want to help others all right and people are naturally drawn to the scrum master role if they do have a desire to help other people be successful but sometimes helping the team in the short term is not good for their long-term development but we have a pull because we get that instant feeling of i've helped and sometimes it's a little bit there's a little bit of well i need these people to hurt a little bit all right i kind of use the analogy of teaching my my kids to ride their bike if i didn't ever let them fall off they would never learn to ride on their own that kind of thing and it's not nice as a parent to see your kid fall off the bike all right it's not nice as a scrum master to see a team you know have a bit of trouble here a bit of stress here a bit of a bit of a problem here but that stress is needed sometimes so that they can build up their resilience and they can prove to themselves they can actually work and work their way through it now scrum masters who aren't comfortable with that will come to the teams rescue too quickly and too often and that team won't grow they will learn a dependency upon that scrum master so that they can sabotage that team growth themselves even though it has good intentions so now the second part which was the first part which is how can you build respect now i would say i i don't have enough knowledge to be able to give a fully comprehensive answer of this because i think culturally respect is earned differently in different cultures and i don't know enough about each individual culture but i i can probably say with some level of certainty that integrity is a common part of respect so and what i mean by that is doing what you say your words match your actions um you have a i was talking to somebody earlier today about um this sort of indefinable quality that some people have where what you see is what you get whereas some people you think i'm not sure that what you're saying to me is something you actually believe i'm not saying i'm not saying you're lying to me but i'm not quite sure that when you say you're going to do that you're actually going to do that and it i haven't really got a good word for that but the positives interpretation of that is integrity what you see is what you get all right and i think that builds respect so one of the first um one of the first tips i give to people is don't make massive promises just just make lots of small promises that you can keep and keep them because then you build up that reputation of okay when when they say something i'm pretty confident it's going to happen be honest and transparent about your faults is another common for me at least in what i have seen pattern in people who command respect they don't pretend to be what they're not when something goes wrong they'll put their hand up when something goes right they don't brag about it but equally they'll say this went well they can own it they won't try and take other people's success as their own they make sure credit is given where it's due these sort of general sort of human um say characteristics or qualities i suppose i think there are others but if you were if you were to think of somebody that you really really respected what characteristics would you pull out i would agree with trustworthy integrity being reliable that's i think being honest so that's indeed all comes around integrity and there's an element of competence as well i think usually or at least knowing what you are good at and knowing what you're not good at and being able to command a certain amount of respect for doing what you do to the best of your ability for me i think most of it comes down to your words match your actions thank you again if there are any comments from the audience more than welcome once again miho speaking if i can okay i understand what's what's say but for example if i'm scum master who is working mostly with services like ccirt some security services uh and more or less this scrum master uh born in this environment he know everything about that or more or less know everything what the team doing and next day he have to take uh take under him some development team which work on some program and he don't know nothing regarding this matter of uh coding and so on and uh how what do you would do on the beginning with this team to not be a secretary for them because okay scrum master don't in my opinion don't have to know exactly about the the matter of the project about the coding on service but i know that is good to know more or less something about the matter of the project this is helpful to for communication with the team and apparently you don't know nothing and you have to be the scrum master this is possible of course this is possible but how to start such project uh cooperation with the team uh to on to not be on the beginning from the beginning be secretary um i hope you understand what i mean yeah i think so so um i it there's there's not consensus about this so i have my opinion um but that opinion is not one that everybody shares so my my opinion is that i would rather be a scrum master for a team where i didn't understand what they did than be a scrum master for a team where i did understand i would prefer not to know but i know a lot of people who would prefer the opposite now the reason i would prefer not to know is because then i'm not tempted to take control i'm not tempted to make decisions for the team i can say with genuine um genuine honesty genuine truth that the team know better than me all right sometimes i say that and i don't necessarily mean it 100 right but it's important that the team believe that they know better than me but if i if i'm in a situation where i don't and that is quite often the case then i believe i can be my most effective as a coach and servant leader of this team so my job then quite explicitly becomes not to hear them all out and make a decision not to make a decision for them but genuinely to help them think through their problems find out where their challenges are find out where i can help them by them identifying where they need help and helping them to see solutions to the problems that perhaps their limiting assumptions are giving them it only really for me becomes a problem if i believe i'm going to either be held accountable for this team or that the team don't feel confident enough in their own ability and understanding to be able to make those decisions themselves and they don't feel they have enough safety to learn themselves so in terms of where where do you start i would start pretty much how i would start anyway which would be getting the opinion of the people in the know to tell themselves in my presence the state of things so they're not telling me they're telling each other but i'm there all right because they're not telling me because i'm not going to do anything with that information apart from play it back to them or perhaps highlight some gaps that i might see because i'm i'm seeing things from a completely childish perspective in fact i once said every scrum team should have a five-year-old on their team because the five-year-olds ask the best questions might go so far as to say three because i've got a three-year-old at the moment and he's asking ridiculously annoying questions but quite quite interesting questions in a way you know why this and why that um and you know just putting words together in a very different way makes you think about things in a different way better you know i'm slightly digressing but being able to ask those really naive questions that if you worked in this environment you just wouldn't ask because well you just never do you kind of accept that wisdom um there's a there's a there's a phenomenon called entrenched expertise which basically means if i if i'm the expert with a hammer i see every problem as a nail and it's so easy to get into that habit but if you've if you've never seen a hammer before then it's a little bit easier to think about how you might deal with something differently so there's one more thing i would say to this and i would say this in lots of different contexts so as well as being a scrum master in the past and as our coach and working with people in these in these guises and i'm also a professional coach so i'll have one-to-one coaching clients leadership leadership coaching clients and part of my setup with these people is to just make sure that we're both clear on what coaching actually is okay and so one of those conversations what part of that conversation will be the difference between a coach and a mental um and the difference between a coach and a therapist and as a coach i'm not either of those things but sometimes i am a mentor to some people and sometimes some of my conversations feel a little bit like therapy with other people all right but i'm specifically engaging with this person in the role of a coach now that's not to say that a coach is better than a mentor or a therapist in fact many people will benefit from having all three okay just not with the same person so i would encourage a team as well as having a servant leader especially if they're new to have some kind of mentoring to look up to experts in their field perhaps within the organization perhaps from outside the organization perhaps it's a youtube channel that they subscribe to whatever it may be having somewhere that they can look to for growth and guidance and expertise and the answers but it just wouldn't come from me i'll stop talking and see if that helps in any way and whether you want to tweak your question or follow up your question yes yes thank you for that and that this is discover almost my second question about the pm who become a scrum master in in my organization this is often a often situation that pm becomes scrum master and very often it's empty like a person who was pm and next day his scrum master to i can say to not be pm in scrum master role you how i understand what i mean but you answer already on this question how to not be pm in skin brilliant and for what it's worth i was a project manager that became a scrum master and so it can work like with me i'm i can say i am still pm but i'm starting work often and often like the scrum master and this is temty sometimes be like scrum master and please do that but i thinking that you should do something like that or that and this is very often temty to be i can say rather ask them what they need tell them what i think to do yeah so but but you understand my point of view yeah definitely definitely and i think part a big part of that and this when i mentioned around confidence competence and conditions earlier on that applies to a servant leader as well yeah and if if for example you you you've effectively still got the job description of a project manager but you've been asked to take on the role of scrum master and the organization still has accountability lines that are saying you know if this project fails then it's on you as a project manager oh i mean scrum master then it's going to be much harder to say okay well this this this is a decision for the team to take because if they make it a bad decision then my job's at stake or my bonus is at stake or my pay rise is at stake so there are conditions that will affect how easy it is to not take control that are outside of that team dynamic and it's it's part of the job to start addressing those impediments those organization impediments that stop the the functional behavior from happening and encourage more dysfunctional game playing behavior thanks for the questions thank you for right thank you a couple of questions that i had on my list from from the audience but already has been has been answered so thank you for that so just to mention that there were indeed those about let's see what not to do as a as a servant leader and i think that has been answered another question and that was also quite quite well answered already that it's about the technical knowledge of a of a scrum master but the the other one would be whenever i'm scrum master as a servant leader should it be only my only role or can i should i participate in some actions or would i lose the the high perspective then and i think that's also something that i personally for instance found very different opinions when it comes to that point should i as a scrum master take also part in in any kind of job being also having a role of analyst or very rarely developer but but quite often analyst i would say that's commonly combined at least in in my environment or should i still keep as a scrum master and do nothing else what's your opinion about it so again you're right there are different very different opinions and quite strong opinions on this um my my personal opinion is i i i like to get really good at what i do um and so rather than well there's more chance i think of becoming a really really good scrum master if i do that role but if i do other roles then i'm going to split my attention so it's not 100 answer but if i was going to not spend all of my time as a scrum master for a team and i had some extra time left then and i've still got the whole organizational change aspect to be going on with then i would rather probably focus more on being a scrum master for another team rather than being an analyst within this team personally i think if i've got more than one role within one team that makes things a lot messier um and a lot harder to to delineate not impossible but a lot harder and generally speaking if i've talked a little bit about this incrementally distancing yourself a little bit giving the team more and more space to fill that gap and become a bigger self-managing unit then it sort of makes sense for me to to have something else to be doing with my time as a scrum master and if i've got that mature team where i'm spending a little bit of time there gives me space to start the growth of another team that might need me a lot more um so that would that would make sense for me but i guess you got to find what works for you in your conditions um there may be many situations where actually you just you just haven't got enough people to do all of those things and focus on one role all right and you can actually get benefit from experiencing different aspects within the team you can build up that empathy quicker people might respect you more if you have more of that technical knowledge the the culture and the the organization differences might might encourage different results but that's that's where i stand on it thank you lord there were a couple of questions about difficulties in your organization so especially i believe whenever you're a kind of a evangelist of scrum or agile in general in a company or you are hired as an agile coach because the company and that's something that especially happens at least from my experience in quite big companies they've heard about agile so they of course want to implement it but when you hit the wall i think quite a couple of questions quite a few questions we're concerning this how do you work with organization that says they want to be agile but you clearly see they they don't really understand what it is about it in fact they perhaps don't even want to be agile yeah well being agile is a means to a particular end so you mentioned organic agility is something that i co-created with Dave Snowden and Andrea Tomassini as a way not of creating an agile organization but of creating a resilient organization one that can actually cope with the unknown unknowns rather than try and plan and protect themselves from the unknown and that's our natural human response is to try and protect against that but organizations in a complex and very fast moving environment need to be more resilient so looking at why an organization has decided to go down this agile route usually in my experience i'd say nine times out of ten but what they really want is resilience not to be agile agile is a way of helping them become resilient so start talking about things in their language start really finding out what their goals are what their organizational goals are and how agile might help them because generally being agile as a company isn't the goal it's what it helps us do or what it helps us be then we've got some commonality then we've got something that we can all work towards because when it's not like that it's a case of i like agile i know agile is a good thing you need to change and you're wrong and it's very adversarial no one wants to admit that they were wrong no one wants to admit that they need to change and so they're always looking for a reason why this isn't the answer rather than looking for a way that this can help us so i i recently recently announced that i'm i'm stopping teaching certain certified scrum master courses and things like that because how a lot of people go to those courses and then try and be a scrum master in the real world in their real organizations and they haven't got the skills from those two days to help them deal with you know senior managers who come in and change the product backlog you know just like that or start moving the teams around or tell teams they have to work late or whatever is going on that stops this team from being really truly agile and they just haven't got the answers to that how do we deal with that so what i've what i've seen success is helping those people once they've got the understanding of what it is and you know some few tools and techniques that they can use to get things going is actually helping them deal with those situations in real time so having some ongoing coaching support you know every month go working through some real examples and usually they're they're people skills their relationship skills their dynamic skills their influencing skills their political skills their their ego management skills flexing your your how you approach people and with in a different way to get a different result so looking at those situations that you you know if you're in a classroom with 15 other people you haven't got time to go through all of those but what ifs but what ifs and in this situation how would you deal with that but the ongoing support then you can so that's something i think it's really really important over time because you know is it is it Einstein that says in theory there's no difference between theory and practice but in practice there is once you're outside of the classroom in the real world it's really quite hard but in theory it's really really simple scrum is very very simple so yeah it's a really long-winded way of saying trying to answer that question but bring me back and tell me if there's a part of that question that i didn't cover and i'll try again all right at least to my understanding i figured what i uh what i expected i mean not what i expected but you answered the question i don't know what about the others any comments i think coming also to to the servant leader because now we we are heading also to the how do you collaborate with organization there were several questions regarding how do i we we kind of answered it at the very beginning but very there were a couple of people that thought about how do i come from other industry and become a good scum master how do i internally in the organization build a skill uh because this is something people i think looking for a guidance where to where to start where to kick off if they are interested in becoming scum master but how should they what should be the first step um i'm not sure what their first step should be but i think an early step would be to talk to people in the role you know and this is why one of the this is one of the reasons why you know i like supporting groups like this because this is not just about coming and listening to someone talk about a book or something but you get chance to know other people you start building up a network of community you can start supporting each other you can have a few conversations especially if it's in person you've got a chance to talk beforehand and afterwards uh you know and you'll find similar problems and you can talk them through maybe it's something you're facing they've gone through already so i would you know a lot of people who are looking in getting into a role like scum master or product and will go along to a meetup group and they'll start talking to people and say so tell me a little about what you do and you know the challenges you face and what it's like working there um and that i think is a really good insight because you can start then imagining how you would deal with some of those situations so i've quite often had people come to one of my workshops one of my training courses and they they're they're changing career so i've had people that have left um marketing i've had people that have left teaching people that have left um nursing and they've they've come to scrum mastering because they've spoken to somebody who's you know told them about this thing oh that sounds quite cool you know i think i might might be able to do that and a lot of the scrum master characteristics that i that i've written about they're not technical they're they're people things right can you do do you have integrity can you can you help people are you are you diplomatic do you know can you can you challenge the status quo can you speak truth to power these kinds of things they're their skills that you can have in lots of other different professions like someone um so i recently did a a train the trainer program so i'm teaching other people to be able to train my courses and one of the people on there used to be in the police uh so they were a crime scene investigator right so a lot of the skills that you have in there looking at things from different perspectives hypothesizing look talking to people and helping them helping interpret you know what their gaps in their memory might be telling you or not um mapping what one person's saying to what another person's saying reading between the lines and playing that back so lots of crossover skills so i would say look at the role from talking to somebody and think is that a role that you would enjoy and is that something that your skills natural skills things that you enjoy doing would play to because if they don't and you're doing it because it's i can't imagine why anybody would want to be a scrum master because they think it's trendy or it's cool or whatever it's a horrible name isn't it but um what would if you don't enjoy it it can be a really challenging i mean i suppose any that's the same with any role isn't it if you don't enjoy it can be quite um quite sad but it is one of those roles that i think you need to be intrinsically motivated to do i think i'm not uh i think at least two more if i may the first one would be a little more general about the environment and the industry as such so there are a couple of questions how do you see agile community and agile evolving next couple of years what threats do you perhaps see to agile there were some mentions also in the in the in the questions that for instance you know big companies again big companies they try to to use agile but in in a sense it's only a buzzword for them right and when people get for instance they get resistant about scrum or agile in general because they saw the very bad implementation of it and then someone trying to to implement it although they never understood it so people got for instance yeah they they're repellent to uh to scrum as such so what threats and then how do you see the future of agile scrum in the future hmm i've never been particularly good at predicting the future but what i would say i'm pretty confident in saying that the threats the threats to not necessarily agile itself because i don't think it's what you say in there is is people's perception of agile and people's appetite for it um is you know the big uh consultancy frameworks things like safe and Deloitte's agile tube map and Accenture's monstrosity whatever it is that they've they've created recently um that that is trying to use agile to help them sell their consultancy services that is that is the threat to me it's it's difficult because there's this phrase that goes around is that nobody ever gets fired for hiring insert name of consultancy here um but they could also be in a almost a perverse way the saviour because i think it will allow the real agile to to more clearly differentiate itself uh because the battle isn't really about agile or waterfall it's agile or crappy agile isn't it um and so in terms of the future what i've what i'm betting on what i've just started to create and nurture is it's called the agile licensing library and the idea behind the agile licensing library basically stems from a problem that i had when i was an employee so when i was a scrum master at my first big organization we we wanted to get some experts in to help us so we wanted to get some scrum training in but at the time there were only like five people in the world that could teach scrum and they were all in america and they all charged ridiculous amounts of money to come over and teach us so that was our any choice and we did it for a little bit but then eventually as a company we said well could you do this job so well i hate training said yeah but we're not going to pay these americans to come over and teach us all the time so you've got to do this so okay i'll do it so we did that um that i was then licensed to teach that stuff that meant we could run classes a lot quicker a lot cheaper um and it allowed for the the knowledge to spread and that was okay because it was i mean it was small it wasn't i mean scrum was still quite young it was still a very unheard of term in many ways but at least it had that element of validity and you know integrity about it had a had a brand but trying to get someone like ester derby in for example to help us with our retrospectives was much harder because she was ester derby she was just ester derby she wasn't the scrum alliance she wasn't scrum and so from a senior management perspective it was very difficult to convince them that we should get someone like her and even though she was even more help she would have been even more helpful than getting um yeah some scrum training in um so we've got all these pockets of people around the world who have created incredibly helpful incredibly good stuff but they are to be in a nice way they're just very small you know they're insignificant against those these big brands these big machines so this agile licensing library is a way of trying to bring those artisan collaborators together if i'd have been able to say to senior management at um at british telecom 20 years ago there's lots of different parts of agile okay there's janet and lisa who do certified agile testing okay we need engineering practices stuff because if we we can run in iterations but if our code's terrible we're just going to build crap quicker so we need to be able and these people do this all right they are part of this umbrella of the same umbrella that has you know ester derby that has roman pickler that has jeff watts that has these and it has that collective um sense of um corroboration i suppose so trying to get a bit more um support for these artisan creators who have stuff that organizations need but don't necessarily see because the first thing they see is the big packaged machine if that makes sense so from the consulting grade the big package yeah fancy advertising i see apologies to any big fancy consultants on the call tonight a little bit of a personal and a tricky one that that's up from the from the audience is what do you consider if you if you would like to share your biggest failure as a scrum master servant either i'm not sure i could say the biggest but i know the biggest uh theme and it's it's something that it's um it's something that i still work on i'm still aware of i still fall into the trap of um and i'm aware of it but i'm a lot better at it than i used to which is that rescuing thing that i that i mentioned earlier on so i i love i love the feeling i get from solving people solving problems for people i love it and seeing someone seeing a team that have got this problem and thinking i i can i can take that away i can solve it for them um and then i do that but then they think oh jeff's good at solving these problems next time jeff can you solve this and it's the same for my my my wife's parents you know they they they have problems with technology i'm i'm not particularly good at technology right but they come to me if they can't log into zoom or whatever or their their wi-fi is down or something i come around and it's just just much quicker for me to do it so i do it all right but now they're dependent upon me and every time oh jeff can you come around and do this which on the one hand is nice because i get that feeling but equally they're they're less and less capable of doing this on their own so when i'm away for a couple of weeks they won't even try to fix their wi-fi that's oh wait we'll wait for jeff to come back and that sense of stagnation i'm undermining their ability to to be self-sufficient so that my biggest failure is is liking to solve other people's problems liking to rescue and i work on it still always probably always well right because it's part of those things that that i enjoy thank you uh rafal commented maybe biggest fail first attempt in learning yes yeah it's not the first attempt though i've been i've been i've been trying to learn this for a while but thank you for the reframe uh you mentioned something about the predicting and there are a couple of very technical very down to earth questions about writing a good user story or so uh i'm very curious about your opinion on uh estimates because that's not really about you know being a leader but if i may one technical question there is a lot of you know discussion right now about do we estimate or we don't estimate the workload uh as as do you encourage as a scrum master do you rather go let's drift away to to this uh very fashionable lately uh let's not estimate let's use metrics let's use historical data or do you still like for instance story points you know t-shirt science i actually like estimates i actually like the process of estimation i like a team to go through that process of estimation not because the answer is going to be right but because they're asking themselves the kind of questions so what do we actually need to do to make this happen and it's not so much how long do we think it's going to take that's not the important bit it's you know we yeah we need to do this and we need to do this and we need to do this and maybe that's it but sometimes when you say we need to do this and we need to do that and we need to do this somebody will say oh yes but we also need to do this and actually that's not right because if we do that then we'll have to do this that's what that's the important thing for me which you get from the estimation process the other thing that you get from the estimation process which is a bit meta and i could talk about this for ages is it will help highlight our dependencies so what i mean by that is if we say how long is this going to take and the team say well if yarrick does it it's going to take a day but if jeff does it it takes a week all right because yarrick's the only person that can do this right so well we've got to give it to yarrick then because we haven't got time for it to take a week we've only got to cram this in that helps us highlight where our big bottlenecks are where our big risks are and actually we might need to stop you from doing this stuff right because ultimately if you go we're screwed so that estimation process helps me i think helps teams in in lots of different ways but if it becomes about the accuracy of the estimates then absolutely it causes all sorts of problems so as a skirmann saying i want them to have this conversation that estimation gives them but i don't want them to be playing a game about accuracy of estimates so how can i how can i manufacture that within the organization so we estimated this was going to be an hour right didn't we i believe so yeah we've run out already of time maybe sorry but this is yeah there were so many questions i still try to group them i think we kind of covered most of the topic so perhaps there is someone else if i may just one small question from from the audience maybe me hi everyone but maybe it will be not a small one uh first of all i must say it's a great meeting and thanks yarrick for inviting such a great guest and thanks jeff to be here with us it's highly appreciated and coming to the question maybe expanding expanding a little bit the question about the future of scram or and agile they have experience with the empowered product teams because it's a proper trend nowadays and companies are trying this approach and scram master role it's like it's not specified there so do you have any experience with empowered product teams and how can scram master find the place for for him here there all right so yes and well i wrote product mastery there's a lot of stuff in there that overlaps with um scrum mastery in a way because the product mastery book isn't about how to be an amazing product manager from a technical perspective it's about how to be a great product owner from a personal perspective and my view and i've seen this in practice is that great product owners actually are almost half scrum masters in a way because they are servant leaders of product management they they they value an autonomous engaged team they're not there to tell the team exactly what to do they give teams problems to solve it rather than requirements to deliver they're creating psychological safety so they're not lying about the estimation process so yeah the empowered product team is what scrum was intended to do and part of the scrum master role was to bring that product person and the people who are building it together so closely so tightly and then work on the outside of that environment so that the the environment is more supportive that this scrum master can walk away and they've got they've got that unit now whether that stays together long enough it determines whether that scrum master can walk away or not you know because sometimes product owners will move on and team members will move on and then you have to work through work it through again but in theory then a product an empowered product team shouldn't in the long term need a scrum master so thank you thank you a lot Jeff thank you a lot once again sincerely thanks for for participating it was really a very nice meeting and we i think we've learned a lot from from an expert so once again thank everyone for participating i think there is there's still going to be a small questioner from coming from Beata in a second as usually about how we can improve so please guys if you can participate we would really really appreciate it and Jeff again thank you for your time i hope it's not the last time and last opportunity for us to speak and perhaps in the future we can we can repeat such sessions yeah thank you and far be it from me to in any way influence how you structure your your sessions but please like i said do use these to don't just come and listen to somebody else but come to connect build that community support each other share your experiences and you've got so much to share to each other don't think that someone on the other side of the world has written a book has got all the answers you've got a lot more answers amongst yourselves than i've got right so share that amongst yourselves thank you nice nice summary actually just just for fyi it's how we do or how we did before the covid so it's been a which was usually about you know gathering in uh physically in one place and discussing or discussing a specific problem or a or a theme but indeed a covid changed a little bit and now it's kind of a hybrid uh then we decided to also have cool thank you all right thank you very much thank you all once again thank you bye bye thank you thank you thanks bye bye bye thank you bye thank you goodbye


I want the same Holy Spirit who gave bonus to Peter I want the same Holy Spirit who breathed upon the church I want the same Holy Spirit in 1st Corinthians 12 who gives the gifts that we might help each other I want the Holy Spirit of God


Well, welcome everyone. My name is Kelly Lanema. I'm the assistant director of the Department of Planning and Community Development, and we're really happy to see so many people here tonight. Thank you so much for joining us to talk about the Mystic River path connection to the minimum bikeway feasibility study. The town of Arlington as we see funding through the mass trails grant program in 2021 to conduct this study. Our aim with this project is the development of a safe accessible separated trail between the Mystic River path and the Minuteman bikeway along the Mystic Valley Parkway and summer street. This is, we see this as an opportunity to increase connections for residents for visitors to the park to access to natural resource areas and a way to improve our connections to our neighborhoods and businesses and through multimodal paths. We're really excited to be working collaboratively with a number of municipalities and organizations to accomplish this work. I would like to thank our consultant tool design group. We also want to extend special thanks to the Mystic River watershed association, the city of Medford, the Massachusetts Department of Transportation, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation and MEPC. And a special generous thanks to the mass trails program and the Lawrence and Lillian Solomon Foundation for generously funding this study. Next slide. I'm sure right now everybody is pretty familiar with zoom but just a few meeting guidelines. Everyone's muted by default and if you find yourself muted. It's nothing personal we just have a lot of people here tonight and so we want people to be able to focus on the presenter. You'll have an opportunity to raise your hand and unmute during the Q&A session. And you'll be unmuted during the breakout sessions for discussion. If you're comfortable, feel free to turn on your camera it helps kind of create a better connection between everybody in the group here. You can use a digital background if you want. If you have a question during the presentation, we do have the chat open. The real purpose of the chat tonight is for Q&A and especially during the breakout groups so we're really hoping that people keep from having side please don't have side conversations in the chat but reserve that for Q&A and for the breakout groups. This main room as you may have noticed is being recorded so we're going to be posting this to the town website in a few days, along with follow up information. Just a quick zoom 101 in the bottom hand on the bottom of your screen, there are mute and unmute buttons. You can also raise your hand that's under the reactions tab there's a little smiley face down there in the corner if you want to raise your hand. And if you're calling in by phone star nine controls mute and unmute and star six is to raise your hand. And so with that I think we can go ahead and get started and I'm going to hand this over to Stephanie where from tool design group. Thank you. Thank you Kelly. So yeah I'm Stephanie wire I'm a landscape architect with tool design group and the project manager for this. I'm also accompanied tonight by Lucy Gibson engineer who's working on the traffic analysis and developing intersection safety, and jolly Shapiro is also a landscape architect to my office. We're going to review a presentation tonight and then really dig into hearing from you in our breakout groups presentation I'm just going to briefly go over the project scope and timeline, our draft goals which is something we want to review with you and the breakout groups as well. Kind of go through the whole potential route and our existing conditions observations there, then just briefly talk next steps. We're going to have 1015 minutes for a question and answer and we will kind of want to keep those questions focused on the project anything related to design and comments you have about your experience and what you want to see. We're going to record all of that in our breakout groups, which I'll describe more later. So the general timeline we're trying to hit into June as our deadline.  We want to hear from you tonight to really get understanding of your experience, really beef up our ability to respond to what you want. So we're going to kind of wrap that up in February, and then starting in February and through March move on to developing some alternatives or cross sections, you know the different options for the path and also various options for each intersection that is part of this project and some planning for our different place making opportunities, such as where overlooks could go. And we're going to come back to you probably late March with another public meeting. April and May, we're really going to be refining those concepts based off of what we heard from you also producing some maintenance recommendations. And then May, June we're going to be working to kind of package that all together and also blend, you know what are the next steps how do we get on to the next phase of design development for this path. Along the way, we do have a project team basically all of the groups that Kelly mentioned are part of the project team and so we're going to be consulting with them. We're going to be talking about this project, as well as doing a focus group different representatives and advocates different interests, probably in March. So we do have a lot of touch points. The last public meeting will likely be in June to kind of give you full picture and a wrap up the next steps. So basically, you know, we have a lot of different ways of communicating with you, some of you might have received postcards from us if you are living nearby or businesses nearby the path. But you know you might have heard through social media through newsletters that you receive and then stick River Watershed Association sent out a big newsletter blast. It has a project page for this and your registration tonight you're going to go on to an email list so you will be emailed about upcoming public meetings. So we were definitely going to be advertising the next meeting widely. Generally for this and the next meeting, we're going to be trying to use a little bit of an interactive format. It's called Miro where we're able to kind of show you visuals and just take notes so that you can see us taking notes on the screen. We also have for both this and the next meeting surveys. If you're going to duck out tonight definitely take the survey we'd love to really get everybody taking the survey, and that should be copied in the chat below. So if you're going to be getting your feedback through this it's pretty brief, and we're going to come back to it again at the end, you can get the link. So the draft goals, I know this is a lot of text, I am going to take the time to read through each one. And again we're going to want to get your feedback on these and just, you know, are we missing anything. So starting out providing an accessible route that contributes to regional biking network by connecting the Minuteman bikeway, Mystic River paths and ale wise Brook Greenway. Strengthen the walking and biking network between Arlington Medford and Somerville by developing connections to perpendicular streets sidewalks and planned bike routes. The regional local connections and increased safety and comfort for all users, particularly at intersections and Broderies, improve access to and views of the Mystic River and Mystic Lakes to enhance people's experience and draw them to these resources. And reduce emissions by increasing bicycle mode share and incorporate planning and design concepts that contribute to climate resiliency, finally preserve and enhance wetlands trees tree canopy is a spelling update and animal and plant habitat. So again we have you know those network connections with regional and local safety and comfort, improving access to these great wire bodies that we have, and then reducing emissions are really anything related to climate resiliency, and supporting environmental values. So, we've been, you know, spending the past month or so, kind of delving into existing conditions analysis and I'm not going to speak on any of what you're seeing here in detail but this is a list of various plans that we've reviewed we've also collected traffic for our various intersections, look through geospatial or map based data. The graphic on the right is from the Connect Arlington Sustainable Transportation Plan. You know so we've really been trying to base everything that we're doing in the plans that have come before and the recommendations that have come before. Tonight you know we really want to focus kind of on the ground and get your feedback about what you're experiencing on the ground. You know broadly, we have some big picture or kind of big connections to make those perpendicular streets that I mentioned before. So this summer, the whole, the whole route should say kind of extends from Minuteman Bikeway, we're trying to figure out where we're going, and then all along the Mystic Valley Parkway, just south of Lower Mystic Lake, along Mystic River, and over to El Whitebrook Greenway. And you know throughout here we have the existing Mystic River paths and so we're going to see how we're going to interface with those. The big picture connections we want to make perpendicularly are the Summer Street Mystic Street Mystic Valley Parkway intersection really making sure that anybody who's coming along Mystic Street can comfortably connect to the path and vice versa. There are some of these strong connections across the bridges to Arlington so through the Rotaries, and then across River Street Bridge as well. And I've got some orange boxes placed throughout just kind of little pointers of things to for you to consider and maybe provide us a feedback on, you know, we're going to be thinking about neighborhood connections as well so some connection to small streets will be basing part of that on on safety and what is a safe connection to make. I'm really curious to hear about your experience and how you're connecting to the existing paths that are out there now. So I'm going to spend the next somewhat slides kind of breaking down what what we've observed in five different character areas, and to start on the west here. So we're going to go from the middle street and Cutter Hill Road intersection with Summer Street, and then over Buzzle field. So we have the minimum bike way down here and again I said we, we want to make a connection we're trying to find out should that be through this intersection, which also has the benefit of, you know, prevent potentially kind of providing a more access to vehicles from the west, where do we come through Buzzle field, and along Summer Street, then we're going to be heading out to the east here. You know we have a wide 38 feet to work with. There is informal parking throughout and we understand that it gets quite busy on game days. We want to consider as we move. If we were to develop the path through Buzzle field is the on a game day you have kind of a squeezed condition. So how the path interact with that. See picture here of Summer Street. It's right now, pretty it's a busy road right now pretty wide so we have a lot of room to work with. So what side of the road should we be on what do we do about parking. Just an example of some of the informal parking that's happening parking is restricted in some areas, not in others. Generally we kind of see it happening throughout. And then at middle street, you know we have a lot of pavement to work with there are medians and all sides turn lanes wide receiving lanes and middle street has the potential for some narrowing and different geometric options through here. So then moving on to Summer Street, Mystic Street Mystic Valley Parkway intersection. Now this is a very long intersection as you can see it here. That's that's offset as well. So Mystic Valley Parkway and Summer Street aren't quite straight on each other. The crossings are long that the crossings in the north and east sides are 60 feet long so it takes you a little while to travel through. And here this one on Summer Street is really about 90 feet along with the slip lane. We want to consider what do we do about slip lane. Do we keep it or not. And how does that interact with the path and crossings. Another consideration here is the grade is going down about five to 7% slope. So that's both consideration for visibility from the intersection and any traffic coming through also anyone who would be coming up a path. You know we want to consider how we make that slope doable for them. And then finally, you know I mentioned beforehand, we want to make that connection to Mystic streets that anybody is going to the path or going to Mystic Street. All of this is very legible navigable easily. Easy to get through anywhere you're trying to go to some pictures here in an example of the length of this intersection. The gas station on the northwest side here has a driveway that people are heading directly into. If we have people coming through that we want to wait. You know, how does that intersect with the gas station something we need to consider. Also, you know, the Duncan's is a high use driveway so that's over here. You know, we need to figure out what side of the road we're going to be on and we're going to look at driveways like that to figure out what's really the logical side to take the path through. So lower Mystic Lake then this whole section here is a little bit different character, much more woodland we have this great, great opportunity with the lake. Opportunities for overlooks and a little bit just stronger connection to the water. The roadway varies a bit in width, it's narrower on the west side here and we also have a number of neighborhood streets coming in here. We're curious about potential connections through here. A little wider as you go along but regardless we have room to work with the roadway to create a path. Right now the path is fairly narrow, but we have so that's about seven feet but we have 10 to 12 feet here and then the roadway has enough width that we can think about expanding into the roadway. We want to consider, you know what would the level of separation be. One, one thing that I'm showing here is we do have a culvert right here on the left side of the lake. And that's just something for us, you know, to kind of think about in terms of capacity and what is the structure need, need and maintenance. Again, great views of the lake that we can develop and then we have potential for some crossings. This is a high speed area and with the curve of the road we have more limited sight lines. Those are things we want to consider and how we would develop any crossings and where the rotaries. We have Medford Street through to High Street Rotaries. We are considering both sides of they'll both have design alternatives applied to them because they work together as a system, and you can maybe see it might be a little light in the photo, but there's a dark pavement and a lighter pavement that really kind of shows where people are driving the part of the road they're actually occupying and that we have a lot of excess pavement to work with to be able to really tighten up these rotaries. Another thing that's happening right now is these circles aren't very big and people can mostly make a fairly straight shot through if they are heading through. And so they can move pretty quickly. They're creating more deflection, creating more of a circular shape that a vehicle needs to follow to help us slow people down. Again, we want to make path connections on both sides of the bridge and there is the Mystic River path extends on this side so we want to make sure that as we're coming up through here we're really making a connection to the actual path along the Medford side. We also have a lot of room to work with on the bridge so we have different options for how we could consider that connection. There is transit coming through here so anything we're designing we also understand from conversation with the project team that there are occasionally school buses here. So just, we acknowledge there are larger vehicles still need to make it through here. So that excess pavement, you know, just how very wide the bridges are, and then an added point is there's a lot of really beautiful trees along the whole project area, we want to make sure that we are respecting those trees with any connections we're making off the sides of the paths, and we have some topography to respect as well in the design. So then finally we're we're going to this whole East End is going to take in the full segment from south of the breweries over to the alewife Brooke Greenway. And it's here through here that the parkway is actually separating in grade from where the existing path is now what the form of the path will be. You know, we have different options, it could all be a path down by the river or we could consider some roadway side bike lanes or two way bike lanes on the roadway itself. Generally through here we still have woodland into as we get more to the eastern end more trees on lawn. So kind of this woodland to park experience. We do have the River Street bridge. That's what's splitting each photo here and the River Street intersection to think about so we'd love to get input on how you're experiencing this intersection as well. And one big thing for us is to consider, you know, how do we connect through or where do we connect over this bridge to we stay back, kind of in this mid block connection or do we bring people to the intersection or both. And then just really we, we want to think about some of the constraints as you can see is pretty narrow through here, and again being respectful of the vegetation and environment throughout here. So really this is the ale wife Brooke Greenway and the right of this photo and we just want to consider the alignment coming in to really set people up to transition there. So that's kind of the walkthrough of the different segments and our mirror boards have aerials that will be able to to use as you can so that you can speak to those. And really just want to kind of go back to connect Arlington and these plans that we were looking at and how these are guiding our priorities, we really, this is a graphic from the connect Arlington plan. It's really showing how the town is prioritizing pedestrians first and then bicycles transit. And that's really the vision for how this path is fitting into the whole network. And then you know really prioritizing getting people out of cars and making it a great experience to be a walker person who's biking. And this is this plan is also from connect Arlington town has identified the intersections that are in this project as high priority safety improvement as priorities for safe and safety improvements excuse me. And so mystic summer mystic Valley Parkway intersection, the rotary River Street bridge. So one big reason this this project came about is to be able to address those intersections. It's a great opportunity to make a number of safety improvements throughout. Just some, some brief data analysis here you know we did collect traffic data but I'm not going to go through that but just. A preliminary crash review of mass dot data between 2017 2020 and none of these intersections is from the regional perspective, a very high crash intersection they don't qualify on the highway safety improvement program list which is top five, 5% crash intersections. However, you know we can see it's the rotaries where we've had the highest number of crashes fortunately no fatalities there are also no recorded collisions with cyclists or pedestrians in any of these intersections. Say recorded because of course there's often conflict that that occurs that we don't get in our records. So just a little picture there of what's going on. And then so that you know we collected traffic data, just to really get a sense of the current use patterns and what is to be able to model the capacity of the intersection, and to be able to make recommendations for for geometric changes, you know, lay out changes to the intersection and operational changes so what can we possibly do with signals to support the path coming through. You know, things that we are going to be able to achieve with these layout and operation changes slowing speeds of vehicles, making path users visible to drivers. Going back to the pedestrians and cyclists as a bigger priority for the town. We also want to make sure that our designs are really expressing them as a priority, you know, in our intersections and through the rotaries. And then finally it should be easy for path users to know how to get through an intersection and that's I think particularly going to be relevant at Mystic summer Valley Parkway. So really make the path legible throughout. So that is really the existing conditions tour. So the next steps are that we're going to be developing a memo and summarizing what we hear from you tonight, February, then we're going to be taking our time in February and March to develop some alternatives. And then we're going to come back to you again in, in March with those alternatives to get your feedback and another survey. For now, again, here is our, our survey please take it send it to your friends. I'm going to open up a let's check our time here question and answer period we've got 15 minutes. Really want to keep the questions focused on, you know, is there something in my presentation you need more information on do you have questions about the project process itself. If you've got thoughts about your experience and design ideas, save them for the breakout rooms we'd love to record them all there.  Just a quick question. Is there any connectivity to the tribe community like that. You thought of a plan in a greater sense. Sure, but it's not a, not a direct connection off your, but I do think that's relevant or what are the larger connections and the directions that people are coming in from. Yeah, I'll jump in quickly this is Amber with the Mississippi River Watershed Association because we have that on our radar to look at potentially replicating some of the ideas and feedback that we have on this section up Mystic Valley Parkway on the site that does connect to the tribe community. So it's the same group of stakeholders it's just kind of moving our way through this area to make it better for walking and biking. I think it will inform that and hopefully create another project. That's our hope that I go that way sometimes. If you haven't seen it, Mr. River Watershed Association has a great map on their site of the different greenway connections that they're hoping to make over time so lots of different fun projects coming forward. How about Dana. Yeah, so I'm a regular bike commuter. So during the design process. Is there any thought given to how the, the paths are going to be maintained in the winter, in terms of, you know, maintaining the ability to use them, you know, like who's going to plow them and, you know, how are you going to manage, you know, them getting covered in snow and, and stuff like that. I kind of glossed over it and talking about the timeline and scope, but we are going to be developing maintenance recommendations from a planning level but to develop them we're going to be talking to the landowners and the people who would be involved in maintenance to see what's feasible and what's really necessary to make it a year round path. So definitely something that we're thinking about. Hi, I lead bike rides for Arlington Community Ed and also bike in the area. And looking at your map it looks like the project scope ends at El Wife Greenway. But would you consider, because there's the new green line station at Tufts going down around the rotary toward Boston Avenue. Because then there's a bike lane on Boston Avenue that goes to what will be the new green line train station. So to end the path at El Wife, Wife Brook Greenway is just short of continuing it around the curve to to get to where Boston Avenue crosses route 16. It's just a thought. I think it's a good thought. I think the connections and setting up that connection for the future definitely something that we should think about. Amber saw you unmute did you have more. This is another example of this is a tout of Arlington owned project so kind of started with that center of gravity but of course these all connect to surrounding communities and there's a regional nature so certainly all of these groups are thinking about what leads to the next connection and so on so absolutely but we always have to kind of draw the line somewhere for these. And Tony, I'm going to figure out how to undim my display here in a second. We're also going to call in Rod Rick when we get a chance after Tony. Oh, I am not seeing. Use his hand. Things that we've been chatting. Okay, after Tony. Yeah, wasn't staring at the chat. Go ahead, Tony. Yeah, my question is kind of similar if there's any sort of discussion or talks or thoughts about connecting this to this path to get away into sort of downtown Medford through the clippership connector and other parts of that are hopefully planned and and don't currently exist. The response is the same and that we're definitely going to be setting up connections across in the Medford. And you're thinking about those wider connections, but generally the scope of the project stays near the river in terms of the actual alternatives will be developing. And then to Rod Rick. Hi, thank you. The, I don't know just a couple of quick points. I what I see, I ride this area a lot. And what I see is that cyclists tend to use the roads through here. Pedestrians use the path along the river. And there's very little deviation from, from that. Second thing. River Street is a very good way to cross the river very simple there. There, you know, is is a bit of a wait at the light, but that's manageable. And that the most of the sort of interesting riding is on the Medford side, right up along the east side of the mystic river and then the east side of the mystic lakes. So it's, it's really kind, it's kind of an integrated Arlington Medford experience. It's possible to ride around the top of the upper mystic like, you know, across the average on a ride. Right along the top of the upper mystic and then down Cambridge Street and Mystic Street in Arlington and then down again. I ride that route a lot. I ride the Minuteman bike way a lot. I seldom ride both in the same Period. So this, this is potentially interesting. We hope so. One, one, one, one other thing. What I've observed is that pedestrians, again, almost entirely on the little path along the river do tend to cross River Street up by the bridge rather than down at the intersection and this is very informal and everybody is careful not to get killed. Thank you. All right, so let's go to you. You are unmuted. Oh, we can, we can just see you and hear you. I think he's actually on his bicycle at this moment. Okay, let's go to Dennis. We can hear you. Hi, I have two comments about am be It's point B. There's a gas station you said you will think about which side you you will pass the cars go in and out of that gas station I had a lot of conflicts. I was thinking maybe a diagonal crossing to the other corner might be a better idea to avoid assuming gas station is going to stay there. And about a you were saying we are considering which option. Why not both. So I keep the longer one through Mill Street for bike heavy traffic and the other one for pedestrians. Maybe so it's shorter but maybe not ideal for bikes but pedestrians. This could be an option. Thank you. And Kevin. Two observations. One is a given how well River Street in Arlington crosses into Harvard Street in Medford. It really is, I think the preferred way particularly for inexperienced cyclists to cross between the two and avoid the rotaries entirely. But what I do think the opportunity is that at both the river River Street Harvard and at the Medford Street High Street is is the movement along the river, which is hard today, that if you are coming from from either the the Mystic River path or the Alewife Brook Greenway. There is not a good way of getting across Harvard Street. And the other thing about Harvard Street there is they're really on the bridge anyway it really is over why it's almost like you could put a whole second sidewalk. And then you have to go to the sidewalks that are there on Harvard Street, both to narrow the width of the crossing of Harvard Street, and to make it easier to move to do the river crossing on Harvard Street, and then similarly, this going along the road at the double rotaries. I think someone else mentioned it that a lot of people choose to walk to the, to the high point of the bridge on the river, before they cross north to south there. It puts them, it limits the number of flows of vehicles that they have to think about there's just one coming from the left and right. So there's a strong pedestrian desire line across the bridge there at the double rotaries in the middle of the crossing. And then kind of the challenges well if, if, if you're on, if you're on your bike, what's the right way to, to just go along the river through there. And I do do that every morning, or three times a week but I always make sure to just turn right from the bridge onto the parkway. And I also avoid the conflicts at be by turning right there and just staying away from everything else. But I think that the, yeah, those to me the two opportunities are along the river. How do you move upstream downstream, rather than between the two towns. Thank you. So we're going to take Emily and Gerard, and then we're going to hop into breakout groups. I want to raise one question that someone had in a chat that's a very much a context setting question to so maybe those the ones you called out and then we'll end with that. Yeah, sounds good. Thank you, I have a quick question about signage and whether that's part of the design process and where it comes in. One thing that is a really common. And kind of common acts to grind about a lot of the connections that we already have in this overall region is that in a lot of places, the connections especially for bike paths and off off road routes really are there. You can't necessarily see the next part of it from the end of the previous. And there aren't signs that show you where to go so we have a lot of facilities that are actually really useful and can get an experienced writers to a lot of useful places, but people can't really see where they are or how to get from one to the other there is even some things in the chat today, saying, you know, explaining how you can make some of these connections. And these are the things that already exist. And it always seems like the wayfinding signage that just tells you, this is the name of the path that you're on. This is the name of the thing you're connecting to. And there's a chain of signs where you can see from the one sign you can see to the next sign and you can see to the next sign, and you can see where to go. You know it does. It does a couple things. One is if you're just kind of tooling around, and you're driving around you can see that there is something to go somewhere. It tells you that it goes somewhere useful. You don't have to be following your phone like this, or trying to pull up a DCR PDF on your phone or something like that, to get where you're going and and I think it just, it also raises awareness of the connections that we have. But that step seems to get lost so much of the time because we have so many of these places where there's a path here and a path here. It's really easy to get from one to the next, but you have to just already know that. You don't already know that or if you didn't, you know, previously start by making that GPS map or something like that. You just think you came to the end of the path and that's that. And so, and it seems like such a crazy step to miss because signage is absolutely the cheapest possible component of any of this. So that's incorporated into the design process as you go so that we know that, you know, once, once these connections are made people will find them. Thank you. Yeah, thank you and I'll just briefly say that, you know, while it won't be the scope of this project of course design the signs are really designate everything that's on the signs, making recommendations for potential sign opportunities. And that signs need to be incorporated and how we really develop the legibility and navigability of the path is definitely something that'll make its way in there. So Gerard. Thank you so much this is phenomenal and I want to thank my Medford friends as well there's definitely a low hanging fruit connecting the whole foods to the beginning of the Mystic Valley Parkway, but I guess my only question or point would be, can we have both worlds of Mystic Valley Parkway for example, I think Roger kind of alluded to it earlier. Can we have a path right along the river which I think would be ideal for when you're riding your bike slowly, maybe some decking or something to stop from time to time for overlooks. But at the same time, could we not also have the Mystic Valley Parkway with some better lines or maybe take a little bit of that space, because when I'm on my road racing bike I go down Mystic Valley Parkway, and I buzz right along there I feel safe I wish I had a little more room. I don't go casual I'll take my hybrid bike along the river so I would just hope that we could make this, maybe the best of both worlds from letter D to E all the way to ally bro, but other than that this is phenomenal and looking forward to more info. Yeah, great great point and definitely as we're looking toward alternatives will be considering whether there's a mixture involved. I remember, are you looking at the DCR question from Phil. I answered that in the chat, they've been at the table and at meetings with us, which is good because you wanted to get them involved from the very early stages and this is a mass trails grant which is administered through DCR so there's a connection there. The clarifying question came from Thomas which is very similar to what Dr was just speaking about so I think it sets us up well. Is the intention of this project to install a new paved off street path for use by cyclists and pedestrians. So the answer is not totally straightforward we want to create safe grade separated roots but I think we are taking into account this kind of like different uses by bicycles, and you can speak more intelligently to this Stephanie but that's really what this phase is is exploring all the options and how the different modes and comfort levels fit together and we can support all of them. Yeah. So just seeing the time. I do see there are more hands raised but we're going to jump into breakout groups. We will probably have a little time afterward for a few more questions or any really salient questions that came up in your breakout groups. So I just want to briefly go to say we're going to have 30 minutes for breakout. So we definitely welcome a lot more comments like we've been hearing we really appreciate the feedback. We're going to spend a few minutes going over goals and getting any input you might have on those. And then, just like you've been talking about you know what are your concerns what is your experience, you know, whether that's through intersections or along the whole of the paths, what are the opportunities, you see, you know, that includes neighborhood connections, potential amenities you know somebody already mentioned wayfinding. So we want to make sure we're really covering both the concerns and the opportunities. So you're, you're going to be put into a group with a facilitator who's going to take notes for you in Miro. That person is mostly ascribed they may not have the ability to answer all your questions but we will be recording your questions. Again, if there's questions that seem like they should be answered for the full group will address those after the breakout room. If you don't get your question answered and it's something based on design we're going to come back in the next meeting and we're going to be trying to speak to some of the questions you have then in that second meeting slash we might also be able if there are a number of questions or commonly asked question to send out a follow up email. So, with that, I think Kelly is going to break out groups going. Actually Doug is going to put us out in breakout groups I think we have groups of about 14 to 15 people. So, when you see a, see a invitation pop up on your screen please hit accept. We're all back well I know I had a really great informative session. I hope you did as well. Would any facilitator if you had a question that rose to the four of your group that needs to be answered could you enter that in the chat please. Like a context setting question or like a question, a bigger picture question. We can we have we have a few minutes left here. Close the meeting down at nine. And again I'll just I'll just give you the next steps are we're going to be taking your feedback and turning these into evaluate to alternative evaluations and coming back in late March with another public meeting. So, yeah, we have about 10 minutes for questions or anything that came out of these groups, ambers typing in saying our group was wondering what improvements could be made in the short term, especially for the crossings of the high street rotaries. And so I'll just say to that one. So there are various things we can look at we talked a little bit about in my group the different kinds of temporary or tactical materials that could be used just flex posts or things that could go and kind of quickly paint. So there are different solutions that we can provide more on in the next meeting. And the goals and designs best reflect or accommodate cyclists of differing ages and abilities. So we, we also got this comment. And this is something that we're going to be working on a bit with the focus group and trying to get input for different needs that need to be considered, you know, ways that we can make. So this is planning level I think, you know, recommendations that would be taken forward into the design for signage accessibility, you know things on the ground that make things a little bit more clear. So consider with the path that we had any bike parking mixed in, you know the sizing of those spaces to allow different sizes of bicycles and trikes through a lot of things that we'll need to give thought to and come back on to. So definitely thinking about both pedestrians and people on bikes and all different kinds of users amongst those groups. And I should also say that you know by law, we're going to be developing an ADA accessible path but generally we try to exceed that and make sure that we're really making more of a universal design. Oh now there's a lot in the chat. Okay, I'm going to move faster. So comment on Buzzlefield and please not bisecting it. Do the high volume of use for multiple sports and past recreation. Challenges for pedestrians, especially at the rotaries. It's the possibility of quick build mid bridge crossing. I think we're going to have to give some some thought to those quick build solutions and come back to you. And for High Street painted crosswalk on the bridge right above the middle of the river. And let's see. Okay so a lot of good design design feedback here. Yes. Yes to lots of ideas for tactical short term solutions. I will say we got the comment as well in our group about separating, you know, people who are biking and people who are walking. So we're going to be thinking about that going forward. Any offered path would need to be wide enough for two way use. This is a group with thoughts. I love it. And please take the survey as well. Julie would you mind copying back in the link for the survey to. We also got comments about that hill. Climbing, you know, toward mystic summer intersection. We were definitely going to be thinking about how to make that look, how to make that easier. Yes to more crossings. Good point on the public restrooms you know as we can think about recommendations for amenities. You know, we're going to be kind of doing a place making plan where we're kind of figuring out what might fit where we will be looking at the different amenities that can make it into the design. And we'll bring that back in the next meeting for your feedback. Lots of thoughts and crossings. I just commented on the experience of the wooded natural feel of the path. I think this is a priority for us as well. Really keeping with the environment and not destroying that experience and really trying to bring people to the lakes and do that through this kind of natural experience all along the path. That's a big point in our group that was actually just cut off as we rejoined the big room, but about looking for more connections to existing natural areas along the path so taking advantage of use of the lake along the proposed facility but also can make me some better connections with parks that are already already there and building out that network. We're going to be talking about amenities, water for people and pets, drinking fountains. All right. We are getting close to time here, really love everything that has been thrown in here. Julie, could I also ask you to go ahead and do a big sweep of this chat. I got all of your notes. I know I got a lot of really great specific thoughts in in my meeting. And so we're going to be taking all of that and coming back to you will summarize in the next meeting some of what we heard, both in this meeting and from the survey, which is again, Julie just dropped it in the chat there. So we look forward to talking to you again, probably late March. Thank you very much for your time tonight. Thank you. Thanks for this presentation. It was great. Thank you for your work. Thank you. Take care. Thanks a bunch. Hey, thanks for the Medford people for turning out. Absolutely. Come to our meetings once in a while. That'd be fun. Stephanie, I have a copy of the chat as well. So great. All right, take care, everyone. I'm going to close this down. And thank you facilitators for all of your help. Yes, thank you, everyone. Bye.


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