All right, let's start. Thank you all for coming. And it's coming to the end of the day and third day of the conference. How many of you have been on the third day of the conference? All right, before we start, I just want to give you one of the things is I've changed the title of the talk. You've seen outside or on the publication, the convention side, it was called as Agile Coach Toolkit. At the time of putting in the paper, I felt that was more relevant. And we are talking a few tools or a few techniques and we zip through that. Over a period of time, I've been working with, as a consulting person, been working with a company. And then there were a lot of other thoughts which came in. And I thought it would be a more meaningful blend if I put in fluency, because some of the aspects of fluency was drove in into the thinking at least. We wanted to drive some of it. And instead of calling it as tools, let's look at it as techniques, which is much more relevant. And hence, I went and changed and tweaked a few things. But still, whatever tools that I mentioned in the paper, that still will be covered. So me bad, if somebody has to shoot me down, please go ahead do that. All right, how many of you are coaches here? Coach, consultant, how many of you are aspiring coaches who've done Scrum Master for some time? And you're getting into that level almost there as a coach. Wonderful. OK. So what are the key issues that you see as a coach? Just to get an understanding of any, what do you see as a key issue? Sorry?  That actually is true, right? When you go in, you want to disrupt something which is not there and then bring some sense to it. So OK. As long as you don't leave them shattered and come back. Cultural aspect, how so? Certain period of time, maybe a couple of years or even more than that, then to immediately come and try to, first the observing part becomes extremely important before you really try to bring any kind of change. And that resistance to change from working in a certain style. I've seen organizations where, working with American organizations where that kind of style was working for over 10 years. So any kind of change that you're trying to bring, there is immediately a big difference associated to it. OK. All right. All right. Good. So a bunch of these things that I'm going to share with you is an experience report, right? It's not like I say so and you do so and then you don't get the same effect. So it depends on who you are, what your personality is. At the end of the day, we also have to understand that. We will not be successful in trying to do everything that the other, we can't imitate other people. We need to have our own way of doing things, right? So this is based out of my experience over years that I've been trying. In fact, I should go back to back in my days at HCL when I transformed myself into being a consulting or a COE kind of person, morphing in myself or evolving myself into a coach consultant kind of role. And both working with the customers and also in-house with many of the teams. And there were a blend of things that I had to bring in and I had a lot of issues and problems. And some of it is on learning through those times. So it has taken some time. And eventually now I think I've got a fair degree of comfort in trying to put together wherever I go and do this. So it may not come out right for you, but then I'm sure you would have also tried similar techniques. Then we would be sharing each other's things. So please chime in wherever you've got some issues trying with some of the techniques that you are going to learn and some of the other techniques which will be interesting for others to learn. So we are okay with that, right? All right, so just to set the stage, coaching. What do you think coaching is? What do you mean by coaching? Helping others achieve their goal, okay? Helping others so that they help themselves, okay? Giving more practice. One at a time, please. Asking the right questions, okay? I think they are all fairly valid. Here is the thing from Wikipedia I got. Helping to identify the skills and the capabilities that are within the person and enabling them to use them to the best of their abilities. So I don't believe that as a coach I get in and then try to start teaching something. Yeah, there is sort of some element of it. I don't know, teaching is still good, but I don't want to be preaching. That's where we distort a lot of things, right? So there has to be balance, okay? The next aspect is role of an agile coach. This coach in general, but role of an agile coach. Much more concrete, not just by the definition, but role of an agile coach, what would you do, okay? Find it's team level, so think big. What else could happen? Sorry? Enabler, okay? Agile values, okay? Still team, okay, what else? Goals of teams, organization, management, what kind of, okay? Value addition of this methodology, okay? Change your, all right. I think there's something. So this is how I categorize them. This, obviously when we enter in as coaches, right? So we could be doing at either a team level where you instill an agile culture. You work as a change agent. You work with management to create structures in the organization in a large scale. So when you talk at an enterprise, which means that you will be talking to host of different people. It is management, it is senior leadership, and it is a team level, right? The hat that you wear is going to vary. You are not going to stop the same language while you are driving values with what you talk with management or the senior leadership is a way to what you want to talk with teams. How do you enable them versus how do you see the values from how should the management orient themselves to visualize a team is going to be different, right? All right, with that manifesto, all of us we have seen this. First of the manifesto item talks about individuals and interactions over process and tools, right? So this is where I have a challenge today. More and more I see process and tools. What happened to individuals and interactions? Lot of the coaches who get in are driving more and more processes and tools. In some form and shape. I mean training has morphed him to an extended coaching. So would that cut it, right? So rest of the things, they have value. I'm not saying that they don't have value, but I think we are losing the essence part of it. As a coach, I think it is important for me to start recognizing the value in that aspect of individual and interactions, right? So we have to pull ourselves back. As an agile community, we've come a long way, but I think we are also distorting somewhere. So I think my challenge today is with that and hence the whole pitch, why we want to focus more on that. So this is where we started. So when we started working with our customers, we said, we want to take this fluency model. I don't want to go into the details of the fluency model. How many of you were in Diana's talk keynote dancing with the fluency model day before? Okay, there's a whole lot of stuff that is already put up on the website. You can go to agilefluency.com. You will get a lot of details, right? For me, what is more important is why we went into a fluency model or what we looked at fluency from a coaching perspective. There is a whole lot of the stars, one star, two star, three star and four star, but one of the myths that, which is there are people misconstrue what the stars are to be a level gradation, which is equal to your CMMI and stuff like that, which is not the case. From a fluency perspective, it is more about the investments that you are going to put in. Investments is not just money, money per se, but it could be time, effort, how do you orient people, et cetera. So and do you want to be at a point where you want to be and how do you want to go there, right? So that's perspective. So we will lose the focus. I'll try and explain a little bit of this, what it is and what it is not, right? The rest of the details are there. Yeah, so basically when you look at it from a star perspective, what it says here is see progress from business perspective, redirect the teams when needed. So this is more about a team cultural shift, right? That is very, very important, right? To me that is important also because somewhere these individuals over these individual interactions also fit in into that context, what is the culture that I'm bringing in? It's all about mindset and culture. Agile is about that. It's not about the tool factor, right? Or the process factor. If I get this in order, maybe that will surely work out. At least my premise is that, okay? Now, agile culture shift is very important. There have been teams working on agile for a long time or practicing agile for a long time, yet you don't see making a successful product out of it or team behaviors are not kind of in the way you want, you expect it to be from a mindset or a culture perspective. It is more about regimented processes, right? I do it from a compliance checklist. If you go and look into these organizations or with the teams, you would be surprised that on a compliance list there will be probably nine or nine and a half out of 10. But when you see from an outcome, the behaviors and things like that is not somewhere coming along on those directions. So that is where I would see one star is a very important step because you want to make that culture shift first, right? The second one, second two star, it talks about shift on market cadence, capture the value frequency and reveal, you know, constructions early, et cetera, right? That is where skill shift happens. Lot of this agile world we are talking about thanks to scrum or no thanks to scrum, honestly, because it's easy to get into scrum way of doing things and call ourselves agile and lose out the entire factor of engineering part of it. I can get a head start, I can start off getting into these practices and doing some of the regiments of standards, et cetera, answering questions, but without the skill component of it, we're going to fail. And that's where we get stuck. The expected outcome or where we want to be in the agile curve so that we can start delivering without the skills will not add value, right? So at the three star level, we are trying to optimize value, right? Optimizing value is more about making excellent product decisions. That's where my product management as a component comes in. I mean, it's one thing to have a PO participate here, but then what kind of decisions are you making, right? How critical they are. So that is where organizational structure shifts happen. In many of the organization, you won't even have a one PO for one scrum team or few scrum teams available. In fact, they are distributed even in a distributed context, it's even more difficult. You have somebody, a pseudo BS sort of playing that role. There is absolutely no decision making. Now, how do you expect any amount of agile to happen? I mean, we could have it from compliance again as a structure, I can make a change by planting in one person. But the point is how effective is that person? Most of the time, organizations also in the transformation path would keep the structures in place, would put an order into the structures, but then again it's a journey. Effectiveness is more important at each of these levels, not just about creating structures. And that's an important thing to bear in mind because if we can take this fluency road, we have done exactly by this, but we are not stealing the value. Means that we need to go back and see how much is the effectiveness playing a role, right? So the last is the optimized for systems, cross pollination, prospective stimulation, innovation, optimized value stream, et cetera. This is again organization culture shift. I mean, if you look at the fluency model, there has been about less than 5% in this area, right? People are still more and more into the one-star, two-star. And people are aspiring to work somewhere through a three-star, and it takes a lot of time, right? Hopefully I've answered that, good enough, okay. So this is where these questions come. As a coach, when I enter in, I need to set the right expectations, very, very important. It's one thing to say that, you know, I would go there and try to do mentoring or I coach the teams, but then what is the management perspective to it? What's the experience? Even from a team perspective, where do you want to be? Where do you want this team to go from this perspective? It gives me a good guideline in that sense. It tells me this is where you are and this is what you want to achieve, this is what it takes. Each one takes a time frame, right? If I even want to achieve a two-star, it takes anywhere between 12 to 18 months. And that's how much time investment comes in. It's not going to be an easy shift. If you say that in two weeks, three weeks time or one month, two months, we will get it, we will achieve it, no. You probably can get an exposure towards some of these practices, et cetera, but you may not be there to do it, right? In a consistent manner, okay. Second aspect is, what investments are you ready to make, right? And the third one is what time frame are you looking at? Very critical, because sometimes let's face it. I don't need a team to go to a four-star or a three-star for the kind of work that I get or I am doing. It's valuable enough to be in one-star. In certain teams, it's valuable enough to be in two-stars, or I aspire to be in three-star because I am going to issue a product like this, but which means that I need to also put in an investment so that gradually I take that, right? So there is a commitment for that also. If I'm trying to do only sustainable engineering, support, operational activities, do I really want to do this? Or I'm working in very, very short projects, but then it is not going to be of high value. It is more about lights on. Then do I want to make that kind of an investment, right? So having that context is very important. Even suggesting where we want to go, what measures do we want to put in place so that as we go forward, we can measure these teams. Are they really getting there? Measures, when I say it is not like metric as in a metric where you can put down numbers to it, but at least are they making that progression? So making those expectations very explicit towards management or any of the teams is very important. So I think it's one of the most underplayed kind of a technique, but then we need to put that in perspective. And that is where make or break happens. I mean, we should not be shying away from the fact that we might lose this opportunity to coach because many of us are coaching and consultants, painting a wrong picture and getting in there, that would be wrong on our part. So that's where I'm very much critical on that element saying that this is what the reality is. This is what you can get, right? If it means that I have to come out early, the sooner, then it's better. I think I've done my job there, right? Many of the teams may not be even ready to start that. I may not even have the right infrastructure. I may not even have the right kind of team. So should I just go and plunk them, plunk myself in and then say, start doing this, it will get in and then we will see. No, I don't believe that. All right, so this is the key necessities. So the star as instead does not communicate any of those investment, which is what, from art kind of a twig, here are these, if you want to seek this benefit for these kind of an investment, there has to be a component of customer and also business. When I say business, the current, my business, my company and the customers whom I work, how do I engage the customers in this process across the line, across all these four stars or whatever you call as four piggy banks or whatever work, right? So it's important. Because people know now, if I'm expecting this kind of an investment, these kind of benefits, these are the things it takes along the way. I cannot sustain at going to a three star with a product owner being my, you know, conduit for giving me valuable feedback. It does not work that way. It still breaks. You need to have real, real customer coming in. Any questions? Sorry? In my experience, no. Currently in think we started off this whole thing by saying that we would probably attempt a two star. We are somewhere between one, one and a half star today. So, sorry, I don't have personally any experience to say here is a three star that I've managed to get. All right, coming to the actual techniques as such. So that's the fluency part. We want to have it to set the right expectations at all levels, right? Then we come into what is called as team norms and working agreements. How many of you have working agreements? Have heard of working agreements? What do you do in working agreements? Okay. How do you go about doing it? Are the kind of common agreement you have and you try to respect those agreement? It's decided by the team. So, here's the thing. We call it as, at least I call this four piece, right? What are these four piece? We start with people. People have goals, right? I come back to other accountable, responsible, later on, but then it is more about individual behaviors, goals, and aspirations. Everybody who's working on in companies as employees or on products have some of these, right? Next aspect is the product and what outcomes are we looking at, right? So the third component is more about understanding the current constraint, which is more about plan. What kind of successful strategies that I can put in place, right? And the fourth aspect is more about the process, the mechanics, you know, the enablers sort of. What are the things, so that if I have to succeed with my plan or the strategies that are there, how am I going to enable that, right? So if you look at it, I've kind of borrowed it from how many of you have heard of RACI? RACI matrix and traditional waterfall or whatever world, right? So there is an accountability and responsibility. It's just that, because you have to enable, in a larger context, let's face it, we still have project managers. We cannot do away with them. Project managers, functional managers, they're still relevant to the scrum teams as well. They do a whole bunch of work and bring in value. We cannot say that they're not required anymore. Decision making has to happen. Larger, I mean, any organization which is more than like 1000 people or even 500 people, you will have a structure set in. You will have to get through that hierarchy, right? So I think some of these, to have it in perspective is very important. So that is where I would have, I've called out some of the accountability aspects and some of the responsibility aspects. If you notice, most of the places, if you see, team is responsible, right? And there are certain players, when it comes to accountability, it is each of these players whose neck is on the line. Don't go and bombard a scrum team that you have to do everything when I don't give them how to do. It's not fair. What are the levers that are there which I can put in place or what are the infrastructure that I need to put in place? How do I equip them with the right skills? And I need to make those decisions. Go figure out, all the time will not lead you to outcomes and then don't blame them for it. If your strategy is, let the team go and figure out that, give them that time to come out with that and be patient about it. If nothing comes, finally you have to step in. You cannot compromise your overall goals. All those accountable, whatever is shown on this slide. Yeah, you could use that as a lever for it, but oftentimes I've seen retrospectives going stale.  I mean, if we are in effective retrospective, yeah, that's a way to do that. You could do it. But what would be the forum where people will come or, because as the end of the day, the team is responsible. Yeah, I'll talk about that. How do you get to this? I'll talk about it in a minute if you can hold on. But the point is we need to have perspectives of all these three and people are central to this. But there are various, be it a retrospective, having your triage meetings, all those are necessary tools, techniques that you bring it along in the process, depending on how the context warrants it. You still will need that. But then it is not just this because this is just the perspective to say I want to drive down of all these aspects. If you want to create a structure and process within an organ in a larger context, without these elements you cannot. If you have to work with management, you need to have that perspective. At the team level, it boils down to one retrospective. So there are two aspects, there are team goals and there are release goals from outcomes and from an individual perspective. Both of them boil down to an acceptance criteria. If I achieve this, can I attain this goal? Right, from that perspective it is more about, okay if I have to do this, what are the set of agreement that I'm going to put in place? This is again collective. Some will be collective at the decision making place. You will disseminate that information coming back into the team. So as a coach you will have to be influencing, you will have to put that aspect along. So management is there ready for to do this. Given this is the thing what management aspires to do, how is it as a team that you can do? Are you equipped, et cetera? Then you will take all of these things and go into your sprints and over a period of time you will still go back and do it. At release goals, milestone goals, whatever you want to call it as. It's not just a sprint retrospective, it's an overall aspect. So you can tie it back into whatever your appraisal system and things like that, but let's not take appraisal out of context and then say I will do year-end appraisal and these are all collection agents till then. That probably will be negative. As long as I get learning opportunity, did I learn enough of it and what is that that I did a mistake and how do I correct myself? That is the most important aspect of this cycle. So having a perspective from this aspect will help us drive better working agreements. It's not just about putting a working agreement as a placeholder, it's how do you drive effectively and this should be a changing map all the time. Working agreement is changing. It's going to be a fluid document. And still you see the same behavior. What do you suggest or what's your recommendation? How to deal with those kind of tricky situations? It takes a slightly long answer. Let's see, we'll go through this course. If you have still not answered, we'll take it offline because there are multiple ways that we can handle it. Hopefully I try to answer with some of them. They get, I mean my thing is the way I want to approach is if an individual would want to go through a self-course correction that is better because I need to show him the way but not engage into a confrontation or ask him you are this and it is not helping. It's not going to benefit anybody, neither me nor him. I'm going to talk about that a little in when we go into the next technique where I can shift out these kind of things and how I've at least tried few techniques there to orient that and how people have fallen in place. I mean fallen in the places, it's in the order that their behaviors have changed because making culture shift is all about behavior changes and until I have it, I'm not going to get any agility. I might get compliance. I might be agile but I might not be driving from an agility point of view. So key considerations, why we need, this is an objective. Key objective of why we need working agreements. I needed to drive holistic factors. I mean there are a lot of things that I need to drive both from management angle, there is an outcome perspective and also keeping in mind the team's perspective, goal's aspirations, I need this, this is an objective. What should it be? It will encompass what are both of these and together collectively what we have made as decisions and how am I going to progress on this? Because this is again, let's not forget it. It's not something I am going to thrust it upon the teams. It is more a collective agreement and I'm empowering certain individuals. For example, if a scrum master has to do his responsibility and he has to go and ask a question, we are not delivering what we are supposed to deliver. In a scrum team oftentimes I've seen there is a backlash. How many of you have come across that? You are not supposed to be asking, we are a scrum team, we will take that. Scrum masters are more facilitators, you are not supposed to be asking this. How do you empower even a scrum master, right? So that is where functional managers, project managers or coaches would add that perspective. So now make this transparent. Make it occul and tell them that it is right to be asking questions because on the objective you are asking questions, not against a person. Because you have made it transparent now. This is what we all agreed on, what are we doing? It's about driving empowerment. When should we establish this? Typically it would again be again close to your release cycles. Shorter release cycles is better. Again you could do it as a release retrospective or a team retrospective at every time span. I would say every 12 weeks or one quarter max if you can keep on doing it, but at least it would take three months. Realistically to change behaviors. In our observation and also some of the study it takes about eight to 12 weeks at least to change behaviors in a person. It's not about, it's about, you're talking about individual behaviors. Whatever be your sprints, unless I change individuals behaviors, how I would. I mean it's, so you've seen most of the success stories or case studies come out of agile with experiments. Short experiment, one time I plunk it in like the Hawthorne effect, it will work. But will it work in a sustained basis that is where we lose out? Because there fundamental changes have to be made. Fundamental shifts as an individual I have to undergo. And I'm not used to it. The challenge is not only me undergoing the change, it's again as a collective unit we need to undergo a change because we need to wipe with individuals. So it takes about that time a sustained effort to do that. So who creates it? Obviously the collectively it's a team, the ownership with the, with the scrum master. Right, he would drive it, but then the point is he will become responsible for the whole thing. Bringing the people together, functional managers contribute to it or the project managers contribute into it. Everybody participates in it. We don't want to do it as individuals and then plonking it on to a team and subjecting them to follow these things. So as a coach what are your key inputs? So I do something called a deliberate practice. As team retrospectives as you mentioned, one-on-one meetings. So the way I start off is pretty much I would work with management. I will work with teams. I would do a team retrospective to understand, but oftentimes these retrospectives have been misleading. Very, very misleading. There's one thing that they say and one thing that I observe when they work. So typically when I go in the, at least ideal way I would want to start off is when they are in between a sprint so that I can observe, I can be part of them. And I don't believe working as a coach outside of a team. I embed myself along with the team and work with them on a day to day basis, morning to evening. And that is where I can get these observations. It's all about observing, looking at how teams, how individuals actually work and behave.  When you leave them in the open it's that's where we will see certain anomalies and that is what you want to catch, right? So there should be a certain time period that you give for yourself to work with the team, understand these behaviors. And you may want to have one-on-one meetings, multiple one-on-one meetings. Here is my observation of these individuals. Have you also seen this, work with the management? You will always see, I mean, if there are convergent views then you are good. But if you are divergent views you have to go and revalidate it. And for that it takes time, you need that time. Allow yourself some time to do that. Because it's dicey to go with a divergent view and then trying to plunk in a certain thing and that process is not going to work. So it's very important that we do it. At least I want to give myself that room. So deliberative practice, I come to it because there is a separate technique section for that next section. We talk about more on deliberate practice. But again, I would want to watch their sprint execution, their business outcomes, objectives and customer satisfaction, how they are doing with that, what are their product quality? How it is really scaling well, how is this working? I mean, do they have any unit test run? Is there a daily stand up? I mean, is there daily builds going on? How often do they check in? What is that test automation thing that they have put in place? Because whatever good thing that you want to say, intent is good, but then without having these engineering aspects, it's not going to give you anything. I could be talking a lot of it, but then it's not going to give any success out of it. Before, you mentioned you need to set up the acceptance right area and then you set up the working agreement. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Yeah, so got your point. I think the reason I put up this four piece, originally I wanted to do deliberate practice first. Observe and all that, but then come to four piece. I'm not ordering it in the sequence. I'm talking it in a sequence. This is important as four piece. You need to have a perspective and for working agreements, you need these elements. But from a covering perspective, I'm doing deliberate practice later. Yes, you will need that. I mean, I'm not saying this happens in the same sequence. I could get into a team. I would do an observation, work with them from an execution perspective. I would work with management and I will be cycling through that. Yeah, true. Because I get into working agreements. Working agreements comes way longer. I mean, later. I don't even get into working rail at the outset. All of these one-on-one meetings, the observation, the sprint execution, from the sprint execution, the team retrospective. In fact, team retrospective comes after these observations one-on-one meeting deliberate practice. So I can converge on what are these convergences? What are these divergences? And then cycle through it one more time. Yeah, but these should not be like really dependent on the acceptance criteria, isn't it? Eventually when you want to set up a working agreement, you need a working acceptance criteria. How do you set up a working agreement without an acceptance criteria? These are what I'm talking about to formulate a working agreement. Here are these things that you need to go through. These are the key inputs for it. And there are management inputs. There are team inputs and your own observation, what you make out of it. And obviously as a coach, you are going there. You want to work as a change and you want to bring about a change. You are not about saying that they're all good and I'm aligning with that. Okay, right? So look out for these. I mean, when you work with teams, obviously what happens is most of the time, some of these guidelines driving are there, they're right behaviors that they are driving. Commitment, responsibility, accountability. Oftentimes you will not. You will agree on working agreement, but in execution you will see them in tangent. You will fail on those working agreements, right? So are these guidelines consistently violated? Because you have to shift back. You cannot give them three months again. So we have agreed one, let's see. Because if I don't see parity in it one to two weeks, I'm drifting away. We need to pull that back. Because as a coach, I think at least I have not had the luxury of working with teams at a really long stretch. You have to make certain progress in a relatively short amount of time. So it's okay to call out but ensure that this is done without breaking safety and trust. That's the most important element. See, it's not about saying that you are doing it wrong, but are you hurting that individual in the process of saying so. How you say and how you work with individuals matters a lot. There could be key influencers that you want to have a one-on-one to call it out, not in front of the team.  So again, context matters. Again, you will have to experiment it a little bit as to how it works and it also depends on your personality. How you will blend with that. So that's most important. I mean, I would not be able to experience you will probably have to look at it from your sense and get those inputs and slowly mature your way of engaging with team individuals rather than taking it as a recipe as to how he does it. Matrix. In some extent, again, it depends on the attitude of individuals. In a matrix, I know if I am reporting to some other people and I have nothing to hear, no matter what I say, I'm not going to bring that parity. Especially if they are like, I don't care what you are saying. And I'm like the big thing. I've been here for a long time. I've seen this as fads multiple times. You don't get. But if you are working in a co-located team and again, same thing can happen here. But it is relatively easy because you are working with the same management who's going to control. Both ways, right? I think the important factor is, are there right attitudes? It doesn't matter whether it is project in this because ultimately I can say, I will say yes to it, but then not work on it. It's equally a bad result. All right. So the next practice is deliberate practice. This is more about practicing software craftsmanship. I believe that we need to get into this mode of mentality of engineering excellence. We need to have engineering excellence without which I think as agile teams we will fail. I've seen empty number of times where people take on to scrum and start doing it and it becomes a mechanical thing.  It's the same rigmarole time and time and game. There's no value. In fact, it gets frustrating. I don't know how many of you have felt it, but at least I have felt attending standups, answering those three questions or even those retrospectives is annoying. In fact, I've advocated moving away from answering those questions, rather answer on, let's understand what is the learning that we've got? What are the outcomes? Are there any issues instead of answering that three regimented questions? So this is basically the experience that I got was I attended the first code read back in 2010, 2011, and it was in Mumbai when Venkat Subramanian did it. I was not a quote unquote developer or I was more about management. I've come from a development background myself. I've done a lot of coding. Not that I'm alien to it, but as you go along the curve somewhere you would have left that and you have to get back into it. I think it is important that we as coaches also are relevant. We also understand the developer aspect of it, how developer thinks and to stay relevant we also have to dabble ourselves into code time to time, right? So this was the opportunity back in 2010 or 11 I think, if I'm not wrong. And this deliberate practice is all about Kori, how many of you have heard of code retreats or participated in code retreats? Two, three, awesome, right? So it's a whole day of software craftsmanship building. So all of us get together, we do at least about six to seven iterations in a day, 45 minute iterations, where you work on the same problem all through the day with different perspective. The idea of the code retreat is not to find a solution for the problem, it is more about the approaches to the problem. What are the different approaches you can take? And it really tests out individuals. And the important thing is why we get together there is to improve ourselves from where we are. Here is one way of solving a problem, but then there is another way. So what is the best way to do? Is this a better object oriented way? And do I need object orientation at all? What are those key, and that is what kicks drives agility, right? I would be scared if there is only one solution to a problem. I don't know about you, but then I'll be scared. There should be multiple options at least to put it on the table and that is where you make effective planning. The decision that as a team you can take, here are different possibilities to solve this problem, but this is what it takes to do and is that what you want to do? That is what you want to be discussing in planning sessions. Not about saying here is a functional, this is a thing, we have put a number, this is the velocity and you come out all days and ends up okay, this is something which we could not do and we push it into an experiment. Perpetually get trapped into that. We don't want to do that. We want to hone our skills time and time again and this if we do it repetitively, it is healthy. Right? So Convay actually did this and it's become a worldwide thing. In fact, there is a particular day today, also it happens that every day, on that particular day all over the globe, there is a code retreat. Many organizations have taken to it. At least I have tried within HCL couple of times where we could do it in certain teams at least, if not as a whole, right? It has helped me and I've been at least to two or three code retreats which are there, which have happened so far, right? And that has given me a lot of learning and then I said, if this has helped me, why can't I take this from a coaching perspective, get it into the teams? I don't have to, because teams, people are smart because if they have been hired into this company and we are in working in IT, they are fairly smart individuals. At least I go with that belief.  That's not the way we would work. They are fairly smart, you could do it. They may not know what exactly is a test-driven way, but I would, in this kind of an experience, you would know in a relatively short time, what is unit testing? Can I even attempt unit testing? These are all in a short part of time, without failing, you could actually fail in a safe manner. You would learn from individuals. You would be pair programming all through the day and it doesn't matter who is it, it need not be a developer, just a tester or anybody, including a strong master project manager. Right, and it's a beautiful way of getting the team started. In fact, the key objective from a participant perspective is about holding technical skills, the development skills. From time to time, this is very important to stay relevant, because they have to be relevant in the industry also, not just in the project context. Doing Java, what we did in 2001 and trying to do Java now also doesn't mean the same. Right, improving self-organizing abilities, because oftentimes I've seen certain people will hesitate to work with certain individuals. There are a lot of misconceptions. I don't like a certain individual. I can't work, but you are enforcing them to do pair program. What pairing will you do? I don't even know that, what are the abilities of that person? How do I bring that element? How do I understand that first of all? I cannot say this person is good and I can't babysit that, because they're all adults. They themselves have to figure out, yeah, I think I had a wrong notion of this guy, but now after pairing this, I thought I got a different perspective. I could also do it and I could learn from something. How do I create that safe environment for him? I think this is a fabulous way of doing it. I would sacrifice one day before we start off a release.  Seriously. In fact, I've had problems with all this team bonding exercise because whatever is the leftover budget, they will plonk it into team bonding at the end of the year. So instead of that, let me give you one day's worth of time, don't ask us anything, we'll go and huddle ourselves, do this thing. So as a coach, there are some key objectives. I am more interested in this. I mean, my true intent is to bring a qualitative change in the people who are participating in it. No doubt about it. But then, mind you that we are all, I'm also starting off this journey to transform as a coach. My key objectives are, how do I understand the team dynamics? How good are you? They will all say we are all very good. We are a very nice bonding team. But we do check-ins only once in a month. We hesitate. We can't take his work. He has done some work. How do I know some of these elements? There are good influencers, there are bad influencers. So how do I shift this out? So this is an observation period for me in a constrained environment, in that environment. While they are learning, I'm actually observing these things. How good is your test automation case? How good is your engineering capabilities? Do you do test-driven? Do you know about test-driven? Surprisingly, so far, many people who have not known test-driven have understood test-driven in that one day. In fact, we have downloaded unit test frameworks in that 45-minute time frame and at least done a Hello World TDD, which is lot better than paying some consultant or a training agent to come indoors and say, give me dole out $1,000 and I will do TDD for you. At the end of the day, you would have still done Hello World. You don't require it, right? Observe key behaviors of individuals, understand cross-functional abilities of them, communication problems, if any, because that is critical. And I think this is much more a challenge in working in India. I mean, don't get me wrong. We are much more a diverse nation. In a team, I will have somebody speaking Malayalam, somebody speaking Telugu, and somebody says, I don't, they actually do a great stand-up have they been speaking in their own respective language. But their communication becomes lot more challenging when you put them and you have to speak in that language where I don't, I'm not that proficient in. So I need to understand these aspects as well. How do I blend that? If I pair these wrong sets of people, I cannot get it up. And I cannot even point it out, this is your problem because you can't even surface. You have to figure out that. So what do I need to understand? All of these aspects, right? But much more is how, as a team, they actually behave. How would they come together to solving a problem? All of this is fine at the higher level, it's fine. But given that there is a goal objective, am I actually solving this? What is it that the approaches that I take, right? So many a times I've seen some of these aspects which kick in. These are my observations. Participation people are very, very skeptical. I mean, this is kind of high contrast to my experience participating in code retrieves. When I've gone into code retrieves, people are all angry on the edge. They want to participate because they have come with a purpose that I want to learn and take away something. But when you do it from a coaching or an organizational construct, it is an imposed thing on them. They don't know what it is.  They don't want to participate. They are very rigid about it, right? They don't want to learn and experiment because that is the time they get exposed. Let's face it, all of us want to look good, right? When you put in this kind of an environment, in fact, this is much more common with seniors versus the pressures. Pressures are more open towards experimenting. There are a lot of the seniors who have created their place and then saying that I'm good, but then ultimately when it comes, I'm failing. That's hard to take. But then this is an environment where you give, okay, this is where we are learning, not in terms of exposing those. So did that answer a part of it? If they realize that, yeah, I have got something to learn here which I had not done in my last eight to 10 years, that's a huge revelation for them. And that message that you send out is also a good thing for other juniors who are there because they now bond much very well with that senior. They never look at him as a senior junior. They know that, okay, I can also do something here. That's very important. And I think this is much better than actually going into conference rooms and talking to them. Individual experiences, especially the tech leads. How many of you have had challenges with the tech leads and architects in an agile transformation? For me, the biggest challenge has always been the project managers and the technical architects. I mean, including myself. I mean, I could not accept this discipline earlier on because of that mindset. All right, so passive pairing. People generally set. You know, there is a certain drawback because this is not something that you want to take because now what do I put in? So how do I monitor them, measure them, things like that? You would want to set up your working agreements with these things. If the team has got absolutely no exposure to this, having a high expectation in your working agreements, you want to attain daily checking. I mean, it should be every 45 minute, one hour kind of a check-in rate is not going to happen. It has to be realistic. Uncomfortable pairing with certain people. You will often see similar designs. Nobody wants to challenge on those designs. It's the same thing. Morning to evening, it's the same thing. Six iterations, it's exactly the same design. The key influencer, he started out with this design wherever he has paired, at the end of the day, you will exactly see the same type of code. Oh, I forgot. As part of this code retreat, one of the practices is that we drop the code at every 45 minute iterations. We do a retrospective every 45 minute, but before we do the retrospective, we delete code.  That's the challenge. And you impose constraints. It's not that you have to cross all the code in a different way. You, as a coach who was standing there, you will impose constraints based on these things. Many of the times I don't see, so one of the techniques is, one of the things that I try and do is, if people don't unit test it, I, by the time of the second or the third iteration, I would say you need to have a definite unit test. I don't care whether you do it in a TDD fashion or you do it as a later part of unit test. But there has to be a unit test to solve this, to tell me that. I will not accept the fact that this is working just because you say so, right? Slowly I shift them around into a further iteration to say that now that you have understood unit test, try to do it in TDD, mandatory TDD. If you have not understood a particular framework, go Google and get that. As a pair, see what you can do. In fact, results have been astounding. In that 40, while they have actually taken whole lot of initiatives to learn TDD over years, in this 45 minutes, they were actually been able to do download unit test frameworks and actually test that out. And get a comfort feel, yeah, this is no big deal, we can go back. It's so much to say that in a mainframe context, we've been able to achieve this, no big deal. We would get that. It's about building that safety net where they can fail and learn. Any questions? So here are some of the experiences. This is what teams have actually felt. This is not mine, it's there. I've taken literal comments from what people have felt. Scaling agile, there's a lot of talk on frameworks and stuff like that on scaling agile, right? My school of thought is if we have a good learning organization, we should be able to scale well. It's not about the processes or the frameworks that we put in place. So how do we go about enabling this? What's a learning organization? Anybody? What's a learning organization? Open to change. I'm slightly running late, but I might need five more minutes, is that okay? I might need five more minutes more than the session. So basically this is what Peter Singh just said in fifth discipline, field book. How many of you have come across this? Learning in organization means the continuous testing of experiences and the transformation of the experience into knowledge accessible to the whole organization relevant to the core purpose. So that's what we want to strike a chord on. Because let's accept the fact that I don't know how much, what is your experience? There cannot be one way of doing agile. Each team is differing. Each will have contextual practices, experiences, right? For some team what works and the other team it doesn't work. Is that your experience too? How many of you have that experience? Yeah? So in that, is it fair to say that I need to have cross-pollination amongst individuals? Five more minutes. As for five more minutes, I'll do that. So we do brownback sessions. Brownback sessions is basically, you create community of practitioners and to enable peer learning, but it happens during lunch hours. Organization doesn't have to put in time or effort or money into it. As communities, we come together and do it. So what we have done is we've created forums for product owners, crumb masters, and the functional manager components, all of these roles specifically to participate and we do it on a weekly basis. Every week, particular days, for that one hour, we share experiences. And we validate whether this works for me or not and I've cross-pollinated like that. So people have taken experiences, it's not work, they come back into it. So basically about sharing their team coaching outcomes. As a coach, this is more relevant because how do you want to do that? How do you want to enforce? How do you want to see that there is a sustainable change? Not just for this team, but for other teams. Things can go wrong here. In fact, we've been horrible in this, at least in my experience, some of these things have been shot down. I mean, intent is good, they have all bought in, but there are various organizational constraints where it has not happened, right? Everybody buys the fact that, yes, it is important, but the point is they are unable to commit for it. So as a community, we will not be able to grow. So the point is it's more difficult to groom, to grow communities of interest rather than putting placeholders and things like that. Placeholders in itself will have no value, okay? So this, we've failed, but then at least, it is still on, hopefully we will succeed. So key measures, I'll quickly run through them. What are the motivators enduring self-organization? Important thing is progression increases motivation. That's a firm belief in which I operate on, right? So which is why you need those tools. But when you look at it from a two, we have two key measures for network, where people actually put the dot on a day, every day basis, did they have for network as they complete the day, right? And they also see work accomplishment. How much did I accomplish on a daily? These are the four quadrants that we have versus, I mean, if you look at it versus no fun to loving it towards accomplishment where none at all to awesome work that I did, I'm done, minute I'm done. So these are the four different things and this helps us to do continuous retrospective. And it also means that functional managers and scrum masters have something to challenge upon themselves if you see people are in no fun and none at all on a consistent basis. More they are towards that end, towards the right corner, you are better off. The simplistic measures, we should be able to make good progress. And we do it on every single day, through the weeks, at least for some time, till you sustain, almost done. So there is no one size fits all. Essentially, you will have to experiment with your own ways. At least these are food for thought you could take in into your own coaching experiments. And all right, so I can take some questions till they set up. But hopefully if you have any more questions, I could take them or we could have the hallway. But hopefully these were four or five practices that are there as techniques that you could implement in your own coaching assignments.


about love, cyborgs, art and open source and artistic approach on how to stay golden. And please give us, Big Aliou, a warm round of applause. Hello, everybody. I'm super happy you came to see my talk today. I think it's quite a special topic because I'm not a programmer. I'm not talking about much technology. I'm more talking about art, about a really special way to see the world and maybe even celebrating that way as a kind of weapon, as a kind of language. Yeah, first I would like to introduce myself. My name is Leo. I work as artist under the name Lou J.P. Musknuck. I'm an art student at the Art Academy in Munich, Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. In the class for digital and time-based media. I origin from the politically left wing direction which led me also to body modification. I wear an acet chip inside of my hand and I'm highly interested in all that field because I see it as a kind of merging between human and machine very soon. I guess you guys can imagine that and you're super open to the topic. And yeah, let's just jump through that thing. Well, I have a rough outline introduction. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about my art, my personal work and my intention. Then I would like to try to talk about the definition of art which is not really easy. I would like to show you some artists. The talk right after me contains some, I'm a big fan of as well. I would like to talk about my personal autism theories. Leider viel noise auf dem Mikrofon, jetzt hat mich ein anderes. Okay. Hallo, oh, viel besser. Weich zu laut.  I would like to suggest some solutions to the actual social problems that I see as an artist and as a human basically. And then I would like to have a discussion with you if you guys are in. I would like to ask you to interrupt me anytime.  I'm more mindful and into consciousness, a little bit spiritual, but in a cyborg way as I say. So you can interrupt me anytime and I also want to point out that the movie I'm gonna show you is maybe nothing for kids. So if there's any kids or people that are lightheaded, I don't want you to faint so please maybe leave the room now if you don't wanna see that movie. Yeah, I think I'm gonna start with the movie that's a spontaneous, you know what I mean, decision, right? So we have some music and you see what I do, maybe that's easier. So I'm gonna stop here, I think you saw what I wanted to use for my introduction. I'm already 34 years old, I'm a carpenter, I'm a CPR like emergency worker and tattoo artist and I realized that a lot of people judge me for this work especially. I use it as my example because I can explain my kind of art best in this piece. The reason I did that was actually to try to perform a time jump in an artistic ideology. So I made a tattoo and three weeks later I decided to remove that tattoo, I put it in formaldehyde and I put it into an art gallery. This actually tells a lot to me. I got judged for that work. It's nothing about any psychiatric issues I have, I didn't enjoy it, actually was a real hard thing to do for me but to me was really important because as an artist you have a lot of pressure, you have to be present. If you guys know Marina Abramovich, she started stuff like that in the 60s already and yeah, I think she was on a similar road like me. If you see that a piece of my body physically is exhibited in a gallery that means the artist is present even if he or she is not present. So the piece of myself, it will not only be present in that moment I exhibited it but it also will be in the future.  I know it's not proper because I think the piece of skin the tattoo will not last very long. My DNA might be killed by the formaldehyde but in theory it shows that I, well part of me which is only a little square piece is already existing in the future. Maybe in some art collection, maybe not, maybe it's gonna land in the trash I don't know but the message is that it's important to understand that even a pixel three times three centimeter of a body of you, of a picture of cells of you represent all of you because if you heard about cell memory, you know that your body is defined out of all the mass of yourselves, right? So we are mainly water and we define ourselves through our minds sometimes. Some people do that even through their bodies but to me it's like a never-ending chain. My skin is renewing every night, every day. I lose a part of myself. Every breath I take is exchange. This process is really important to me. That's also why I show all those fast pictures because we are living in a world that adjusts processes. There's no products anymore that are to be important to me. I don't know if any one of you has read Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway. I really would like to suggest it to you. It's really feminist, that's what people say. I have my own opinion about it but I'm not here to discuss that. I just would like to recommend you to read it and build your own opinion about it as well as the German book Jäger Samlone Kritiker by Brecht. He's kind of like a pop philosophy guy. I like him, he has a good opinion but as always please build up your own opinion and check it out. This one is a fancy effect by Apple, I like it. This one is another work I did. As you can see my main topic is the overwhelming in this today's world. I built this ball out of monitors. It's 25 monitors, 26 Raspberry Pis and zeros as well and it's bound on there with the Shibari ropes. Those are Japanese ropes because I think in times where we have to question AI and humanity, collective intelligence, cloud uploads, you imagine what I mean. I think the most important question is what's going to happen about authority? I mean if I lose my leg and my leg is going to be reproduced, still I'm 75% roughly of myself if I see myself as a bunch of cells but the rest of it, it's going to be metal maybe or some high prosthetic device. How much of me is going to be still me? Since I believe in a cell memory, I think the question is which leg is going to win? I mean if the right one is not real, the left one is real and me and my brain is steering both of them. What if the right leg decides to go another way suddenly because it's maybe metal and not part of me or is my body going to adapt it? For example, I think the chip I have, it's kind of like collaborating in a weird way with my body because I'm weather sensitive. I bet a lot of you know that from themselves. If I have a scar, scar tissue, whatever, and it's going to start to rain, it's going to get itchy, it's going to feel funny, stuff like that. The same happens to me with the tissue around my microchip. Once I get close to magnets, I talk to many people and they told me they believe that could be possible because there's metal inside, right? That's logical. So if I imagine I had a whole leg or maybe even more, a whole torso, whatever, in the very far away future, I wouldn't really know what would happen in questions of authority, how much of myself is going to have control over the rest. And if I lose half of my brain, it's going to reproduce in a computer, what decisions are going to be made different? Yeah, the work over here is exactly discussing that through symbolism. Because you can see those ropes, they use in bondage, you maybe know that from the BDSM. And finish area. And I wanted to show that those videos all around the bar, which are half machines like war machines, war machines in the building, in the making by companies I don't have to mention. It shows a lot of holographic stuff. It shows technology about 70%. And the rest of it is nature. I mean, I put some videos of bees and stuff. I think it's really hard to describe art. You should step inside to understand, but I think the overwhelming of the actual world is a big problem, it's going to be a big problem. And I think you can also see the effects already on the kids. I have a son. And remember when he was five years old, I showed him a bunch of photographs, you know, like physical photographs. And what he did was that move. And the pictures flew away because he didn't understand it's not a tablet. And at that point, I tried, or I started to understand that haptical sensations and all that, it's gonna start to change. It's like the body hair changes because we're not in the blizzard and cold anymore. It's a lot of genetic and evolutionary stuff going on. And I think as an artist, my tool to try to give a sense of what's gonna happen in the future to people is make exhibitions, just talk to them through the language of art. Yeah. So what is art, especially conceptual art? I don't think you don't know what conceptual art is, but I felt the need to show this definition of the internet. It says an art form in which the artist's intent is to convey a concept rather than to create an art object. Sorry, it's just so hard. Well, I think that's a really easy definition. It's made easy, but it's not that easy because if you see this whole camp as a sculpture, as I do a social sculpture, you might be reminded of people like boys, but actually, sculptures like this, you cannot hang over your couch, you cannot sell them for millions, but they exist and they are the really, really important pieces of art. That's how I see it. It's relative, it's all relative.  So I can buy new artsy stuff and change the world in a naive way I do as an artist. But yeah, I mean, I think this definition is so broad and so wide that there's a lot of space for other disciplines as well. So I don't know if you guys know Stellark. He's a really cool artist. I'm in touch with him, actually. He used to do a lot of things. He had this ear in his arm. He's getting hooked, he's getting body suspensions. He's a great guy in starting the whole scene and actually, he got a body suspension in the Art Academy of Munich a long time ago.  I did several social sculptures but it's always hard to sell stuff like that so it's more like people smile at you, like, oh, nice, she's trying to do something. But as I said to me, that's the essential part of art. Of course, as you know, Moon Ribas and Neil Harbison, cool people, they are thinking about the, they founded the Cyborg Foundation. I think the talk is right after this so I'm really looking forward to it. Maybe you should listen at that one, too, if you're here. Neil is the guy with the antenna in his head who can basically hear colors, if I understood it right. I think it's really, really good that those guys start to raise awareness for all the personification thing of cyborgs. I mean, if you have a body part, that is not you but it's practically inside of you or implemented in some way. That still means it's a part of you so it should get rights as well. But that's a very long discussion so I reduce that to my power. Well, here's some nice pictures of those guys on the bottom right, Stellark with one of his super cool fancy devices he did. There's many videos, if you wanna research them, I promise you'll find a lot. Well, now here's my autism theories. As an artist, I like to play in my mind. Conceptual art is like, how do I say that? It's like a big playground for me to go all crazy. I can change my personalities, kind of like David Bowie did. I can play around, I can imagine things, I can talk about Schrödinger's cat, stuff like that. So in my opinion, autism, especially Asperger's and you know that Simon, what's his name? Cohen. Thingy about being autistic to me represents a strong sense of evolution. I researched a lot and it's hard to put that in words but I realized there's a lot of parallels in autistic people and evolution. In my, it's a slow evolution that's pointing into the direction that it's harder for the brain to process some things and at the same time do some other. But since we are in an anthropocene time age, it's gonna happen anyway. So of course if we use computers a lot, of course our kids start to import the haptical stuff but not only that, I even think that all those kids from engineers and IT managers that are autistic or on the spectrum as you would say it, they are basically the future because they are evolving into a world where it's easier to focus on yourself and maybe add social skills if you choose to. So I think the most important thing is to talk about solutions. So the most important point I have here on my little sheet is be interdisciplinary. I realize a lot of people just separate, they isolate the physicist hang out with the physicist, the artist do the art stuff, the hackers do the hack stuff but it's much more important to generate a fusion. In the same name festival you can see that and you can see it here as well, how good it works but I think we should spread that more in the world in general. To me it's really important to sharpen social skills. That's easy to say but it's not that easy actually. We start to move away from people. We don't respect each other that much anymore. That's what I can see on the internet sometimes. We try to anonymize ourselves and I don't think that's a good thing. What is worse actually is to steal data from people of course but if we have the power to change that now we should do that. Well communication is essential, that's true. If you are not able to communicate no matter if your language is art or design or Python, you're not able to do anything right? So you should try to listen to other people get back to the communication skills because they are super essential and then art can be a weapon or a language or switch. So as I said, Boyce is super right and he also said that everybody is an artist so if you code, even if you go to the toilet you can see everything you do as art if you do it in a positive way because every change starts in you.  But change actually always begins in you so if you have this whole consciousness karma, positivity, discussion up, believe it. I think it's true. I mean it was that story that happened to me a couple of days ago where I paid this super nice guy a beer because he forgot his wallet at the tent and yeah, he came back the next day he gave me the money for the beer and he gave me an extra five and he told me, hey, you gave me this even if I might not have found you and stuff like that, here you get the... Sinsen, you get this five extra and then I shared it to the next person and of course this is the karma chain that will never stop. I think a lot of people still didn't understand that and it's not as unimportant as you think. Well, not you in certain, but society. And also one point I really observe in every social area knowledge has to be shared. Jealousy always returns.   I think a lot of people still didn't understand that and it's really important. And yeah, here's Sophia, she's my starting point for any discussion because I think she's like, I don't know kind of like Trump, but in a technology way. So yeah, does anyone want to say something? Okay, so as always, if you have something to contribute we have two microphone angels because of the recording you need to speak into a microphone to be heard. So please line up behind the microphone angels all make yourself visible to them then they may also come to you. All right, there we go. On the stage left. Hey, I liked your talk and I agree with your premise a lot. And I think since we're talking about how we're already kind of cybernetic and how media and communication are all influencing each other and our ideas are living on, is there something really special you find about the way, about specifically body modification? Like what your own personal body has to do with that? If that question makes sense? Like is there some potency in the body? Yeah, well I see that really futuristic because I mean, of course we have wearables and we have smartphones, but to me a smartphone is already a bodily extension because it's a brain prosthetic.  Well, or whatever cloud, I don't wanna use it to Apple, but I have all those storages and all that stuff but it represents my memory in a technical way. So yeah, I think it's really important to use the body even, you know, like create some nano stuff that can be inside of you and morph because it's stupid, we're wasting the planet but I think by generating energy out of our own body out of ourselves, we could maybe stop that even if it's too late, maybe we could find ways to connect with machines to use AI to save voltage, to generate solar cells, to improve productivity in a way it's not gonna destroy things basically. Thanks. All right, any other questions or contributions? Otherwise maybe if someone could just volunteer to have a look at the stream, like at the ISC and Twitter to see if anyone else has a question that's not in the room. I don't think we have a signal angel officially but maybe someone can step up and become a signal angel temporarily. Otherwise, do you have anything else you want to say? No, that's all I wanted to say. I'm not really good in talking out, I'm more a connecting person so I'm gonna switch the yellow LED on my cardio on and if you wanna come up and talk to me face to face that's much more interesting I guess because I would like to collect all your opinions and kinda like put it into my art which is not only a narcissistic approach, it's more like collecting a social sculpture out of people like you because here's a lot of intelligent and skilled people and I'm really curious about your opinions about all the future stuff I tried to mention. Thanks for coming. Any anyone else? Okay, please.


Hello everyone and welcome to this webinar about the NERC Digital Solutions Hub. My name's Richard Kingston, I'm Professor of Urban Planning and Geographic Information Science here at the University of Manchester. So what I want to talk to you about today is this NERC Digital Solutions Programme. It's a five-year eight million pound investment programme to build what UKRI, UK Research and Inversion Colour National facility. So this Digital Solutions Hub is in phase one at the moment. It's funded by NERC, the Natural Environment Research Council and it's supported by NERC's five data centres across the bottom of the screen there. If you go and search for the NERC Environmental Data Service you'll be access data from these five data centres. One of the interesting things about what this programme is doing is our core focus is to work closely with stakeholders outside of academia, so across the public, private and third sector. We also think that there's a lot of academics and researchers that are not in kind of environmental science and climate science who are kind of NERC's core sort of users really that would benefit from what we are doing. So apparently this is all about the fact that these five data centres across the five of them they sort of curate over 40 petabytes of environmental data. This data is mainly used by kind of climate scientists, environmental scientists, physical geographers, but there's real value in this to others outside of those kind of domains, particularly when we look at think of organisations within government, whether that's national, regional, local, but also environmental sector, whether that's in industry or third sector. So it's huge potential. So the main primary sort of aim of what we are doing here is to make better use of this data that sits in these five data centres. Now when we proposed what we were going to do to NERC, we said well whilst this data is a great resource across those five data centres, actually where you really get benefit from this data is when you combine that with a whole range of other social, economic health and other environmental data. And what we're doing at the moment is just focusing on the UK, and that's the whole of the UK. All four nations from a national level down to country level, down to regional, local authority level and much lower down to neighbourhood scale, depending on who the users of this hub may be. Obviously some of the data that NERC hold goes outside of the UK, it's global, in fact British Antarctic Survey, a lot of their data holdings cover not surprisingly Antarctica, but also Himalayas and a lot of things around sort of Greenland and the Arctic around ice melting and things like that. The other important thing about what we're doing is this isn't just some sort of huge data portal, it's not just a place where you will go and find you know catalogs of data. This blue image in the top right hand corner, that's NERC's supercomputer called Jasmine. So the hub will sit on top of Jasmine, and what that allows is something quite unique that a lot of our potential users haven't had before, and that's high performance computing to do analytics and modelling on this data. We're currently running until 2025, and then the idea is hopefully if we do this correctly that we will then get additional funding for another five years to keep this this facility running. So one of the reasons why we rewarded this, I don't know if any of it's quite an old film now, but if you've ever seen the Kevin Costner film Fields of Dreams and they talk about this idea of if you build it they will come. Well we're not doing that, our overall approach around if we built it, i.e. we built some kind of digital solution, this digital solutions hub, and then we'd go out there to the community and say look we built this great thing you should really do it. Well no, no, no, that is not the way you do this. We could have spent four years building this out of five years and in the final year go out to all of these users and say look at this great thing it can do A, B and C, but what users then end up telling us we know this from previous work is well great it can do A, B and C but we also wanted to do X, Y and Z, and at that point you run out of money and you can respond to that requirement. So we've shifted our approach and decided actually you need to put users at the front and centre of this. So we spent a large part of going back into when we're all in lockdown a lot of my time was spent talking to all of these organisations these are sort of the big players at the national level across the UK but also lots of other smaller organisations particularly local authorities and smaller environmental consultancies, the kind of organisations that could really benefit with using NERPs data and integrating in with their own data. So lots of conversations with lots of organisations but people have funding that we've got. So as I said earlier rather than building something first and then going out to potential users and say look at this great thing we turned it the other way around and said well actually we'll first of all start off with some context scalping map the landscape of stakeholders understand and that was again some of those initial conversations during lockdown understand what some of those users want and then we had a really kind of intensive phase from September 2022 to February 2023 where we went around the whole of the UK doing face-to-face workshops. So we targeted very particular organisations who were open for anyone to come and I'll say a little bit more shortly about the kind of people that came along. So we did all of that work last winter then through March to July all of the knowledge and information that was generated from those user workshops around the UK that was all analysed and brought together and we developed what called user personas and identified different scenarios of what users want to do with this data. That report is available through our website there's a link at the bottom corner of the screen there and now what we're doing is going back to those users the ones who ticked a box on their paperwork saying you're happy for us to follow up with them and we're actually digging much deeper into their requirements. So we're doing two of my colleagues who are my postdocs doing one-to-one interviews they're starting in the next few weeks they're happening between now and middle of December where we really dig down into well you told us this what do you actually mean by that what exactly do you want this hub to do within the context of what you're doing. In parallel to that we've obviously got a lot of software development ongoing we're testing and trialling different approaches with 40 potentially up to 40 petabytes of data available to users we can't second guess exactly what data sets users are going to be wanting to use but that creates a few challenging issues about how you ingest that data how you extract it transform it how do you load it into this hub. At a time when NERC are also thinking about net zero and not wanting to shift vast amounts of data from a data store into into some other environment and then the idea is from the second half of next year again my little face in the corner is covering this up that the second half of 2024 will go out doing user acceptance testing with those users from the workshops and then we'll move on to doing you're rolling that out to a much wider broad of users during 2025. So this is some of the headline sort of outputs from what users told us and some of the problems the face that they really struggle with the fact that data is held in lots of disparate places whether that's within their own organization or lots of other organizations national government like data.gov.uk. Data also is not held in formats or in systems that make it easy to search and find. Often if you don't know exactly what you're looking for it's difficult to find relevant data. It's not always obvious what the purpose of different platform or different platform is and the variety of data that they contain. So over the last decade or so there's been a pretty big growth in the number of kind of data platforms not just you know at national level in this country but other countries and and for a lot of the users we spoke to they just said they were felt inundated with with so much data they didn't really know where to start. So it's hard to keep up with the sheer range of different portals different hubs different places where they could go to find to find data. They also found some of these platforms were rather clunky difficult to learn difficult to use it would take them multiple clicks to get to actually the point where to the data that they wanted and they just found it rather large use of cumbersome registration process and often found things where and we find this with some of the tools we developed sometimes I'll get emails from people in local government saying they can't access the tools outside of their organization because of the firewall restriction and things. So a lot of practical problems that we've not really thought about that they were raising in through these through these workshops. In terms of some of the kind of headline key requirements that they were asking for what users want sufficient access to the data to be able to quality assure it and make sure you know they can clean it and transform it into suitable formats for their particular use. So what this sort of comes down to is what they don't want is to not be able to first break well yeah preview the data ready to get an idea of what that data is what's the metadata where does it come from what's its provenance and you know is it is it really they don't want to have to have gone through lots of spent a lot of time getting this data then doing things with it to actually then realize it's not quite the data set that they want want it. So certainly reviewing a sample of the data to help them determine whether we're not suitable in a far easier way than it's possible at the moment. Normally you'd have to download access a full data set or if they may want to preview a subset of that to get a feel for it and understand if that's useful to their needs and they also want to be able to track keep track of the work and the resources that they've used and what what sort of processes have applied to the to data sets. So the idea there is that the hope will when you log in you would have your own workspace on there and it would be able to keep track of your workflows and what you had done previously. So when you go back in it's not completely forgotten about about way you work. They're also keen to avoid what they refer to as duplication of effort excuse me through sharing of work that they've done on data sets and access in the work others have done. So this has there was lots of discussion around this. So the idea that if you are working say for example one one example is if you're in the southwest of England and you're doing some some work you work in a local authority they were quite interested to know whether or not someone else in another part of the UK had been doing similar work and was there a way of sharing that and some kind of way of having a peer to peer learning system built into the hope which was again something quite interesting that we'd not not really thought about. They also wanted to know what were the most suitable ways of applying suitable analysis software to data. So what was the best toolkit? Should it be spatial analysis software? Should it be something that's now allowed them to do coding? Do they want Jupyter notebooks and things? So what's the most suitable software that they should be using for the kind of analysis they want to do? And again building on previous work done here at the University something called method box where that was developed in computer science where you can even put in what your criteria are and it would tell you what the most suitable method that you should apply to that data. Another key requirement as well was allowing users to combine and link their own data with other data as part of the analysis. So an area where they can upload their own local data that they don't want to share and allow others to see. So what we've done with that and we worked with Open Data Manchester who run the workshops with us and we developed this idea of a user journey and all of our users there were over a hundred people turned up to the workshops from different types of organization issues. We could put them into this kind of user journey and everywhere we would you know some users would be there to define a problem, others and some users went through this whole journey but others would only be part of this. So some users might just be defining a problem then that gets passed on to another part of the team who are getting data and then analyzing that and others who might take that analysis and then somehow showcase it and then publish it. So one example of that was a couple of people who worked in the south west of England in a local authority they were responsible for kind of telling stories with data to convince the public why a decision had been made and they were using some one way we can do that is through something called story maps where you're integrating analytics within GIS and within mapping tools but you're also telling a story around that to help support a particular decision that has been taken. So one of the things we definitely know what we're going to be doing is integrating the what's called story maps from Esri the GIS software company on the hope so because this came out a lot around the country people want to kind of visualize the data in a way that is useful to a much wider audience. We're also able to put our users into what's called personas or archetypes all users we possibly do an analyst and the analyst the author the leader the investigator the specialist and the data steward and again we've got a report that you can access through our website that digs you know about 80 pages long but if you're really interested in this that digs down into what all of this means. We also put all of this data so we've got this isn't publicly available but we've got a rich data source it's all of the users and we're put into they're all anonymized but we know the different types of organizations they came from what data they used which departments they were using data from and this is an interactive tool that we can use to really understand how users are using data and what they're using it for. So yeah it's an interactive data set with over a hundred users from 84 different organizations these are these are people who came to our workshops. A really important thing that we're doing is following what are fair principles so making sure that the data is findable accessible interoperable and reusable and I don't know if copies of these slides will be made available but each one of these is is hyperlinked here so you can dig a much deeper and find out a lot more about the fair principles but without this the hub will just will not work you've got to make the data findable and accessible in the first place so that users could know you know if you don't quite know what you're looking for you'll be able to find things and so a good example of this so the NERC have what's called the data catalog service and if you type something into that search so here we've got you know where will be either where will the hottest place in the UK be in 2030 it gives absolutely no results that's because you know it was not designed to answer this kind of question what you'd have to put in here is UK CP data 2018 that's the UK climate change program data for 2018 it would then probably give you a list of data around UK CP 18 so what we have done is taken a different approach and using a large language model we've trained that larger language model is Google's third model on all of NERC's metadata records that's for those 40 petabytes of data so in our approach this when you say where will be the hottest place in the UK in 2030 it doesn't give you the answer but what it does at the moment do is give you a list of datasets that will help you answer that question they're obviously working you know the next steps around this would be to actually then allow you to click on one of these links and it give you a preview of that data and then make the decision as to whether or not you want to bring that data into the hope for you to do some analysis so I guess an important thing here is to say that this is not just a data portal as I said earlier it will run on jasmine supercomputer and the fact that the vast majority of this data is spatial means it lends itself to some kind of GIS approach to this and also we're obviously integrating this not just with the NERC data but the other environmental social economic and health data and allow users under that first fair principles to kind of find and explore data so this we're building on things we've done before this is an example of work myself and a colleague Sarah Lindley developed we've been doing this for about 10 years now and we're rebuilding this using UK CP 18 data and that'll be relaunched it looked very different to this but will be relaunched early next year with updated climate change projection so we're building on things and testing things and trying things and basically developing a series of what we call it a set of proof of concepts so this is to allow users to test different data types and formats test out different types of functionality and meet some of the user requirements and we're doing this through four broad use cases one around air pollution and health one around our housing and environmental constraints another one around flooding and particularly flooding in coastal communities bringing in tidal surge and sea level rise and then another use case around heat stress and each one of these it brings in a range of different data types in to greats the different data centers but also having to spur them to a lot of these big national organizations and government departments we know that these are things that they are interested in so it allows us the software engineers to build something and try things out but also produce kind of data products and tools that we know some users and they find very useful but that's not everything there will be you know this also has to be quite a general system as well so using maybe the same methods and tooling and analytical approaches but you could be you know you could slot in another use case there depending on your what your job role is and what you're trying to do with with data to go into that today so if there are further details you can get the report from the user engagement workshops is now available on our website there's an online webinar with open data Manchester on the 20th of november you can find out more about that if you sign up to our newsletter that'll be a two hour online event and we'll talk in a lot more depth about our user engagement process so yeah more on the website so thank you for listening


Over 100 people have already pre-registered for a 5k run and walk in support of Bemidji's angel fund. The 5k will be held June 2nd at Paul Bunyan Park. The angel fund supports the Bemidji School District's unpaid school lunch debt and negative account balances accrued by families who are unable to satisfy the cost of student meals. The current debt total that needs to be paid is $29,000. The goal was to pay down that debt and start the next school year off by having the entire amount paid. While the fund is relatively new, the need has always been present. It's a relatively new thing. The school has been feeding lunches for several years. They just realize now how bad the debt has gotten. So we're going to have a free lunch afterwards immediately following the race. We're going to have awards. We're going to have a silent auction for people to participate in. So it's going to be a really fun event. For more information and registration, you can visit their website at BemidjiAngelFund5k.com.


I welcome you in the course of leadership, emotional intelligence and the CN making. This is module number 32 and we are going to talk about mindfulness potential promise for the leaders. When we talk about mindfulness, obviously this situation is going to overcome our dilemma of mindlessnessness and automaticity. The mindfulness training is important for the leaders to go through and in that particular training the leader would be able to overcome the leadership stress because we should understand one thing that leadership position is a tough position and the leaders are going to face a lot of stress in everyday life. The challenges, the circumstances around him are going to cause a stress of the psychological patterns in his mind. In the mindfulness training, the leader is supposed to understand the emotional reactivity. The leader is going to enhance his or her emotional intelligence and the leader is going to think in a way that the third thing in the mindfulness training is basically focusing upon attention and on the working memory because it is important for a leader to understand his or her aspects, perspectives, circumstances, and the emotional reactivity that affects all the things in his mind. Along with that, the leader needs to develop the perceptual capability, the perceptual skill, and the cognition that all the aspects that are affecting his or her belief set. Because his values, his beliefs, obviously his decision making will be effective. So in the mindfulness training, the leader goes through these points. Secondly, in the mindfulness training, the leader is taught, the leader is trained that how to develop and show and demonstrate empathy and as you all know, the empathy is basically taking care of the other people, putting yourself in other's shoe. So your empathy would be the focus point when we talk about mindfulness training. Secondly, the decision making capability of the leader would be enhanced in those training sessions and the leader would be more conscious in his or her everyday patterns. The third thing which we have to focus upon during the mindfulness training is related to the innovation capability that the leader should be coming up with innovative perspectives, the leader should be coming up with new inventions which could be commercialized, the leader should be coming up with the creative ideas. So his empathy, his decision making, and his innovation are the three major capabilities that we will incorporate in the mindfulness training. Now, when we have to manage the stress in terms of leadership concern, then remember that the leader goes through a lot of stress because of the situation, the overall stress of the organization, the needs of the followers, the expectations of the leaders, the stress of the leaders. So, the leader needs to understand his or her stress level and then how to manage the stress, that is something which the leader needs to learn in those mindfulness training sessions. The second thing is that sometimes the leader goes through inherent loneliness because when we talk about the leader and the follower, we alienate and separate the leader from the follower and that leads the leader to a feeling of loneliness. Sometimes the leaders feel as if they are alone in the whole problem and there are no person, there are no people who are going to support him or her by any means because they are in the position of a leader and as a leader we send them to superlative degrees. Along with that, in the stress of leadership, there are sometimes ambiguities of authority. Sometimes there are role overlaps. Sometimes job descriptions are not elaborated properly. Sometimes responsibilities shared or discussed are not there. What will happen to this? The leader would be having ambiguities of authority. It does not have complete information about empowerment. So, that would be increasing the stress level related to the leader. And the fourth aspect which the leader needs to go through is basically related to the mindfulness practice because without the mindfulness practice, he will not be able to overcome his stress of leading. As a result, there can be two types of situations in front of us which are taken up as adaptive challenges. The situation can be related to eustress or it can be related to distress. When we talk about eustress, it means positive stress.  Basically, you gain your drive of energy from eustress. You increase your motivation.  And by doing your work, it becomes better and better. If the stress increases, it would take up the shape of distress. That distress would result into job burnout. That distress would result into mental strain. And due to negative aspects, the person might be feeling fatigue, may suffer from cancer afterwards, his heart disease, diabetes, obesity and digestive disorder. All these problems can occur with a leader when he starts absorbing stress more than a limit. If we conclude all this, then remember that in mindfulness training, the leader has to take care that he activates his conscious mind. He can overcome his unconscious mind processes. And also, keep in mind that the person should not be taken up with a bigger level of stress. Because of that higher level of stress, a leader's capabilities are compromised. Thank you.