Gambler Jake Green is out of jail after seven years in solitary confinement, having taken the fall for his boss. During this time, the time has taken him inward. He has been shown the game and how to win it.  The spirit must reach us wherever we believe we are. This is the story of redemption through the exaggerated filter of gangster respect and fear. Here, at a gross level, can the game of human life truly be seen? Everything we do is motivated to maintain a facade, a self-concept. That is why we stay in terrible jobs or bad relationships. We desire to be right about who we believe we are. We stay for that slap on the back that says you are a good guy, a good gangster, a good father. The greatest con that the ego ever pulled was making you believe that he is you. That his thoughts and feelings are yours. So it's like a hijack of identity and the greatest con is making believe that he is you. We do not always recognize our mighty companions when they show up. Avi and Zack teach Jake that he is still in prison and that it is his mind that needs to be freed from the game. He's got out of prison and he thinks he's free man now. He's got his money back, his old gangster ways and he's going to go get revenge on the boss that put him sending away to jail. Show him who's really boss. In the truly practical application of the principles he has learned, they lead him through a series of assignments designed to flush the ego who in this movie is called Mr. Gold. Mr. Gold sees everything in the world. He goes world and the transcend Mr. Gold fully into awareness. Mr. Green must give all to have all. It's a lesson from the course to have give all to all.  And these two Holy Spirit characters show up and say oh no, that's not what the assignment is. You're going to give him exactly what he wants and it goes against all of his instincts for revenge. So the Spirit is going to take his mind and flip it around and show him through almost like casinos with Las Vegas symbols about the way to go back to God through to the thing you'd never imagined. Who's Mr. Gold? Mr. Gold is the symbol for the ego. He's the old boss, right? Makas the boss. Mr. Gold is someone, everyone refers to Mr. Gold in the movie but nobody knows. So it's almost like oh Mr. Gold, fear, fear. You have to fear it but it's different. Fear, power, money, all the things that the world offers. Fame is Mr. Gold. And Maka, who's the guy in the place? Ray Leata. Ray Leata plays him. Ray Maka. Oh he plays a vicious gangster. And oh the end scenes. I think of all the movies clips we show. People, their mouths drop and they rave and they tell all their friends they run out. I've never seen this one scene, my God, I've never seen a scene like this in a movie ever because it shows pulling the mind away from the ego in a showdown in an elevator scene because Jake is afraid of tiny spaces. So the Holy Spirit takes him into the tiny space of an elevator and stops it. Everyone's afraid if they're in the elevator that it will stop. They take him into his greatest fear so that he can face the imposter. And it's a very intense scene. I mean it's amazing they even made a motion picture out of this. But you'll remember, you'll go home tonight. If you remember one scene you'll remember the elevator scene. Because that's like a showdown of the spirit overcoming the ego and transcending that fear forever. And once he does you should see his face. This is the main character, he's just so serene and so clear. And then he has to face one more giant temptation by the ego after he reaches the calm, almost like, and now demonstrated. Show it. Show, prove it. Show that you really have reached that clarity and serenity. And in a truly magnificent elevator scene he recognizes that the voice of fear is not his real identity. Now truly released in a state of forgiveness, nothing can touch him. So he goes into a state of perfect invulnerability. And it's only 45 minutes. This is the Holy Spirit's pick for us tonight. Oh, we asked the questions. It's very direct. It's almost like the Spirit wants to take us as directly and rapidly as possible back into our remembrance of our true self. And the ego is heavily defended. And so, you know, the pride, you'll see as we move on, the pride is his greatest block.  He still believes cash is king and power. He's got all these egoic beliefs. The Holy Spirit is like coming in with a very strong intervention. And we're going to see some pretty direct scenes where the Spirit's just going to give him a whole context about this world and Mr. Gold. And this is a game you can't win because everybody's challenged to be successful in this world, to win the game, to play, meet the world on the world's terms and do well. And they're basically going to say, you know, it's actually, it's a game you can't win.  But he's still pretty resistant even though he's, he got the thing about his disease and dying and everything. You know, he's got quite a lot of resistance and he will have. He's, he's identified as being a gangster. So it would be like going from gangster to enlightened, from gangster to Ramana Maharshi. You know, it's just in one, one swing. So it's, but it's such a good teaching device because, you know, you can see for yourself like, ah, this is where it's actually his pride that is where the resistance, the sacrifice idea comes in. Everything that he's resisting is coming from pride. Yeah, it's kind of like even with healing, like if someone will say had received an instantaneous healing, they may be so threatened by that healing that they may try to kill themselves because it's too much and it's too radical. In other words, like when we think of sickness even in the body and symptoms, the ego of mind selects those symptoms. It actually selects the symptoms and then sometimes you have to have a mixture of magic and miracle. There has to seem to be doctors or agents or operations or something because the mind is too terrified of healing. It's like too shocking of losing control of its own personal identity that it actually would kill itself. And it's a similar thing here with giving up of judgment that if the judgment was given up too rapidly and the ego had too sharp of a reaction, you know, it may be like a point of despair or hopelessness for the ego. It's like a suicidal tendency. So it really has to be slow because its ego just is apt to be perceived as personally insulting. And when there's that much resistance, then it's like the healing has to hold off. The mind has to come to this healing willingly and voluntarily.  It's kind of like in the Course where Jesus says if you have a baby that takes a hold of some scissors, the scissors are sharp. But if you try to just rip the scissors out of the baby's hands, the baby will cry. And it's hand on the scissors, even though it can harm it. It likes the scissors in those hands. Like when babies grab a hold of something, you try to pull it away from them. Even if it would harm them, they scream. Because they don't know. Because they don't know. And it's the thing like judgment is really damaging in awareness to the mind. But if it would come off too quick, it would be like a huge reaction. Almost like a temper tantrum, like a scream. So they're working with him and you're working to get to hear all of his thoughts. He's been doubting their motives all along. And we'll see how that intensifies. Because it's pride. Those thoughts are all pride. And the Spirit is trying to say, you know, let's get those thoughts away. Let's give up those thoughts. And the pride is like trying to hold on. But because this is like a mini movie, we're going to see it all kind of in a very focused way. It's almost like taking many, many years of awakening and it's compressing it down to like a 45-minute mini movie of what the whole process is with the key points along the way. Like you have to follow the instructions. The Spirit knows the way that ego doesn't. The ego will throw up all kinds of defenses and resistances to it. As if it's being conned by the Holy Spirit. Because he's so suspicious, he's just used to being conned. And that's the way it goes in, oftentimes in relationships. We were talking, you were going to get married and all of a sudden there's this rapid turn away, almost strange and everything. But you know, in this movie, if it's too threatened, you know, then that would shut down the whole process. There has to be a sense of steps, otherwise it just gets too much, too fast and the mind just wants to shut down. The money was his king, so it was very hard for him. So they had him landing money to all the ones who can't pay him back. And his rule, one of the rules was they have to pay something back. Like you've got to give something. Like I've got to get something. Someone's got to pay for it. And so they had him give away, give away, give away money to all the ones who don't have like nothing to pay back. And it was like, yeah, so that was kind of like a stepping stone. Like the chorus, to have, give, all to all. The Holy Spirit is starting to reverse all the ego beliefs. But you have to actually step into it to see that you're healing. When you've always been take, take, take, then the first lesson in the Holy Spirit is the three lessons is to have, give, all to all. Yeah, and the thing is, even like in the movie, he came to that, like because it was painful for him to give away, but he came to that himself too. That's also like Holy Spirit's curriculum. He's like, no, like, I can't take anything back. So that was like, that was over. So now that was like, pushed him into this. That was like a stepping stone into whatever is going to happen, like here, right now. And it's really the teaching of the course that the workbook lessons are set up where Jesus says, he's even going to give you 365 lessons, but he says, here's the two rules. You have two guidelines, you know, and transfer the training. Don't do more than one lesson a day. And then he says that if you can achieve, if you could forgive one person, basically it will transfer to everyone in the whole universe. It's not cumulative. That's why even with relationships, if you have a partner and you make a commitment to hold no grievances, then you can go just from with one person and seeing one person with no past brings you back into eternity. It's not cumulative. It's just all you have to do it for one instance with one person. He says it can save you thousands of years, lifetimes. And he says, even he talks about meditation, as Jesus calls meditation, it will actually get you where you're going, but Jesus calls meditation tedious and time-consuming. So now you're dealing with the Master. Anyone who calls meditation tedious and time-consuming has a better way. He says your way will be a holy relationship, which is basically see just one person without a past. Just one, for one instance. And you're back in eternity that quick. So now what they're going to do with Jake is his whole motive was revenge against Maka. So basically they're saying one more lesson here, one more assignment.  And that's the last thing he wants to do. He wants to go up and kill him.  It's like a total reverse of the ego. Just in one swift move to free him of all his pain, of all his suffering, of all his human life and everything, just one thing. So this is like the major setup. And this is going to set up him to go upstairs into Maka's room in the middle of the night and face him. And then you get to see the ego roaring because the ego wants to kill him. And the spirit is like, now remember what the lesson is here. And then eventually it takes us right into the elevator scene, which is probably one of the most magnificent scenes ever recorded at showing how to transcend the ego. So here we go. It goes pretty quick, but this is like all packed into a little short space. And it's just all there. Oh my goodness. This is actually how we started going around the country. What we did was we took clips from all these great movies. We probably went and let us look for tonight. We confused the nines.  So he believes he has a wife and a daughter. And he's a family man. And he's really tied into that. He loves his wife, loves his daughter. And then there's this blonde woman, his long blonde hair, and she's kind of inserted in to rescue him from his dream. Oh my God. And she's going to make the rescue. She's going to start talking about it. You forgot you made this whole thing up. You're still trying to re-arrange the pine cones. Like you're playing, you're tinkling with all the things in the game, but you don't realize it. You just made it up. And this isn't you. You don't have a wife. You don't have a daughter. Let me tell you a secret. She whispers blonde hair in his ear, you're not a man. Never been a man. She just comes zooming in to the thing with the spirit to help him come out of it. And then he's got to make a decision because he thinks, he's so into the game of the characters of the being the father and the husband and everything. And he likes that. And she's got to help him pull out of it because it's keeping him from recognizing his whole identity. Then he's got to make the decision. He's been avoiding the light and avoiding the love by addiction to people. Addiction to people. He's got a people addiction. And she's coming in and he says, is this a murder? And she said, no, it's not a murder. It's an intervention.  No, it's not a murder. It's an intervention. So she loves him so much that she's kind of like an insertion into his dream to save him misery and pain and suffering. But that's, most people don't, they think of substance abuse, but they don't, I think people who have been through really intense relationships can see that there's some kind of addiction going on. We call it codependency and dependency that's going on. This is giving it from a much higher perspective. People on this planet are your drug of choice. Like we had Avi and Zach were there to give very specific directions in context for healing and forgiving. They're coming in in the sense that he has totally, he has so much amnesia about the love and the light, the warm love and light place that he came from, which they'll remind him of. And they'll ask him, do you remember it? And he can remember vaguely about it, but it's been so pushed out of awareness. And also he's forgotten that he's made up all the characters, all of the characters. And that's what the ego made up all the characters. So in the minds identified with the ego, it projects out all these characters and they're just acting out the fear, the doubt, the attack thoughts. And that's why we have to give up the attack thoughts in the mind. And then we do draw different characters sometimes. I mean, if you think overall in the history of the planet, the Jesus, the Buddhas, the Gandhis, the avatars that have come, everything, those are like reflections of our divinity that we're seeing snippets. But it's even beyond the characters. The ego made all the characters and the spirit is just using the characters. It's like puppets to say, oh no, no, it's completely beyond anything in this world. And so this is so good because it shows all the human emotions, his attachments to being the role that he's playing, to want to somehow make it work, find a way to make it work, all the things that have been tried but are unsuccessful. This is giving a much deeper context to why our struggles have gone on for so long with no success is because we're still tinkering around. It's like moving the chess pieces. Like they were doing Avi and Jake were moving chess pieces all the time. And Avi was even letting him win and then going, oh, you're good at this, you're good, but then here comes the teachings like you still have to forgive, you know. And so that's what's happening here.   The characters can sometimes freak out when there's this intense, I remember how I said today, you never forget how frightened your brothers are. That's what the unwinding is. So they're getting in the vehicle here to go back. Now you'll hear it's a beautiful scene. It's a beautiful kind of familiar scene in the world. Husband, wife, daughter in the country drive going home. And picturesque and going home, the hearth, the home, where they'll get into the blankets and they'll have their getting pajamas and all the things we associate with good warm snuggly feelings. Meanwhile, we listen to the song that's playing in the background. I can't run far, I can't run far. I will always be found, I will always be found. In other words, the spirit's going to find us. We think we're searchers and seekers in this world for the truth. Really, the truth and the light is coming at us. The light is like, oh, I didn't forget you. I'm coming for you. Because you belong in eternity, you belong forever in love. So the song, even you have this beautiful, I love this scene, all these beautiful familiar sights and sounds of a family. The song is, I won't run far, I won't run far. I can always be found, I can always be found. That's like the spirit answering, I can always find you. I will always be found. No matter how far away, time and space I run, I'll always be found. I'll always be called back. Oh, and this is what this movie is. It's really like, this little snippet of the movie is so strong because it's like such a strong call. But now this is the easy. And this will take us into another scene where he's going to go and he's just going to lay at night, but he's going to have his eyes open because he can't sleep. He can't just fall asleep business as usual. He's had a calling. He's been activated by spirits to come with us, come home, come back. That's beautiful. I have met so many people in all my travels around the world. Some of them have out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, experiences of being abducted and UFOs. One friend, he was like a businessman. He was like a really, really a solid identity as a businessman. And he was walking with me one time and he said, I said, how did you get into all this stuff? And he said, well, I was walking along those streets and then something took over my body and walked me into a New Age metaphysical bookstore. And I said, well, how did you feel? And he said, well, I walked in and I was judging what was happening.  And then he gets walked to the back of the book and it's the owner is sitting there smiling, going, hey, I'm glad you came in. He's like, oh, I don't even know what I'm doing with this and this. And then the owner looked at him and smiled and he went, I recognize you. And my friend was like, what? You recognize me? I recognize you. You're like an admiral, aren't you? And my friend, his hobby was sailing and so he loved to sail ships like an admiral or captain and everything. And then the guy said, you know, you were, we were together, you were an admiral on the Palladian ship. What? And then he thought to himself, I don't know what that Palladian stuff is, but it started to, it resonated and he was like shocked that it resonated and then people tell me after that all these things unfolded where he left his business behind. He got into the book, the metaphysical bookstore. He became, he sold books. He became publishing a metaphysical magazine called Way of the Heart about waking up. It all started with, it all started with, it hit a total of 180. And I meet so many people to hear their like everyday stories of how they were, everything starts to turn. And then he met Suzanne, this is not the one we know but over in Australia. And he told, and they tell you all their adventures and this was the guy that brought me to Australia and took me on tours. And the more he traveled with me, he would like, he would have trouble functioning. Like he, you know that emptiness feeling you were feeling, he started to feel like so giddy and happy when we would like travel along the coast of Australia and then he would get up in front of a group and he'd say, you know what it's like to travel with this guy? He said, you get so like lightheaded and you lose track of things and you don't feel like, he said, I can't, I feel like, I feel like at times I can't function, I can't function anymore. And so I was out with him walking and I said, well what did you mean by you can't function? And he said, I don't feel grounded. I feel like I'm just getting up there and soaring and it's almost like, yeah, it's just getting more ethereal. So I just said to him like the thing with the car going, it's familiar. I said, well what would it take, Raj, for you to feel grounded? And he said, what would it take? If you came out to dinner with me and we both split a bottle of red wine and had a big steak. A big? Wow. That was, in his mind, that was the most grounded thing he could come up with.  And I said, okay, let's go. So we did, because he was having trouble, we couldn't count the donations. He started to get so slap happy and giddy that he couldn't do the thing. He set up a tour, but he couldn't even do the functions of the tour. But there's so many of these stories of just people that are like, they finally just say yes to spirit, like okay, I'm going for it. I don't know where this is going to end, but he's had a very, very happy life. But nothing that he ever planned. It's always something like, beyond what you can imagine. Like the spirit just has, using whatever you believe in to take you step by step. So it's like meeting you, met him where he was at, and then again and again and again and again. Oh wow. Yeah. It's amazing. Just those stories just go on and on.  I had this out-of-body experience and it's freaky. And I'll say, well, what was it like? And they'll describe it. And I'll say, yeah. And suddenly I was up in the corner of the room and I was viewing my body on the couch. It was the freakiest thing. I tried to swim back into my body, but I couldn't. And I said, what was it like? I said, well, I could see. I could see. I could smell. I could hear. I had all my five senses. And I said, but you were in the corner of the room. That's right. But I could see. I still could see and hear. And I said, but you didn't have any eyeballs. That's right. And you didn't have any ears. That's right. What does that tell you? That your five senses are not part of the body. They're part of consciousness. You don't even need eyeballs to see or ears to hear. So I was like, oh my God, it's true. I was in the corner of the room. I could see and hear everything, but I didn't have any eyeballs or ears. And I said, yes. The eyes don't see. They're just projections. The ego is tricking us to think that we're actually seeing out of eyeballs and hearing through ears. It's so sneaky.  And then it convinces the mind that it sees through the body and hears through the body when it actually isn't. And that experience, that one out-of-body experience, I said, see that showed you that the five senses are part of consciousness. They're not part of the body. And I said, that's just another advancement in waking up. So every little thing that happens to anybody has like huge significance in terms of a much bigger picture of freeing the mind from the identification with the body because it's a trick. It's like a grand trick. But the mind is so accustomed to it like he was in there, this last Jake. He was very identified as the husband and the father. I like this world, he said. So we say trick and grand trick. Is it an intentional? It's an intentional trick. The ego is wanting to perpetuate guilt and keep the mind off. It convinced you that it's you. Remember the first movie there? It wants you to believe that it is you. And then once it does complete that, then it doesn't want you to ever see that it's not you. Because if you saw that you're not the ego, then you would be something else. And the ego doesn't want you to see what you really are. Because of the shame. If you saw who you really are, then there's no ego. It's like game over. So it gives a whole context to this whole waking out in a very deep way. And then suddenly when you percolate these ideas and you start to give it over, then you start to say, wow, then what would you have me do? Where would you have me go? How can I open up to my joy in the fastest way possible to be of service to the whole universe, the whole one mind? The one mind is behind the veil of all the sleeping minds in the sleeping bodies and whatever. It's all there. That last movie made me feel really scared. The one we just saw? Yeah, because it felt so like it's not exactly what happened with me. I mean it's like, I don't know what happened with Alan. I don't know if he had some experience like this blonde woman coming to him or whatever. But it just, I don't know. I just have this feeling right here and I feel like all of a sudden that's like, oh my god, nothing's real. Who are all these people? I all of a sudden start to feel really alone and really scared. Yeah, that happens too. Because it's like the associations that were familiar that we were thinking was the love. It starts to loosen so we're like, love is still real but if it's not there then the mind starts fishing a bit like, well then where is it? And that's why we need so much love and so much convincing to help us be confident in the new way because otherwise the ego will interpret that something real is being taken away. Yeah. And when that happens then the mind can start to close down and, you know, or it can even feel coerced. Almost like the spirit's coercing but the spirit never coerces. It's just the ego perceives that something valuable is being sacrificed or lost. So, like I say, that's why I got into the course like 25 years ago and it's been, that was just when I began traveling exactly 30 years ago but it was more just that attitude of like, okay, I'm going to take it easy and just show me, gently, convince me, show the way, show the way. Because, yeah, probably the fear was coming up just like you were saying that Alan went to a spiritual teacher and then so abruptly just left almost like what did that... What did she say? What did she say? What did the spiritual teachers say? And you wouldn't tell them that you asked them? Yeah. But I feel like if it was coming from a loving, like, spirit place then you wouldn't be so abrupt. I could be wrong. I'm curious. I would also throw you in. What's that? He would also tell you what was, if it was something that was... Heart-opening. Heart-opening and helpful. Yeah. He would want to share and extend that. Yeah. But because he didn't, there was probably a ego thing or I'm just like so confused. Well, remember what I was saying how it all really works together for the good. In other words, no accident that he seemed to exit that you seemed to come here and you seemed to go through this weekend of like light bulbs going on, insights and insights. Oh, very good. Because it's all for the good. In other words, it's the prayer of our heart, spirit. You know, anything that could hold me back from coming home to you, please take this from me and anything that would help me open up, please bring it to me. And that's like our prayer of our heart. So then these beautiful witnesses just start coming all the people and the puppy dogs and the baby and the music and, you know. And so it's actually working for the good and it does get doubtful whenever we look at one of the characters and we say, what really was your motive? And Jesus at one point in the course he says it's dangerous to analyze the motives of others. Because you always use your ego when you analyze the motives of others. If they'd only told us that, you know, in the owner's manual it's dangerous to analyze the motives of others. That would have kept us out of professions. We would never become lawyers. Oh, my God. We would never have gone. We would never have been steered in those ways. I'm not getting into that. That's just total analyzing the motives of others and trying to manipulate things for an outcome. So, yeah, it's quite amazing because in the end it doesn't really matter in the sense that if you have that deeper trust like I'm going home to God and God is sending me the perfect things and at the time something happens like I was sharing with you when it's abrupt it's just shocking. It's just an initial shock with it. And then in retrospect we've even got a movie that's called Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow. We were talking about that. Yeah, where she gets fired from her job and in one scenario she catches the train back and she catches her boyfriend in bed with another woman and it shocks her initially but it's actually helpful because she starts to see by why he's not the one that she's supposed to be with and she meets this amazing man after she's shocked and then in the other scenario she doesn't catch the train the little girl blocks her and she gets mugged and she gets home too late and her lying boyfriend the woman is gone and he's just lying to her and lying and lying and lying and she feels intuitively something's off but she doesn't have the evidence where the one scenario she got the evidence shows she had the evidence she said no no and she went into this amazing relationship that she really could open her heart up and so those are like amazing movies too to show that it's really working together for our good but the ego wants to judge that something terrible has gone wrong and that we messed up or something could have been different and it tries to send us down a real dark interpretation Yeah, I feel that like what's wrong with me what did I do wrong? That's why you're here to be loved and nurtured, yeah I think there's a part inside that it yearns so deeply for love and what that equates to is that in heaven love is perfect continuity there's no breaks there's no loss there's no ending it just goes on like a clear day song forever and ever and ever and ever and it's such a fond memory it's an ancient memory like it's still there that's been so covered over and so what I feel is what we've got here and this is what I tell people when I go around the world and everything is that these relationships that these configurations are going into now they're lifelong relationships we are in a lifelong relationship you know, we and I see these people as like crisscross around the world but we do crisscross we invite like I was invited here then we say come you come where we are come over here they are lifelong relationships because they are awakening relationships it's the purpose brought us together the hope of course is to find like a partner like a fiancé or you have somebody you're married you talk about having a family and children that's continuity that's where the love seems to be even in a family configuration there's a steadiness I'll stay with you we'll stay through the good through the bad through the difficult we'll be there together we'll grow together there's a continuity that the mind is seeking and this very vibration that brought us together kind of in this quantum way is I just say we are lifelong relationships you know we're in it for the ascension the ascension has brought us together for that purpose


Efficiency is a performance concept. It measures what you accomplish relative to what you expend to accomplish it. Benjamin is facing a math problem that he needs to resolve in order to design a test for a physics theory. After two weeks of trying without success, he finally takes it to his math teacher, who tells him that it is a classic problem no one has ever solved. But it had been more efficient for Benny to take it to his teacher first. The performance answer is that efficiency is zero in both cases. There is no efficiency unless the valued result is achieved. Where there is no performance, there is no efficiency. Susan wants to solve the same problem as an exercise in learning, just to see if she can do it. On not finding a solution, she also takes it to her teacher. When she gets the same answer as Benny, she is satisfied that it cannot be done. Would she be more efficient if she had taken it to her teacher first? Her purpose was testing herself and her ability to use math. She succeeded. We can measure efficiency in her expenditure of time and effort and the value of the lesson she learned. The question of greater efficiency goes to whether she would have learned as much if she had taken it to her teacher right away. This begs the question of what she really values. In this case, Susan was testing herself and there was little purpose in addressing the effort to her teacher. Not having to struggle to find a solution was not a valued result. It was not the lesson she had set herself to learn. Efficiency compares values and value is your determination. Someone else will have their own understanding of what your time and effort is worth and the value of what you gain. The value in personal performance are your values and only the values you have will be useful for determining personal efficiency. Your efficiency is a measure of how effective you are in accomplishing what you value. It is a concept of personal performance and relates well to the use of the black box. Personal efficiency is not something that you have to know in order to be effective but will gain in usefulness as we address dealing effectively with others. What it does provide to the individual student is a concept of what others are likely to observe in your efforts. It is a general tool for evaluation. Those who understand the basic concepts of efficiency will be able to appreciate the efficiency of others in ways not open to those who are focused only on processes. One classic performance engineering experiment was to measure how much good lighting affected ability to work. When the lighting in a test group was increased, they became more productive as expected. Then, as a check, they lowered the light level again and were surprised to see the performance go up again. So they lowered it more and performance continued. It wasn't until they reduced it to the level of bright moonlight that the work actually dropped off. People reacted to the intensity of interest by leadership in what they were doing. The studyers were focused on the wrong process input. It is people who do the work, not lighting, and the people were reacting to the intense interest of leadership in what they were doing. As teenage students, you are motivated by both intense interest in others, parents and teachers, and by your own sense of value. Still, the investment is yours to make and learning is an active process that you perform. It is easy to get tied up in non-performance efforts, learning to be the best mathematician of your age group, or to compete against someone else's records. These are not performance matters, and efforts are unlikely to enhance performance for the educational purpose. Educational performance always comes back to you and whether you will become a more effective adult. You come into this from childhood. Trusting teachers and parents are also focused on the general purpose of education. Trust is an assumption, a belief that they are aligned with you in this purpose of becoming an effective adult. On reaching your teenage years, you come to realize that you have more choices to make, more control over how hard you work and what you set yourself to accomplish. These outside influences shift from directive efforts to guidance and support. It is not some overnight change, but it happens largely through your increased personal acceptance of the educational purpose. But as others see you making choices on what you do to gain what you value, their value also changes from being directive to supportive. And efficiency? It is their understanding of your efficiency that is the key. When they see that you are concerned with getting the most from your efforts, then they can relax. It is their efforts that have achieved some level of success. When you become more effective, it also makes them more effective. This is the nature of performance. That when you accomplish valued results as a student, everyone else shares in your successes.


Ranger of the Woodland! Ranger Bill, warrior of the Woodland, struggling against extreme odds, traveling dangerous trails, showing rare courage in the face of disaster, in the air, on horseback, or in a screaming squad car. Ranger Bill, his mind alert, already smile, unswerving, loyal to his mission. And all this in exchange for the satisfaction and pride of a job well done. Hello, Ken. Hello, Bill. Do you have a free minute? Of course. One over, sit down. I really appreciate your taking time to listen to me. Ken, I'm always glad to take time to listen. Now, what's on your mind, fella? I've got a large-sized problem. Oh? Well, to make a long story short, Conrad shot Mr. Prince two days ago. He didn't. Not Mr. Prince. It's true. I don't know why, but he did. Oh, he says the dog was on his property, so he had a legal right to do it. I found our Mr. Prince ten feet across the fence line with a rifle bullet in him. Dead? No, not yet. The vet says he has a 50-50 chance. Oh, this is terrible. Why, that dog never heard anybody in his life. I was Julie taking it. Well, that's the case in point. Julie isn't taking this very well at all. I'm sure sorry to hear that. She's in love with her dog. I'll say she is. Mr. Prince is the apple of her eye, and now she cries all the time for him. Even at night? Yes, even more so then. You see, Prince is her guard when she sleeps. He always lies in the hallway in front of her bedroom door, and no one can get by without him knowing it. She misses her puppy terribly. I remember when we first decided to get her dog. I remember it very well. Daddy, are you taking a nap?  Daddy, you said I could have a dog after we moved here to the ranch. I did? Don't tease me. You know you said it, Daddy, and my ears were real open when you said it, too. Are they ever anything but real open? What's on your mind, little one? Here. Mommy says that there's a collie puppy for sale, and I should ask you if I can have it. A collie puppy? Yes. Mommy says it says he's sable and white. A collie? Great day in the morning, child. You're after a small horse, not a dog. Why, they get to weigh about 70 pounds. Yes, Daddy. I want a big one. Well, you sure do all right.  Please, Daddy. Please. You said you'd let me... I know what I said. Let's get in the car and go look at this puppy horse you want. Puppy, I ever saw... How much do you want for him, Mr. Nichols? Well, let's say $20. What's wrong with him? Oh, there's nothing wrong with him. Can't you see that, Daddy? Julie, please. Mr. Nichols, how come you're asking only $20 for the dog? Isn't he a pure blood? See for yourself. Here are his papers.  I love him anyhow. He is a pure blood, Julie. And I want your Daddy to buy him for you because I know he's going to get a good home. Here's your money, Mr. Nichols. And thank you. I know the going price in this dog is $50, but if you say $20, I'm not going to argue. Well, thank you, sir. The puppy has been moved twice now, and this will be the third time. The other folks wanted him badly, but there were too many small children and very busy mothers, and they didn't want the dog neglected. Oh, you are my very own. My very, very own. I can see why Julie is upset, Ken. Children certainly get attached to their pets. The child is cared for a dog like a trooper and lavish great love on him. Now this. I'm going to have to do something, Bill, but I don't know what.  Have you taken this problem to the Lord in prayer? I've tried, Bill. The Lord knows how I've tried, but I can't. I don't understand. Why can't you take it to Him in prayer? Bill, whenever I try to pray about it, I hear Julie crying, and I also see Conrad's face screaming. I have a legal right. I have a legal right. You talk with him? Talk? No. We screamed at each other. After the doc removed the bullet from Mr. Prince, I went to see Conrad and almost shoved the rifle ball in his teeth. He screamed legal right. Legal right. That man has got to learn there are more rights than legal rights. How do I explain legal rights to my heartbroken daughter? Tell me, Bill. How do I do it?  Listen, Bill, you don't have to watch a broken hearted little girl sob her heart all day after day, but I do. What am I going to do? Ask the Lord to make her stop weeping and shout for joy? You could ask the Lord to give her strength to bear this grief and heart sickness, to ease the pain of her anguish. Have you asked Him to do that? Bill Jefferson, if our dog dies, I'll get my revenge on Codred Flaum. Do you hear me? I'll get my revenge. Conrad, what's ailing Black Thunder? I think that Stalin is doing slowly insane. It's honorable month. It weren't so valuable. I'd get rid of him. Perhaps you should anyhow before he kills someone. I won't do that. Maybe a dog or two, but not a person. He's got an awful fear of dogs. Hates them. He does, huh? Why? When he was cold, a pack of dogs sat on him and the mare. But the mare drove him off after she kicked a couple of dogs to death. Well, that Stalin goes wild. I'd start mad when he sees a dog. Is that why you shot Mr. Prince? Oh, so they've gone to the law, eh? Bill, that car was on my property. I had a legal right to shoot him, and you know it. Yes, you did have a legal right if the dog was trespassing with malicious intent. That's what he was about to do. You shot him just 10 feet inside your fence line. Ah, you listen here, Mr. Chief Ranger. I know my legal rights and you can't touch me. What I do is my business. Everybody else can mine their own, and I mean that to include you. Hello, Ken. Joe. Glad to see you outside in the sunshine, Julie. Mr. Prince isn't out here in the sunshine.  Bill, will you stay with Julie a minute? I have to make a phone call. Sure, I'll be glad to. Thanks. I'll be right back. Well, Julie, you say Mr. Prince is going to die in the hospital. Has the veterinarian told you this? Oh, not really. Then how do you know Mr. Prince is going to die? Stop crying and listen to me. Looks so shook up, Bill. I sure didn't intend to get her excited. I know you didn't. What do you think about the problem now? Ken, this is beyond my wisdom, and when I get in these spots, I just stop and give the Lord time to talk to me. Well, while you're waiting, I've got something to add to the tightness of the knot. Your phone call? Yes. It was to the vet. Prince is getting worse. He has a 40-60 chance to live now.  Yep. It'll hold that crazy stallion all right. Hey, it's you back here kind of soon. Perhaps. I was just over talking to Ken and Julie. So? You don't have to get my permission to talk to them. Mr. Prince is getting worse. The vet says he has a 40-60 chance to live. Yeah, why are you telling me? I did only what's my legal rights. Your legal rights. Your legal rights.  Listen, Bill, don't preach to me. Don't push me, Conrad. I'm trying very hard to be fair in this problem and look at both sides of the picture in their true light. I happen to like that dog very much. He's a fine and gentle animal. As far as I know, the only animal he's ever attacked is a wolf. I'd say you ought to be man enough to recognize you made a mistake and make restitution of some kind. I got no use for dogs on my ranch with my horses. Your logic is faulty. A bad experience with two dogs doesn't mean all dogs are bad. You forget, Conrad, that Mr. Prince is a ranch dog.  I had a legal right to shoot him. Do you know how long 10 feet is? Of course I do. You shot Mr. Prince when he was only 10 feet across the line. Very peculiar that you should happen to be right there just after he crossed under your property. Yeah, well, there's nothing you can do. I'm within my rights. You could have shagged the dog and called Ken and warned him about the dog trespassing. Now you've broken a little girl's heart. Made your neighbor nail-spitting angry. Good day to you, Mr. Jefferson. Conrad, there are a few things you have to learn about the rights of other people. They have the right to consideration, Christian love, and a chance to correct their mistakes, if they will. Yes, sir, Mr. Flam, one of these days you're going to find out just what I'm talking about. Good day, Mr. Jefferson. Now, one more thing. You'd better make sure that stallion is inside a good fence. He's a killer. If he ever gets loose, somebody might get hurt. Julie, girl, please don't cry. Please, for daddy's sake. We have to be patient now until he gets well. But he is. Oh, honey, I'm sorry you heard that. Didn't want to make you feel more unhappy than you do. Oh, well. No, you don't, baby.  You mustn't. Open this door. Down at four o'clock in the morning, who do you think you are? Listen to me, Flam, and listen good. I just got a call from the vet to bring Julie and see her dog because the dog is feeling fast.   Let me tell you, Flam, if that dog dies, you're the one that had better worry about getting shot at, not me. Understand? He was threatening me.  I called Bill Jefferson and he's going to pick up Julie and me and go with us to the animal hospital. If Mr. Prince dies this morning, I'll get my revenge on you for shooting our dog and breaking my daughter's heart. Don't scare me. I know my legal rights. Wait just a minute. Bill, this is no time for talk. Please, Mr. Jefferson, we've got to hurry. Mr. Prince is still alive. I just checked with the doctor on my radio telephone when I came out to pick you up.  In Proverbs, the third chapter and the fifth verse, it says, Trust in the Lord with all thine heart and lean not unto thine own understanding.  You and I aren't able to second-guess the Lord. We can't understand everything that happens in our lives. But the Lord knows why for those of us who are Christians. We must trust Him and not lean on our own understanding. We become bitter and hateful.  It isn't your dog that's dying. She's got a point there, Bill. Let's go inside. Waited so long. I hope Mr. Prince is still alive. Perhaps you'd better not, Julie. Oh, it won't hurt him. Just don't go near his chest and the bandages. You can pet his head and scratch his ears all you want. I'll be real careful. Do you think he can hear me? Well, I don't know, Julie.  He hasn't responded to me at all in the last 12 hours. Isn't there anything else you can do for him? Unfortunately, there isn't. Maybe Julie Fussing over him will make him worse if he's so close to death. It might do the reverse, Ken. It might give him the fight to live. Do you really think so? It's certainly worth a try. Let's leave the child alone with their dog for a while and see what happens. She might get through to him. I am sorry I can't do more for Mr. Prince, even though veterinary medicine has come a long way in the past few years. What are his chances now, Doctor? He's not good at all. He's got about a 30, 70 chance to pull through this. Will you go for me? Honey, we'd better let him rest now. Please, Princey. Can't you open one eye, just a peep? Please don't start crying. Look, he's open his eyes. What do you say, Doc? I'd say he's fighting now, fighting to live. You really think so? Well, I sure do. That's more response than I've gotten from him for several days. Wonderful. Julie, we've got to go home now. Daddy has to go to work and you have to go to school. Can I stay here, please, Daddy? Can I? Please? Mr. Prince needs me to stay. You're a hard man if you say no, Ken. All right. You may stay with your dog, Julie. Do you hear that, Mr. Prince? Right here with you all day. Julie? Yes, Mr. Jefferson? You seem so sure that Prince will live now. Oh, I am sure. Why? You said we should trust the Lord and not be bitter and have hate about what's happening. That's what I'm doing. Oh, good stallion. Given this big gorilla a lesson or two on manners, let me get out of this stall here.  Look what I'm looking at, James. I suppose you'll come to the app at me again about that dog. No. I stopped by to tell you the dog is recovering now. He's at home and coming along slowly but surely toward total recovery. And all because of one little girl's faith in the Lord and love for her dog. I don't know why your body is telling me I'm within my legal rights. Yes, you're within your legal rights. But someday, somehow, you will find out that there are more rights than what the law states. You'd better not shoot that dog again unless he's in the act of attacking your horses or causing other damage. Come here, Prince. Scratch your ears. Shake your paw. Doesn't he look good, Mr. Jefferson? He sure does, Julie. You're taking real good care of him. I stopped to see Conrad and tell him the good news. That was a waste of time, wasn't it? You know it. If you knew our name, you'd better not shoot this dog again unless Prince was attacking his stock or destroying his property. He would never do that. I know it, Julie.  By all means, keep Mr. Prince away. Oh, but definitely. Julie, don't ever go on the other side of Conrad's line fence for any reason. I don't care what it is. Keep Prince in strict obedience when you're close to the line fence. In fact, you'd better keep your dog on a leash when you have to go near Conrad's place. Oh, I will, Daddy. Can we walk down the road past his spread? Of course, but Prince must be on the leash just in case. He's obedient, but we can't risk him getting another rifle bullet. Well, I'll have to be running along now. Thanks for all your help, Bill. Bye, Mr. Jefferson. Bye. Will he come back soon to see us, Daddy? Of course he will. You and I are going to take a walk down the road. OK. But remember what we said about Conrad's line fence. Oh! Crown's line fence, but he can't hurt you as long as we stay on the road. Thunder way off there. He's a mean one, all right. What's the matter? Is something wrong with Black Thunder? Help! Vincent, see what's wrong. Julie, I can't make sure I'm dead. Broken. You've got to keep Prince here to drive the stallion away. Well, I crawled to the fence and under it. I'll run home real fast. No, you've got to keep the dog here to protect me. Daddy and Mr. Jefferson said I can't let Mr. Prince off the leash when we're near your fence because you would shoot him again if he got on your property. Julie, please listen to me. That insane stallion is standing up there on the rise, watching to make sure I'm dead. As soon as I begin to crawl for the fence, he'll be down here in full fear and finish me off. You've got to let the dog loose so he can drive the horse off. I can't let Mr. Prince go over the fence. You might shoot him. Julie, how can I shoot him if I ain't got a gun? But you shot my dog before, and he almost died. Shot your dog? Maybe I shouldn't have. I don't know right now, even though I did have a legal right to do it. Maybe I was wrong. That's the word? That's the word? Can't stand up or fight back. You've got to help me. Please, and you must. You shot my dog, Mrs. Zip. You must protect me, Julie. You've got it. You shot my dog. He's coming in for the kill. Please turn Prince through. I won't make it, Julie, for saving my life. And when I see Mr. Prince, I'm going to thank him, too. And I want you both to come to my home and visit me. But legal right to go on your land. Oh, yes, you do have a legal right to come to my land, and so does Mr. Prince. That's quite a switch in your thinking, Conrad. Boy, I'll say it is.  And I'll never use the words legal right again. From now on it's love and tolerance and consideration for rights other than what the letter of the law says. Well, boys and girls, I don't think there's any comment I can add because the story speaks for itself. Just remember, if there's one thing better than being legal, it's being Christ-like. See you next week for more adventure with... Ranger Bill was produced in the radio studios of the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago.


That's not refined. It's to sharpen our horse's response. Using how soon will sharpen your horse. But that's different than if we were to say how little does it take to canner. So once I do a time or two of how soon, that was pretty soon. Then I start getting into how little. And that gives you balance. That gives you equilibrium.


As the new US administration works out its foreign policy and national security priorities, it's really important to keep our attention on the four intense civil wars raging in the Middle East and North Africa. Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya. We've already seen the spillover, the violent extremism that emanates from those conflicts and devastates families not only in those countries but also Europe and the United States. Despite what often seems like intractable situations, there are steps the United States and international partners can take to reduce the violence and help move these countries to greater stability. That means working with NATO, the European Union, the United Nations and other international organizations as well as local leaders and their citizens to make change. This takes time and persistence, but it can be done if we work bottom up and top down. In addition to our military efforts and the critical humanitarian aid we can provide, we also need to deploy vigorous diplomacy to resolve these conflicts. And we need to support local citizens in these countries who are working to reduce local tensions so they don't generate more violence. The US Institute of Peace has invested in mediators and facilitators on the ground across the Middle East and North Africa. These are respected community leaders stepping forward to resolve local conflicts or prevent them from turning violent by working with disenfranchised parties to find common ground. This has led to displaced people returning home, communities and roads opening, basic improvement in their day-to-day lives, showing us that sustainable peace can be achieved.


Avdeevka, so many dead Russian soldiers, volunteer asks for body bag donations. In a social media post, a Russian volunteer pleaded for followers to donate body bags for Kremlin soldiers assaulting Avdeevka, saying that there's a horrible deficit, according to Kiev Post publication. If anyone could help purchasing bags for corpses, they are badly needed right now, he said. I won't manage it while on the road. Please help. Buy the bags if you can. They're badly needed. There's a horrible deficit in Donetsk, he added. Ukraine has managed to cling on to the frontline town of Avdeevka, despite constant Russian strikes, the most massive since the beginning of Russia's full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, happening over the past few days. Much of Avdeevka's population has fled. Local officials say that the town now has about 1,600 residents, down from 31,000. The Russian volunteer also sought donations of food and clothing. Food should only be in closed packages just in case, so that no one could add or spoil it some way.  Let's help. Let's provide strong assistance now to the guys in hospitals. The volunteer said, there's loads of them, really loads, and they really need the help right now. They have no one to hope for, except for the Rears.


Is this not working? Yes? I was just thinking that this is... It doesn't work very well. This is my third time talking at the... Change it a bit. Third time talking at the Agile Singapore conference. And people still show up. It's quite amazing. So I'm going to talk about... Let me put this a bit higher. I think it sounds good. Is that better or worse? Better. So I'm going to talk about this before that. A couple of simple things. I'm going to pass an iPad around. Please don't take it. It has a spreadsheet. You can put your email in there. And then you'll be sent the presentation and some other stuff if you want to. If you don't want this, pass it along, please. A bit of other things because I always forget this. I'll do it before I actually start.  And I'm also doing one last Scrum course. I rarely do those here in Singapore. There. Now with that, back to the real talk. This is the agenda for this talk. I'm actually going to start off talking a little bit about Scrum. Very little bit about Scrum. Then I'm going to talk a little bit about less. The kind of boring part. And then I'm going to talk about how less has been created. So Scrum. When most people think about Scrum, they think about the Scrum flow. People always associate sort of this or a variant of this picture with Scrum. And it is definitely true. Scrum is a perspective of Scrum. But at least to me, it's the least interesting perspective of Scrum. In this perspective, it only describes meetings and roles and artifacts, but it's kind of missing out the essence of Scrum. So there's different perspectives that you can have on Scrum. And this picture, much better, in my opinion, describes what Scrum is in the previous picture. So Scrum is essentially about teams that we set free, that are self-managing and self-organizing. And the teams are cross-functional and they iteratively, incrementally build up products. Which much better reflects Scrum than this picture, but unfortunately, if you see this picture, nobody goes like, ah, Scrum. This is another perspective of Scrum, which is the one we don't want to talk about too much, which is the structural impact, where it typically means abandoning functional departments in organizations and creating cross-functional departments. This is too uncomfortable. Therefore, this perspective of Scrum is usually kind of forgotten or not talked about too much. But for me, the key of Scrum is really, really simple, which is this idea where we gather a bunch of people together, who together have enough skills to build a product.  And then after they build something in that short time, they show that to an actual user, somebody who wants it, and they get feedback. And then they think about how they worked for that short time, and based on all that input, we take another fixed time, and we give them another goal, and they'll expend on that. And that's basically it. That essence of Scrum is actually lost in this kind of pictures, which is completely missing the actual point of Scrum. So when we talk about scaling Scrum to multiple teams, then we don't really want to scale that perspective, or we need to, but it's not the interesting part. The interesting part is how can we get this perspective, this perspective of giving teams goals within time, and they're building slices of product? How can we get that with multiple teams? So less is similar. We got the similar flow picture, which kind of looks like this, and if you go to the left side, this is the first picture you'll see, that is less like the Scrum flow picture in Scrum. And this is what often people want to know, and it is the most copied picture, although it's missing some of the essences. But let me run through it really quick to give you the overview of the less flow. So in less, there's only one product owner, and only one product backlog, no matter how many teams. We do not want teams having their own product owner and their own product backlog. We consider that a horrible mistake. Then, each of the teams, they work within the same sprint. They start off with sprint planning, which the first part is shared across the teams, which each of the teams picks the work they will work on the next sprint. Sprint planning, too, is usually individual, although teams that closely work together often do that together. Then during the sprint, they build the product, and the teams do their own coordination and integration during the sprint. There are no separate roles or events for coordinating between teams. Therefore, at the end of the one sprint, there's one shippable product, which is the output of multiple teams, and we'll have one shared sprint review because we have only one product where we get feedback on that product. We have an individual retrospective per team where they improve and look back on the previous sprint, and then less actually adds only one event to scrum, which is the overall retrospective, where the product owner management scrum masters and some team representatives talk about systemic and organizational problems, the really hard problems in large-scale adoption. That's about it. That's about all there is to say to the less framework, so thank you very much for coming. The rest of this talk is a little bit different and not focused so much on the framework itself but more on how and why it got created. The origin of this talk is in the previous Agile Singapore conference, which is two years ago. Was anyone there listening to my talk? Wow, and you came back. Thank you. It's actually the talk is online, but I thought it was pretty good. So it was basically just a framework introduction, a bit longer version of what I just said. I thought it was pretty good, and then a colleague of mine, Louis from China, he invited me to talk at the AHA conference, or I should pronounce it like... Here's the... my colleague is the official conference pronouncer.  And he said, what are you going to talk about? And I said, I'll just do the same talk as I did in Singapore. I have the slides anyway that will be easy. And he looked at me and he said, but that talk was boring. And I said, what do you mean it's boring? So I said, no, no, it's not you. It's just that every talk about a framework must be boring. And I took that as a huge challenge. So I decided to completely get rid of it and think about a completely different way of doing the talk. And therefore that's the talk you're listening to now. This is the interesting talk. And one of the things that I asked was, what makes things interesting? And one of the things that makes talks interesting in my experience is stories. So therefore the rest of this talk is going to be only a story about how less got created. Because there's much more essence to that than that flow picture, which is kind of the result of that. So but I'd like to start off by sharing a story about my son because people will work with me, know that I always share stories about my son because we have lots of discussions, always, of conversations. So this is my son exactly the same. And as you can see, he loves Star Wars. You guys want to see Rogue One? Yeah. So we have lots of conversations. And one day the following conversation happened when we were driving back from his swimming lessons. So we're sitting in a car and we're stuck in traffic. In Singapore that actually doesn't happen that often. But we're stuck in traffic and he gets annoyed. He's in the back of the car and he says, Papa, I want to go faster. And I said to him, well, that's nice, but we're not going to go any faster because there's all these cars in front of us and we're stuck. So he got more annoyed and then he saw the cars on the opposite side of the road and he pointed to them and he said, but they are going faster. And I said, yeah, they're going faster, but they are going in the wrong direction. We have a choice here and that is we can go really fast in the wrong direction or we can go a little bit slower in the right direction. What do you want to do? So he looked at me and he said, I want to go really fast in the wrong direction. And at that point I thought it was just funny and we didn't turn around, although we did get lost once because he was sitting in the back of the car and he said, I want to be lost. We didn't turn around. But the next day I was thinking about this short story and suddenly realized that this kind of the summary of my life, my professional life, he said when I work with large companies, most of them are obsessed about going faster in the wrong direction. The company that I work with now, and I'm not going to name that one, a new lean program and the slogan of their lean program is higher productivity. And all the people who know anything about lean, they're going like, huh, that's interesting as a lean program. So you see these productivity programs come and go every two years and you learn to ignore them. But that's not what we want and that's not the goal. So the goal in less is definitely not more productivity or hyperproductive teams or things like that, but we want to focus on going in the right direction, on learning, on agility and flexibility, the things that in our opinion really matter. With that, the story of less. So the story of less actually starts in a company that now seems to have quite a bad name called Nokia. And I still work with Nokia for after 15 years or so, but not with the phone site, which is now or what's called Microsoft and now has been sold again, I believe. But with the network site that built network equipment like this one and the company is now called Nokia, surprisingly. You use their products probably nearly every day, but you don't know, except when you start looking at roofs. So this is, the picture here is a four generation LTE base station and that's one of the products I've been involved with for the last eight years or so. But it didn't start with that product. Instead, it started about, the story of less starts a bit, let's see. Not yet. So the story of less starts a little bit of, over a decade ago, when I was living in China, I've lived in China for five years, and I had the opportunity to introduce agile iterative development in all of Nokia networks. The only thing that I needed to do is move to Finland. I already said yes before they told me I needed to move to Finland. Later I realized that was a mistake and if you leave with one lesson from this talk, let it be, don't live in Finland. It's very cold over there. So we started doing agile iterative development in all of Nokia networks because it was this new thing. And one of the things I quickly discovered is that they didn't really know what they were going to do, what they wanted to do. They only knew that we want to do something agile. So the first thing we did was start working with this person, who's a good friend of mine now called Craig Larmond, the co-creator of less. The reason we started working with him was that he had written a book called Agile Iterative Development, a Manager's Guide. Has anyone ever read this? Excellent, one person. It's actually pretty good. It's one of the early agile books that talked about everything agile but then a very little bit. So that was perfect for people who didn't really know what to do yet. So we asked him and we had these large sessions with hundreds of people and we would go in a whole day, we would go over everything agile, all techniques, methods, frameworks, etc. But only a little bit. And afterwards we went to the products and we asked, well, what did you like? What did you want it to do? What would you like to try? And most of the products said, well, this extreme programming thing that you've been talking about, that is a bit too extreme. We don't want to do that. But this scrum thing sounds really easy. So let's do that. So we started working with Kent Schraber. But right from the beginning we had two huge problems. The first one was that Craig had been too successful and we didn't have one product that wanted to try this out but we had like 20 of them and we had in total one and a half coach to support that. Which is kind of tough. And the second one is that scrum at that point was described as this one team framework. And in Nokia Networks there were no one team products. The smallest products had three teams and the large products they don't know how many teams they have. It's just a lot. So therefore the key question was how do we do scrum with multiple teams? And that's kind of the originating question of less. How can we do scrum with multiple teams? Not how can we get multiple scrum teams to actually work together but how can we get the same, remember the same key point, the same effect but not with one team but with multiple teams. So what we started to do is we started to I started working with a couple of these products really close and then the other products we would visit them every now and then and we would just do experiments. We would propose why don't you try out this and I would go and try it out and we would come back a bit later and see whether it worked and what we could learn from that. And because we had 20 products one of the things one of the great things we could do is lots and lots of experiments all at the same time and kind of discard what didn't work and keep what worked. And the the origin of these experiments were our own experience but at this time we also phonetically read everything about existing product development and not the theoretical things but we loved everything that was describing how products were built so the more experience based material. And two books were particularly of a high influence which was the early work from Microsoft so Microsoft at the 90s was really good at building software development. At that time they were. And they wrote two books which are excellent debugging the development process and the dynamics of software development and debugging the development process is written by the lead of the Microsoft Excel project and Dynamics of Software Development the lead of the Visual C++ project. And especially this one talked about two practices that were essential for the first versions of C++ Visual C++ which were feature teams and daily builds. Now daily builds of course had a huge impact on the agile community because they were taken back in extreme programming to practices to the extreme so they took daily builds to the extreme which became continuous integration and now continuous delivery. But especially the feature teams was more interesting and we were ignoring that a little bit in the beginning. But then we were influenced by this obscure paper XP and large distributed software projects by Colson and Anderson which worked in Ericsson and just so you know, Ericsson is like the number one competitor of Nokia at that time. So when your competitor publishes that paper you pay attention. And so they talked about how they, in their flagship product, how they applied daily builds and feature teams. Exactly the same thing. And we read this paper once and we thought it to be uninteresting. And then we read it again and we thought it to be still uninteresting.  This is really, really important. So the thing that they were onto was the structural change of organizing your development from a component team to a feature team organization. Between the two? Some. Let me give you the shortest version of component versus feature team. So most traditional projects or product development, they are organized around components which means that the architectural chart and the sorry, the architectural diagram and the org chart, if they look anything similar, you're using component teams. This is after an obscure paper from 1968 or so by Mel Conway. That's why it's sometimes called Conway's law. He observed that. He also mentioned that it's not necessarily a good idea, but that part is unfortunately forgotten. So to take the simplest component team structure, if you build a web application, you tend to have a front-end team and a back-end team. So your architecture is a front-end and a back-end, so we form the teams around that. So let me do that. Let me get off this awkward stage and put people in teams. So we got here four people. You are now a team. Do you want to be a front-end or a back-end team? Front-end team. Sorry. You guys will be the back-end team now. So, and we need a customer. You look like a wonderful customer. But our customer is a bit annoying because she unfortunately doesn't give front-end features and back-end features. In fact, she doesn't care about whether the features are front-end or back-end. And therefore the features that she gives means changes in both the front-end and the back-end. Now, that doesn't actually matter too much as long as she would make sure that all the features would require an equal amount of front-end work and an equal amount of back-end work, but no. She doesn't do that either. Instead, what she does is she prioritizes features with lots of front-end work first and then the back-end features a lot later. And the effect of that is, of course, we have first of all, we have dependencies between these teams. And originally, I thought dependencies between teams is the key problem for scaling. And I've learned that that is not true, and I was wrong for years.  And that is the real problem, because what happens now is that this team will work very hard on front-end features, whereas this team will work very hard on back-end features, but on different ones because of the different prioritization. So therefore, the feature that they work on, the back-end parts, they also need work from that team, but that team is not working on it at the same time because they have more important things to do. So therefore, what happens is that this team they're part of the feature, they integrate it within the codebase and a couple of sprints later, a couple of iterations later, this team will do their part, and they integrate it with the work that that team did a couple months ago. And of course, that doesn't work. So therefore, this team starts interrupting that team, and this team will be annoyed because they're done with that. They're working on something else, right? If they have an over-enthusiastic scrum master, he will kick them out and say, no more kicking. Sorry for that. Does it work again? Good. So, kick them out because it's an interruption. And that would be a really bad scrum master. So, you've got all these conflicts between these teams and these asynchronous dependencies, that is the real problem when you try to scale up and work with multiple teams on the same product. Now, does it work still? So now, the idea of feature teams is basically not to organize your teams around the architecture, but to organize your teams around the value that you're trying to deliver around your customer. So, therefore, making feature teams is really easy. Let me just show you how you do that. Can you guys stand up? No, no, you sit down, please. You two. Two there and two. Can you stand up? Can you sit there? It's permanent. Done. See, it's that easy. As long as they're in the same location, at least. So now, we have two teams, and both the teams have front-end skills and back-end skills. So now, we can take a customer feature and give it to the team and the team will work on this feature and everything that they need to do, they can do it in the team. And when they're done, we can take another feature and give it to this team again. And the same with this team, and there's no more dependencies between the teams whatsoever, except that they still work in the same product. So now, they work in the same code, the same components at the same time. The front-end people there, and the front-end people there are in different teams and will work on the same code at the same time. Now, traditionally, that problem was much harder, but that problem has been solved with agile development techniques. Remember why feature teams and daily builds in the history always came together. There's a reason for that, which is the daily builds and automated tests enabled multiple teams to take a shared code ownership and work on the same components. Now, there's still dependencies between these teams, but these dependencies are very different. They are what I sometimes call synchronous dependencies, and they are good. They're not bad. Because the only time the teams have a dependency with each other is when they, at the same time, make changes in the same code. Because if this team works on a piece of code, one sprint, and that team work on a piece of code, another sprint, there's no dependency. And because they work on the same thing at the same time, therefore, there's no interruption. If that team goes to that team and says, hey, you're working on the same code, and we're making changes there also, then that team won't be interrupted, but they will go like, oh, wow, what are you doing there? Hey, maybe we can use some of the stuff you're doing. So therefore, synchronous dependencies are actually not a bad thing, and they enable this collaboration of multiple teams together. So we started trying out feature teams first in I'm losing it again. I should not move. I should I'm going to talk like this now. So I'm not moving anymore. I can't do that. Anyway, so we tried it out in a product with three teams, and it worked really well, and 10 teams, and it worked really well, and 50 teams, and it still worked really well. In fact, the larger you get, the better it works. For two reasons. First, the component team dependencies become worse and worse the larger you become. Two, because we give the team similar features all the time, therefore they start still specializing at different parts of the system and will be able to talk directly with customers because they speak the same language. So this worked really well. Oh, these are component teams and then these are feature teams. So after living in Finland though for two years, I had enough of that, and I wanted to leave it was too cold, and there's too few people. So I first moved back south to Hangzhou, which was where I was living before, and I joined the management team of this product, which is a third-generation telecom product, and we changed the whole five, 600 people organization to start using what we would now call less. At that time we simply called it large scale scrum. It didn't have any catchy acronym yet. And I did that for a year. We changed the whole organization from component to feature teams. I did amazing things with test automation. And then after a year I moved here to Singapore, where I've now been living for the last eight years, where there's no winters ever. Excellent. Except inside. It's freaking cold here. So and at some point Crack came to me and said, let's write a book. And I didn't know that the answer should be no because writing a book is a real pain. So I said yes and we started writing first only one. Later we ended up with two books. Has anyone read these? For those who didn't they're really good. I'm a bit biased. But what they are is simply catalogs. They were catalogs of experiments. So the first one just said, you know, we tried this in this context and it worked well, but there's no guarantee that it will work for you. Or avoid this. We tried it out. It didn't work, but it might work for you. And the second book we added, what we call the try avoid. And the try avoid was we tried it in this context and it didn't work and we tried it in that context and it did work. Good luck. And the feedback was really positive except for some negative feedback. So we ignored the negative feedback and we called the readers not smart enough to understand our writing till we realized that's not the way to deal with feedback and we started looking at the not so positive feedback and we started recognizing this pattern which was basically thank you for your books now I have 1000 of pages of ideas but not once did you tell us what we should do right? Not once does it say you should start with this. So now I'm stuck. I don't know what to do with all of this. And then we reflected on that a bit and eventually put that in the the Shu there, Shu Ha Ri learning model. Was familiar with Shu Ha Ri? Shu means beginner which means you need to follow rules Ha means expert beginner or beginning expert we kind of learned to break the rules and re-means you kind of make the rules. It's the most simplistic explanation. And we realized that the books we had written were Ha Ri level. They were great for people with already a significant amount of experience because it gave them lots of ideas to try out. But people without a lot of the Shu level people would just at the question how do I scale up agile development. They are lost because there was too much stuff. So what we needed to do was create that starting point. Create rules create prescription. But you know there's a reason why we didn't create it then. And that is we don't like prescription. Because usually if you give people the prescription this is what you should be doing. Then they go and follow that. And they stop thinking. And that's not what we want. Instead we want people to take ownership of what they're doing and think of it themselves. So therefore we don't want to give any prescription or rules. But we have to give prescription of rules because otherwise people don't know where to start. They're kind of stuck. They've got all these ideas and they don't know what to do. But we don't want them to give sorry let me try that again. We don't want to give them prescription or rules because they'll just follow it. And then they don't experiment anymore. But if we don't give them prescription or rules they don't start and they can't even experiment. So we're stuck with this conflict. And suddenly we realize this is solved.  Scrum is extremely prescriptive at times to the point where it becomes boring. Like you need to stand in a circle every day for 15 minutes answer these three questions. It can't get more prescriptive than that. But on the other hand it leaves things completely open. And if you think about Scrum what it's trying to do intentionally or not it's adding prescription around the points where it creates transparency. It's adding prescription around the points where the team gets enough transparency so that they can inspect and adapt. They can take this empirical process control. And we were like that's what we need to do. We need to figure out what are the points where we generate that transparency. We need to add prescription through there and the rest not at all because we want the people to take that ownership and figure out themselves how they should work. We created the less rules which is free pages which is basically the things that you must do when you adopt less. But now we have a problem because we have free pages of rules and 1,000 pages of experiments. And the gap is a little bit too big. So Craig asked do you want to write another book? And now I knew the correct answer so I said no. And he said this one will be quick. We just copy things together and it will be two months. It will be I said okay then the goal would be for me to publish it before my second son was born. The book got published last month. My second son is now three years old. So we kind of missed that line slightly. But the third book which is this one is kind of contains what we call guides. They're in between the here's tons of ideas and these are the things you must do. In fact most of them explain how to adopt these rules in organizations. What effect it would have in your organization. And to complete that we've also added 10 less principles. The only difference between the less principles and most usual principles is that they're added retrospectively. We didn't think what principles are great but we thought what principles have we used over the last 10 years. Which were most influential. And in a moment I'm going to talk about one principle the more with less principle because this is one of the most significant one. And it kind of explains the essence of less. But before that, so this is a whole picture of less we call this the less complete picture. And we originally started with scrum. This talk started with scrum and the different perspectives of scrum. And less is the same. It has all these different perspectives. We started off with the most boring perspective. The deflows of meetings etc. We talked about feature teams versus component teams. Which is the structure. Less talks a lot about how do you structure your development. We talked about the less complete picture the experimentation and the same goal of trying to set teams free. But the last thing I'd like to talk about because he's waving this big sign end. So it must be the last thing. Is the more with less principle. Which is kind of the essence of less. And I always like to start introducing this by this quote. This is a quote from a book called Balancing Agility with Discipline. Has anyone read that? Good. Don't read it. It's an old book and was published by Barry Beam. And that's what makes it interesting. Because Barry Beam has been in the industry forever. And it's probably the inventor of waterfall development. And he writes a book about agile development. Which is what makes it interesting. But when you read it you discover he doesn't really understand it very well. But at some point because of his traditional perspective he comes up with these really insightful points. And this was one of them. Built your method up. Don't tailor it down. What he basically said is that we've been wrong in the industry for a long time. And the thing that we've been wrong is that we create these huge massive processes with multiple layers and many roles. And if we give it to an organization and said here you go, this is the process. But don't worry. You don't need to use all of it. You just need to tailor it down to your product. And he says that doesn't work. And I'll get to in a moment why it doesn't work. And he said instead one of the things we need to learn from agile development is that you want to create that minimum core that you must do. And you give that minimum core and say this is what you must be doing. And if you're in pain and only if you're in true pain you add to that. Now let me go back to the tailoring down why that doesn't work. The reason why it doesn't work is if you think about it pretty obvious because usually you need to tailor down when you start a new product with new people with a new customer etc. So at that point in time you have the absolute minimum information and knowledge. So with what knowledge are you going to make those decisions? You have none. So what happens is that somebody will say look at the big process and will say in our product do we need a release train conductor? Well we're not quite sure maybe. So therefore let's keep it just to play safe. And what happens is all of these products they end up with too much processes roles and artifact. And one of the reasons why they end up with it is because people in organization think that too much processes roles and artifacts is no harm. But that is a mistake. It is very very harmful. Because if you have too much let me start off with roles. If you have too much roles what does it mean? A role means that I take a set of responsibility and give it to a particular person. So therefore if I give that responsibility to one person I will not give it to the team. So therefore more roles leads to less responsible teams. More artifacts tend to be the interface between the team and the customer. So therefore if you add more artifact it leads to less customer interaction. If you add more processes like I mentioned before people are going to follow those yes I know it's the end. People are going to follow those and we get less ownership of the process. So therefore you don't want to have more artifact roles and processes because that will ruin your development. You need to have less artifacts more customer interaction. Less process more ownership and less roles and more responsible teams because with less of that you'll be able to get more output and better product and that's what we mean with more weight less. And that's exactly 40 minutes. So I'm going to end here. Thank you very much. Do we have time for questions? You can take questions. Sure. For less or large scale scrum is this also applicable for an organization that is not practicing ideal scrum? So teams distributed across the globe different time zones and product owners not co-located with their teams? Well unless there wouldn't be product owners there would be only one product owner. So that would definitely need to change. So the short answer is yes and the longer answer is no. Because let me take the simplest one one of the things that less has in the rules says co-located teams. Now that doesn't mean you can't do multi-site development like the product I work with now is I think 30 different sites but each individual team must be on one site. But of course you can just change that anyway and if you do it up less you will it will require in any less adoption that I've seen structural changes to the organization. Without those structural changes you won't be able to it up less if you are making those structural changes you will be able to do that. Does that answer your question? Yeah. So No it's actually the opposite. Component teams lead to duplication and horrible code practices. The reason is that nobody is looking at it. It's like we got our own team and we can make a mess of our own component and nobody will notice it. And this happens all the time because then the people leave. I'm sure all of you have experienced it and somebody looks at the code for the first time and they go like oh no.  So it's really painful because it exposes these kind of poor development practices throughout the organization really quick. And similarly because we work on the same code we know that that team has already built something. So therefore we take that out and make it reusable. How do? Is there any other interaction between those two teams to say that yeah I know that other team is in the business but will that be missed in a long run? Oh well then the answer is no. Any other question? It won't be missed. It's the amount of interaction between teams tends to make sure. Because what you're looking, what you're really asking is is there a role of an architect in less? And the answer is no. There's no role of an architect that doesn't belong to the team and doesn't write code. It's extremely harmful practice. Does that answer your real question? Thank you. Hi Bask. I had a question. I was looking at the different case studies that you had for less and I was interested in what is the largest I think it's been like the last year or so tracking different case studies and kind of posting them up. What is the largest implementation of less and successful one? What did that require organizationally in order to achieve? The largest case study is my favorite one, which is also from Nokia. Not because I wrote it. I didn't write it. But because the title is your second less huge adoption won't be any easier. So it's actually about two less adoptions. One of five, six hundred person product and one of three thousand person product. And the case study spends ten years. And it's very rare to get case studies that spend ten years. And it's still ongoing. And I made lots and lots the organization completely changed within those times. So yeah, that's the largest one with the most significant amount of change. Does that answer your question? So the we recently had the first less conference in Amsterdam which is a wonderful conference. Yes. Are you speaking next? Oh, okay. Yeah. Last thing. So there were four case studies and one of the things they had in common was all of them removed a layer of management during their less adoption. Every single one of them. Now it doesn't mean you have to do that but that's just the effect of adopting less in those organizations. And now it's really the end. No more questions. We'll ask one more time for a very lively and entertaining talk.