Peak Performance with Jeff Sutherland, PhD

Jeff Sutherland, PhD,  co-creator of Scrum and former RF-4C fighter pilot, discusses the state of the Agile community and the challenges faced in Agile transformations. He explores the connection between John Boyd's Energy-0Maneuverability Theory and Agile, as well as the application of neuroscience principles to Agile practices.

 Dr. Sutherland emphasizes the importance of individual and team performance in achieving peak performance. He also highlights the need for leadership and change in organizations to embrace Agile. Finally, he addresses the urgency of Agile in today's rapidly evolving world and the potential for Agile to drive significant improvements in productivity and competitiveness. The conversation explores various themes related to Agile, Scrum, and the intersection of technology and human performance. It delves into the importance of going back to first principles, the lessons learned from the military, the concept of human-machine teaming, the collaboration between Scrum and AI, the significance of Scrum in planning and execution, the focus on reducing energy and improving performance, the connection between Buddhism and optimization, and the expression of gratitude and acknowledgment. Overall, the conversation highlights the pivotal time in history and the responsibility of the Agile community to shape the positive impact of technology.

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Transcript

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:58

All right, welcome to no Way Out. Today we have a special guest with us who graduated from West Point, went on to fly reconnaissance aircraft in Vietnam the RF-4C Phantom. He went on to get a PhD at the University of Colorado. He is the co-creator of Scrum and looked at the Minaka and Takiyuchi Harvard Business Review article and that's where you got the idea or the name Scrum from that, the new product development game. He's also one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto. In the studio today we have Dr Jeff Sutherland and our new co-host today in the Asia Pacific, steve McCrone. So both of you welcome today.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 1:42

Thanks for inviting us. Glad to be here.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:44

Thank you, kia ora. So hey, steve, I don't know if you know this, but going back about 10, 12 years ago, I was living in Europe, had an opportunity to meet Dr Sutherland in Amsterdam, and he really planted the seed for what we now know as Agile X. And the reason behind that is, he said hey, what you need to do is take a bunch of former aviators, special operators, military members, martial artists, and go stomp out all the bad Scrum and Agile out in the world. Do you remember that, jeff? Yeah, yeah, okay. And here we are fast forward to today and, looking back at that, I had no idea what he meant then. I do have an idea now, but I want to hear from you, dr Sutherland, what's going on in the Agile community. Go back to that conversation you and I first had years ago and look at where we are today too. What's changed, what's going right, what's going wrong?

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 2:42

Well, I think the situation is the same or maybe even worse.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 2:47

The last data we had from the Stannish Institute was 58% of Agile teams, of which 88% of some kind of Scrum, are late, they're over budget, they have unhappy customers, they're Agile in name only, and that is what I hope that you and our fellow fighter pilots and martial artists could help fix, because a lot of it it's about split evenly, I think, between management. In my new book, I talk about the seven deadly sins of management that destroy Agile transformations, also the way the Scrum masters and the teams function today. In my new book, I'm focusing a lot on neuroscience. There's seven neuroscience accelerators that I point out in the book and you can see whether they're activated when you meet with a Scrum team. You can see it right away Either the energy is really high and people are really pumped, or everything's flat, nothing's happening With teams that do not have. As we know in martial arts, if you don't have the focus and you don't have the move, you wind up on the mat, and that's where most Scrum teams are. They're on the mat, not able to execute.

Steve McCrone: 4:17

A number of our clients use your methods, jeff, so thank you for that. What's going well Over the last 12 years since you and Ponch had that discussion? What's been the benefit?

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 4:35

Well, a lot of the companies are doing quite well with Scrum. Microsoft, all their development products, are done with Scrum, and Amazon, all their products are done with Scrum. I was told by people in my classes from Apple that the reason Apple meets all its dates is that they do Scrum by the book. When I asked what book, they said the red book. Scrum the odd of doing twice the work and half the time Apple does it exactly like the red book. The companies that are actually executing well are totally dominating the market space. That's the good news. The bad news is that if you're not doing it well, then you're really severely limited and non-competitive.

Steve McCrone: 5:31

What's the difference between what Apple might be doing and what some of these other companies have been doing? Where's the gap?

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 5:38

Well, the company that I run an investment company in and we're about half our investment is in Tesla. I followed that really closely. I actually done training inside of Tesla Scrum training. They do a little bit of Scrum but not a lot, but they are absolutely the most agile company in the world. Ford used to do one feature update a year. They do 20 a week. They're a thousand times faster than Ford. How do they do it? They have autonomous teams that are digitally mandated by AI. Everything is visible on monitors, what needs to be done where they are, and the teams swarm to make what happens needs to happen, and so agility is really effective in companies like Tesla and the companies that are in their domain that don't start doing exactly what Tesla does. They're going to go into bankruptcy, many of them probably this year.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 6:53

Right. So, jeff, in your new writings you talk a lot about the second law of thermodynamics and I want to go back to the cockpit and you know on the podcast here we talk a lot about John Boyd's observable anti-decided NAC loop, as well as energy and maneuverability theory. I want to go back into your background, not just at West Point but in Vietnam, flanned the reconnaissance missions, learning about John Boyd's unit loop and a little bit about EM theory, and you wrote about an interesting connection between EM theory and Little's law. So I want to go there and before we do that I just want to kind of set the conditions on the EM theory and my understanding of it from fighter aviation.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 7:35

John Boyd is the co-creator of energy maneuverability theory. He was actually trying to understand the second law of thermodynamics and apply that to fighter aviation. So we're talking about a complicated system without the human involved. Just how do those aircraft perform, or how do they get peak performance given different contexts altitude, air speed, air density, things like that. So he used a closed in my mind a closed system approach to create a way to understand aircraft agility in the air. So I want to see if you can build on that some more or offer up any other insights on EM theory, on where we're going with this?

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 8:17

Well, I've been going back to.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 8:19

One of the most interesting things that's happened in physics in the last two decades is Wolfram's physics project, where he's used his simulation tools and his team of theoretical physicists.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 8:32

He has worked for him to try to simulate the universe, and there's a couple of fundamental principles that are driving everything. One is what he calls computational irreducibility, which simple rules generate very complex behaviors that are unpredictable. In fact, for even simple things like a project plan, you need infinite computing power to compute when it's going to be done, which, of course, no human has and so you never know when it's going to be done. And in order to deal with this unpredictability, you have to do things in small increments and at the same time we have and I think this is where boys start to come in, we have developers in neuroscience. The latest and greatest theory in neuroscience is Friston's free energy model of the brain, because we have been in an environment of unpredictability and our survival depends on prediction. The brain is evolved as basically a predictive engine and it's constantly you're constantly trying to predict what's going to happen, every second.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 9:52

And that's energy efficient.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 9:54

Right, that's an energy energy, and if your prediction is correct, then that gives you lots of energy to do also some other stuff. If your prediction is wrong, then you have to correct your view of the universe and do all kinds of things that waste a ton of energy. And what Boyd is trying to do is, by rapid response, change what is going on. So the simulation in the enemy's mind is out of sync with reality. This caused what Friston calls Bayesian surprise and the cost of the Bayesian surprise he tries to make as big as possible so that they're talking about the second law of thermodynamics, so that entropy takes over and everything just accays and they can't function right. So Boyd is playing off these fundamental principles that are at the level of physics, and the reason I'm starting to talk.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 11:04

Let's build on this more. So let's go back to the cockpit. You and I are in a 1v1 dogfight. I paint on the bottom my aircraft, the canopy, and the reason I paint that borrowed ideas from either biomimicry or animal kingdom to create that mismatch. And you and I are fighting, we come to the merge. We understand a little about the EM theory. I'm trying to create that mismatch for you by painting the underside of my canopy right, or underside of my aircraft with the canopy, to show you that when I'm belly up to you, I'm actually not belly up to you. And that's what competition looks like, even in sports, is. We're always trying to create those mismatches to inject surprise right, surprise into the other, the opponent's OODA loop. Can you expand on that and make sure? Yeah, I think.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 11:58

The really interesting thing about Friston's theory is that it's not only a theory, it's the mathematics that they're putting into robots, because a robot has the same problem. It's running a simulation, something happens, the simulation's wrong. Now they got to rewire everything right, and so that's what you're trying to do with the canopy painted the bottom of the aircraft. I come up, I think you're upside down, and all of a sudden I wake up. It's not what I thought. Now I have to redo everything right, and that redo has a cost. And in Scrum we call those impediments right. Yeah, we go to try to do something and then we're blocked, and then there's a significant cost in unblocking and redoing and figuring out what to do.

Steve McCrone: 12:49

So humans are inherently very, very good at managing in complexity. It's part of our evolutionary journey and it seems and I think bring back to your initial point, jeff that management blocks us from doing that. What's to do? If you take Cal Friestin's work, it's notoriously very hard to comprehend. I've been reading on that subject for a couple of years and I won't claim any expertise. So how do we bring that to your typical team, your typical Scrum team, your typical management meeting?

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 13:25

Well, one of the reasons I started writing my new book is that the Chinese trainers were telling me what do we say to these Chinese managers that think that micromanaging and telling everybody what to do is the best way to get stuff done? And so my thought was you're not going to convince them by telling them that Scrum says so, right, you're going to have to give them a deeper education, like how things really work. So let's go back to physics and build up from physics in the neuroscience, and the neuroscience then came up into complex adaptive system theory, in which there's a massive amount of research, far bigger than Scrum or Agile, on complex adaptive systems that show there's mathematically provable theorems that show that autonomous units that have maximum degrees of freedom evolve a system faster, as long as you don't go over the edge of the complexity into chaotic behavior. Right, you can mathematically prove that. So my idea whether we're working on it, I don't know is to sit down with the Japanese manager and say you know, this is the way things work. You can't really tell when things are going to be done.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 14:54

Have you noticed that, no matter how much you beat people up, they're still late? And what physics shows us? It has nothing to do with programming or Agile or anything else. What physics is shows us that these are the basic rules and, in fact, your brain has evolved to actually work this way. If you watch what you're thinking and you ought to manage in accordance with these fundamental principles things are unpredictable. You have to try things in short intervals, you have to be constantly adjusting and adapting. And going back to John Boyd's Oodleoo, that's probably one of the best explanations of this ever right that people can understand. This is the way it works in fighter aircraft in the air.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 15:46

So, that's my try.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 15:49

Okay, I'm trying to get a different discussion. We're doing the same thing, Ish, in parallel, where we talk about how neurons work, how cells work and you're very familiar with cells working with Markov blankets and the same thing that we're talking about the free energy principle in neuroscience. We're interested in doing that too. So we go in and we do human factors training. We show them a strupe test or whatever it may be that gives them an illusion, and we walk them through what does active inference look like, the free energy principle look like, so they can experience it for themselves. Is that similar to what you're trying to do when you're talking about educating leaders on how things are?

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 16:30

Yeah, I think you're running in parallel with this. It sounds like.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 16:35

Yeah, but as you've been in this business quite a long time, you've been helping create peak performers, organizations with peak performance. Is this a good teaching technique to show folks something that is pretty advanced when it comes to neuroscience, but bringing it back to something they can learn and see that's tangible Is that a good experience?

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 16:58

The thing about neuroscience is what it shows now in a provable way by more and more research is that the basic principles on which the great coaches operate, the way Olympic teams was trained. When I was at West Point, the Olympic Gymnastic team trained alongside us, the. Our assistant coaches were members of the Olympic team and our head coach was the head coach of the Olympic team. So every day I would have the senior guy in the Olympic team. I was on parallel bars. The senior guy in the Olympic team on parallel bars would work with me three hours a day every day for years, and what I learned from that is that Every time you get up on the bars and do an exercise it's always wrong.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 17:54

But there's no judgment. There's just here's what you can do to improve that one. That improvement is endless. It just never ends. The rigor of that is something that you might experience in the Special Forces team, but most Scrum teams never have experienced the rigor of continuous improvement at the Olympic level. But the style of coaching I got is now reinforced by the neuroscience parameters I'm talking about. And so the problem with coaching is it was hard to explain how a great coach works right, because they're always working the team. They're working the individual, they're working the team. What they do looks unpredictable because they're trying to counteract one type of behavior and move it in a different direction. But the neuroscience principles tell us what is going on Particularly. They're highly relevant to Scrum teams like the ones I talk about.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 19:09

So, going on the neuroscience path, we understand a lot about psychological flow, peak performance and going back to EM theory. In the jet, that is peak performance for those aircrafts Coming to the merge of 350 knots altitude, wings and proper configuration Peak performance how do you get to there? In fighter aviation Neuroscience, we know a lot about the flow triggers and flow in a team is actually really good because it's a high-performing team. So my view of Scrum is you're trying to protect the team so they can focus, so they can have their shared goals, that shared risk. You can blend those egos. They're familiar with each other, they have that close listening. All those things need to merge, or actually not just emerge, but can be taught and they can be learned, because we learned that in aviation. I just want to check with you on this Is this where Scrum should be? Is getting those teams of peak performance in complex environments?

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 20:28

Well, all of these factors are talking about peak performance. What I'm trying to do now is I don't know if you can see this, but now this is measurable. So that top line is my energy. Right now I'm sitting at I'm over 75%, which is pretty good. That's late in the afternoon here I'm still over 75%. I was only at 85 when I got up. And it also has a histogram of stress, and what you want to do is get the stress in the blue, and so I've learned through this.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 21:07

The health care guys have convinced me that I should develop a Scrum framework for health and performance, and these analytics come from firstbeatcom in Finland. They're used to train Olympic teams and what you want to do is get the energy really high and the stress really low, Because any athlete, whether they're jumping the high bar or they're swimming or running, they're really great athletes. It looks effortless for them because they've removed all the impediments. And if you remove all the impediments to your personal function today we can measure in real time 24 by 7, your energy level and your stress level will be down around 5% if you have no impediments. What I've found is, if you do that, you get into a flow state where time kind of advantages and it's really easy to get stuff done.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 22:15

Absolutely.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 22:18

And the other thing I'm starting to talk about is actually in the MIT Sloan Review. This past week there was an article called the Eye in Team In the Agile Manifesto. It says we are interested in individuals and interactions more than process and tools. It starts with the individual, and so in a recent company meeting, everybody was not everybody, but a lot of people were complaining about sustainable pace, and so that means either the scrum is set up wrong or you're not maintaining yourself as an individual. So you have very high energy, very low stress and it's stable. It's a maintainable situation. And I told them I want you to put on a watch and I want to come into every retrospective and all I want to see is show me your watch, because anybody on the team that doesn't have very high energy and low stress is going to slow the team down. High performing teams are not possible without high performing individuals. Then you can talk about the interactions, and that was the point of the Sloan article. You need to train individuals for performance before you focus on the team performance.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 23:47

OK, let's build on that. Because, on a technical aspect, the technical skills are one thing. How I do my development, how I fly a jet, how I fight fires, all those things, I have to learn those technical skills. On peak performance with teams, you still have to learn the interaction skills, the collaboration, what we call teaming. And then, from our backgrounds, we ended up with what is known as crew resource management, which is the foundation of team science today. So the team scientists, those researchers are telling us we have to learn those teaming behaviors, which can be individual behaviors, they have to be self-similar, they have to be good practices because they can always get better.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 24:30

And that's where, going back to the earlier point about stomping all the bad and scrum out, agile and scrum out and what's going on out in the industry, what I see is people do not take the time to learn those interactions, those skills. That's one piece. The other piece is I think right now, the average person gets about 11 minutes of work done a day. I think that's where we are. So the context, the conditions that they're working in, is deteriorating their mental health, right, this is not a. What we're trying to do here is increase the well-being of individuals by creating the conditions and giving them the tools they need to be, I'll say, peak performers or high-performing teams.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 25:17

Yeah, but my I mean our background in martial arts tells us it doesn't matter what the environment is. If you have the right centeredness, the right technique and the right energy, you determine the environment. Yes, and scrum games can even do that. Particularly if they know where they are, what's important, and they can collaborate together, they can actually create enough force so that management has to change. And I'm talking about that now a lot with the trainers because I'm using Newtonian physics to explain it.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 25:56

Force equals mass times, acceleration You're trying to accelerate a team or an organization. The bigger the organization, the more force you need. Work is force applied over distance. You have to apply that force over a long period of time. This is why you need sustainable pace, and I asked one of the original XP guys how much faster was the first XP team going at a sustainable pace compared to other teams at Chrysler? And he said 52 times faster. That's a stable pace for that team. So if work it was force over distance, power equals the amount of work in a given time. So to do twice the work in half the time which is what the scrum book is all about you need four times the power.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 27:00

Right, and what I'm arguing is that we can measure this on the launch. If your energy is at 75, like mine is now, and my stress is at five, then I've got a proxy for that. Power reading is 75 divided by five. That's a lot of energy to apply to the problem. And, in terms of the problem being moving an organization, that is the energy to work on removing competitors, convincing people, being like the best scrum masters. They like bulldogs, they just grab ahold of your leg and they won't let go. And that includes managers' legs. Right, and that's what changes the environment. Right, if you sit around like I'm just the victim, the management is so bad they're destroying everything. My health is going into the toilet and I'm just the victim. I'm going to lie down and die. That's where a lot of people are right. So if you're not the victim, you're going to get up off the floor, you're going to power yourself up and you're going to take down the opposition. Right, that's John Boyd's philosophy that works.

Steve McCrone: 28:15

So we're and that's what. Sorry, jeff, I like this. The most stressed and high-energy people in the room tend to be the managers, and that permeates particularly the stress across the team. It would seem to me everything you just said there is a big mismatch between the skills, knowledge and abilities of your average managerial person compared to what we've just said in respect to their ability to coach, their ability to bring the team together around that energy and minimize the stress involved. What needs to change?

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 28:55

Well, I mean, I don't want to put all the managers in the same box, because there are some really great managers that have the energy and the insight and the power to really move organizations. I'm just saying a lot of the people we work with, the organization is floundering and the managers do not know the basics of Boyd's energy maneuverability, the basics of the way things work that are unpredictable. You have to work at short integrals, you have to constantly update your plan. You have to expect and adapt constantly. They're not doing that. They're trying to say, oh, the plan is X and I'm going to come back in six months and it better be X and 100% of the time it's not X. One of the most amazing things I found working with investors I work with a couple of different investment groups, have them for decades now.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 29:53

I remember when I first started with Open Adventure Partners, they'd implemented Scrum everywhere. The reason they did it is the investors said to me our biggest problem is we get in a board meeting, they present a Gantt chart when the price is going to come out, and then the financial guys put the financials on that Gantt chart and we have to make a decision as investors whether, when are they going to run out of money? When did we need to give them no money? That's what we're thinking at every board meeting and we can never come up with the answer, because the Gantt charts are always wrong. And I said to the investor I said always wrong. He said yes, in 30 years I have never, ever seen a Gantt chart.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 30:41

I asked there were eight other investors in the room. We went to each one. Have you ever seen a correct Gantt chart? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. They are 100% wrong. So that means managers that are depending on a Gantt chart. They are totally and completely clueless. They are totally out of reality and they need to change their mindset and they need to change their behavior. And the only way you're gonna do it and we're gonna do it with the work we do with management teams is it has to be an emotionally powerful display of how screwed up they are and a demand that they step up and actually run a company in the way it needs to be run to be more successful. I mean, they're just not gonna change unless you're in their face.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 31:39

So that Gantt chart you're talking about is a map that is developed by people who don't look outside, right. So go back to the free energy principle. That map is not reality, it's not the terrain and, worse, it's created by people that don't have the contact with the outside environment. So I agree with you that is a fundamental problem.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 31:58

Even if they do have the contact, you could create a Gantt chart that is correct given the information at this instance and it's gonna be wrong by eight o'clock tomorrow morning.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 32:10

Right, the same thing with the map. When we build a map, it's in a complex environment. It's gonna be wrong the moment we take another step right.

Steve McCrone: 32:15

Yeah, yeah. So in uncertainty, to use the phrase, we have three options suppress it, ignore it or adapt to it. And it seems to me that suppressing and ignoring have been the favorite methods. And now what we're talking about is adapting to the reality of the world, as opposed to suppressing it through the Gantt chart or any other predictive model. Right, that adaptation takes an amount of moral courage. You're standing up to the conventional wisdom. You're standing up to those who refuse to believe the Gantt chart's wrong. We just need a better chart, jeff. We just need more detail. That seems to me to be the hurdle. It's certainly the one that I encounter the most, and I think your passionate pleaser is like get in their face.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 33:05

That's why we have the scrum values right, openness and transparency, respect for people so they will be open and then courage to state the truth. And I remember I was talking to ING Bank. If you remember, they implemented the Spotify model many years ago and a company I worked with was we're doing a lot of the training in there. They would bring me in and I remember I had 40 trainers in the room asking how they could be better trainers and I said you need to not tell people what to do, but reflect the reality of what's going on, because I met with a lot of teams today and a lot of them are not doing very well and unless you expose that clearly to them so that they actually have an emotional effect, they're not gonna change. And that means that you need to have the personal power to confront them with the truth. And those 40 trainers were shocked that that was their mission, because they'd been dodging and avoiding that.

Steve McCrone: 34:25

So Actually you can see that in a lot of government agencies where people are actually insulating themselves from the emotional response of their decisions or of the reality of the world. So I think that's it. Yeah, I remember, I mean this reminds me again.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 34:42

coming back to the Air Force, I was asked to be with the head of maintenance and support for the US Air Force right, all the aircraft of the Air Force and I said I know what your problem is. You're supposed to have 80% readiness and you only have 40% readiness and you want more budget next year and the brass wants you to cut your budget. She said that's absolutely right. I said if you could do twice the work in half the time which the Scrum book is all about, your problem would go away. And she said my challenge is, in order to do that, I have to fire half of my commanders. I said well, you have a choice. You can either sit in your seat and do nothing, waiting for a retirement or another assignment, or you can actually be a leader.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 35:46

And that's hard to do, right In today's context.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 35:50

Not many people want to know At West Point, the leaders they put in front of us get it all the time. Yeah. The leaders they put in us were. I mean, obviously General Patton wasn't alive when I was there, but the people they put in front of us were like General Patton, and he took no prisoners, sorry, not even as his own forces. If they were not doing what needed to be done, including his own commanders, they were working someplace else in a hurry. That's leadership.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 36:27

You get the right people in the right place and you do not tolerate dysfunction?

Steve McCrone: 36:34

It seems to me, jeff, particularly in the last few years, people have been abdicating leadership responsibility in the way that you've just described leadership. Now they don't want to be in that place. That gap has been filled by what we refer to as the merchants of certainty that have created formulaic approach to agile, formulaic approach to strategy, formulaic approach to organizational development. That's a great sound.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 37:00

I like that.

Steve McCrone: 37:01

That's.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 37:02

Diego.

Steve McCrone: 37:03

Espinosa's phrase, and I thank him for it. How do we stop that happening again? How do we stop the merchants of certainty coming in and taking the free energy principle, the Oodaloo, the complex adaptive systems theory, the stuff that we are very passionate about, and creating formulas?

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 37:23

I think one of the things we're doing at Scrum Inc is trying to upscale all the trainers and coaches to operate at a higher level. So, for example, we've worked with some of the big consultancies like Bain has been a partner for us for years and those guys are very good at going in with a slide deck at the management level and they can convince anybody of anything and their logic is impeccable. But many of the agile coaches they're down there working at the team level. They're not able to really talk to the management and make the case in a way that really communicates. So we need to have those of us who are really agile need to be better at explaining to management than you know, the merchants of certainty or whatever the phrase was.

Steve McCrone: 38:24

They have a. The merchants of certainty have a big marketing budget.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 38:28

And after produce results. So like we have two really good case studies here right now with with rocket mortgage and John Deere I think you probably have seen both of them Both of those companies did say for 10 years For those 10 years John Deere stock price didn't budge. We came in and implemented scrum at scale, which focuses on prioritizing the impediments in the organization and implementing a clean, effective scrum, and John Deere stock price goes up almost 400% one year. Those are the kind of results that convinced management that they should change their behavior.

Steve McCrone: 39:11

Yeah, good, I mean, one of our favorite sayings at AGLX is we're not going to change the world by educating people. We change the world by doing good work with good clients, and I think that's a great example.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 39:24

Hey, Jeff, there's been a lot of folks writing on LinkedIn lately that agile's dead or dying.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 39:30

You know, that's what I get your take on. People were saying agile's dead 20 years ago.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 39:34

Yeah.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 39:37

You know the universe is agile and the minute you take the eye off that ball, the John Boyds of the world are going to take you out.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 39:47

That's not only you they're going to take your whole company out. Do you know? The 75% of companies are dead by the time they're 15 years old, and that is going to accelerate. Ai is going to cut that at least in half. So, whatever company you're in, you have a window of seven years or less to radically change your behavior or you are going to die. Right that, that is the reality.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 40:18

And that's the second law right.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 40:20

If you think you could not be non agile and survive, you have been smoking pot in the back room too much.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 40:29

So let me ask you this you go back to the agile manifesto and you're right in there. That it's. You're searching for better ways, right? You've been at this for a while. Where have the better ways come from? What are you seeing over the last 22 years of agile? What's what's working in your mind?

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 40:47

I think the most agile company in the world today is Tesla Okay, with SpaceX a close second and the reason is they have they have implemented complex adaptive systems theory. They have autonomous teams collaborating together towards a common goal. That goal is constantly manifested on screens on the assembly line in the company. You can see exactly what's going on all the time and the team swarm to make those numbers go up Right and they're on a mission to change the way the world uses energy and and there are a thousand times faster than Ford has been historically. So we we have emerging a really full implementation in a way of what scrum was kind of the starter kit, right To get to get to that level. Google and Amazon and Apple have done some of the same thing. So we have a great company. You go down the list of the top 100 companies. Anyone that is, any of them that's a technical company is agile. You can't today get the top 100 companies as a technical organization without being agile.

Steve McCrone: 42:17

So I guess to the comments on LinkedIn about agile dying, what I see is a growing gap between agile done well to the principles of complex systems theory and then agile done to a formulaic process. I copying someone else's agile experience and expecting that same thing to work the same way for you. Is that true?

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 42:44

I think this is. This kind of talk is really old thinking. Right now, the analysts are saying on the average, the whole industry is twice productive this year as last year. 46% of the people in GitHub are using Microsoft co-pilot to write most of their code. By 2030, the analysts are saying, the technology will evolve so that the teams are at least 30 times faster and maybe 100 times faster. So I would say to these people that are worried about agile being dead how are you going to get 100 times faster in the next six years? Because if you don't, you're going to be out of business. So if you don't like the word agile, come up with something else that's going to make you 100 times faster. Let's talk about that, because we're wasting our time talking about agile is dead when you're going to get crushed like you're going to be run over by a steamroller called AI with teams running 100 times faster. We are in a state of emergency Wake up people.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 44:03

That's great. So this is why I think you're going back to first principles and going back to the early part of the conversation about going after that gut, going after that emotion to show people how things actually work and your first principles In one way.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 44:18

To me, agile doesn't matter, Scrum doesn't matter. What matters is computational irreducibility, which says everything is unpredictable. Now I'm really working on the entropy issue, because entropy is all about things falling apart to disintegrating, becoming random. That's happening faster and faster. That means companies, instead of taking 15 years to die, are only going to take seven years to die in the near future. Everybody particularly manages. What are you doing about that? I don't care if you talk about agile. I want to talk about how you survive by being 30 to 100 times faster than you are today. That is the challenge in front of us as business people.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 45:14

Jeff, I want to talk about the connection to the military. Don Rynardson has a background in the US Navy. We have the great book Team of Teams by General McChrystal, your work in Scrum. Talk to us, Walk us through what exactive lessons are really working from the military thinking that you're seeing, if any, I'll build on this more. We have high reliability theory that's grown into resilience engineering that's underpinning DevOps, the culture of DevOps. We have human and nervous performance, which is built on a lot of these things as well from the military. Why are the lessons from the military so important in today's business industry?

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 45:55

Well, right now one of Scrum's biggest customers is the British Navy, the Royal Navy, because the first sea lord brought us in there and said we need to move faster. The bad guys are moving faster than we are. He said we're going to start at the top. We're doing our planning for the next 10 years. It's usually really painful. We're going to use Scrum to execute the plan. When that came in faster than anybody ever expected, they said now we're going to roll this out to all the forces. Then he got promoted and he owns not only a big chunk but part of the civilian military operations. He started to spread it throughout the organization.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 46:49

They're asking us we need to go faster. One of the latest things they're asking us the man-machine interface. Today all our forces are now an aircraft. It's a man coupled with a machine. With the rise of AI, they want to know how can they use AI to better implement Scrum and also better to implement the man-machine interfaces. Basically, how to go faster, be more adaptable. Execute John Boyd's loop at a significantly faster pace is their goal. On the one hand, they have this huge bureaucracy that they have to move out of the way. On the other hand, they're really serious, just like a martial artist. We have to move with more power and strength. We have to do it faster. We're learning a lot from them.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 47:55

That's interesting. Today I had to answer a question for a client on human-machine teaming. The way I did it was through the OODA loop and some work that Steven and I did a few years ago with Dave Snowden, really emphasizing the strengths of machines and the strengths of humans. If you understand that, you'll understand that you need to keep the human in the system. And I want to come back to something on EM Theory here. This is interesting EM Theory.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 48:17

When John Boyd created that and this is going back to Vietnam, he was running around the country telling everybody F4 should not fight a MiG-21 based on the paper. On paper, they should not fight each other. Our weapons school, our fighter weapons school, said wait a minute, you're forgetting about one thing the person in the cockpit. We get the math, we get the numbers and all that, but once you put that person in that system it's a complex adaptive system now, but a crew in there, they can do things, they can fight now because they have their mind. This is what we're going with. Human machine teaming is there are strengths in the complicated system that when you add a person to it, machines do things better than humans in computations, things like that faster, and there are things that humans do. This is more important now than ever before is understanding everything. You just pointed out that you have got to understand how to get peak performance not only out of your human systems, but your socio-technical systems, your human machine teaming, right, absolutely.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 49:22

I mean, I tell people, look at the Starship Enterprise. Can the captain get the enterprise out of the dock without the computer? No, you can't even get out of the dock, and that's probably true with some of our airplanes which two of our airplanes as well? You can't even get out to the runway without the computer, right, right, right. And a lot of people don't understand that, even though everything they do today is largely around computers and stuff like that, like we're talking now on Zoom or on Riverside. So take that another level and look at what happened when the computer became the world chess champion. One year later, a team of people with laptops, with AI and the laptops, beat the computer world champion. And a few years later, the same thing happened with Go. It's as the military says, it's the man-machine collaboration that wins.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 50:32

Right and then adding scrum to this. Going forward, you have to have those feedback loops, which you're still gonna have, machines that are, like you pointed out, your watch earlier. That's, to me, human-machine teaming. That's getting some information that we just don't have access to right. So you still have to use the machines to understand the context, the environment, use that feedback and build on that to improve future performance, which, to me, is still using scrum. If you will plan brief, execute, debrief. Plan execute, assess, framework.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 51:05

A really interesting happened to be some years ago in Zurich, where a guy from the IBM Research Lab in Zurich came to one of my classes or one of the events we had, and he says you know? He says the supercomputers are gonna be running scrum. And I said what do you mean? How do you know it was gonna work? He said if it works in people, it's gonna work in the computer. And I said well, to have a dynamically changing backlog, the chips are gonna have to run differently. He says oh yeah, you need a special kind of chip. He says we already have prototypes of chips that will dynamically rearrange backlog in the supercomputers we're building. So you know, in one sense, the basics of scrum are gonna be a common language between the machines and the people.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 52:00

Yeah, and then to me you know I don't like taking anything away from scrum we use it quite often in the right context. The scrum is, in my view, is a plan, execute, assess. It's a cadence of accountability. To do anything has all these awesome things in it, and I see people attacking it all the time. I'm like, hey, I don't know if you know, but all good teams, all great teams, they plan, execute, assess. It doesn't get any easier than that, right? So it's how they do that, though, it's how they communicate, it's how they create the goals, it's how the context it's created for them, how the impediments are removed, and I think that's what matters, right.

Steve McCrone: 52:38

And I think also that's why, in my new book.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 52:41

I mean, I'm mentioning scrum, constantly pointing back to it, but I'm talking constantly about physics, about neuroscience, about complex adaptive systems. That's where scrum is. Any methodology or any framework is a higher level of abstraction, trying to address fundamental principles. So I'm trying to show there are six levels of abstraction. I talk about my book. Agile is at the top. The Agile values are just a summary of a huge amount of stuff beneath it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 53:19

Yeah, hey, jeff, I know we're gonna wrap up here in a few minutes. Some of the things that we're working on are connecting a lot of the lessons from Agile, if you will, to human and organizational performance. What we see is go back to the free energy principle. How do we reduce the energy individual spend on trying to understand these different initiatives in their organization? I think that's where you're going with your first principles, your writing and all that is. How do you make that a lot easier?

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 53:42

Well, what I've learned from healthcare. I'm running a healthcare company now with scrum and putting together a scrum framework to radically improve your health by iterating quickly. Yeah, high energy and low stress is basically the only two things that matters. If you can't, I don't care if you're an 80 year old person that can't get out of bed or a 22 year old marathon runner. The only thing that matters is getting your doubling the energy that you have and cutting your stress in half. That's what will make you win a marathon and that's what will get you out of bed in the morning. Right?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 54:24

Yeah, you've been writing a little bit about Buddhism in your book too, and then Eastern philosophies. We picked up a lot of meditation, breath work here to get in that peak performance as an individual. So I see the parallels of what you're doing.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 54:42

What I've found is my doc actually gave me a prescription Jeff, you need to meditate 15 minutes every day, same place, same time. I see you. I took my watch and then I figured out okay, what is going to double my energy and cut my stress in half? How is that meditation going to do that? And I found that it's been for me.

Steve McCrone: 55:06

Jeff, sorry, I asked you a question. It seems to me we're talking about AI augmenting human decision making, and I read your article on Buddhism and it seems to me that there's a real focus there of embedding ethical decision making within the framework of optimization for teams and outcomes, and this is particularly relevant, I guess, in the military and in healthcare at the moment. You get a comment on that.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 55:34

Well, I think it really is all about entropy, things decaying into randomness, everything breaking down. It's not only what Joad Boyd tries to create through the uter loop, but when you go into battle, that's what happens on the battlefield right away. Right, klausowitz talks about the fog of war. People get killed, lots of smoke and rumors floating and people are afraid. All this stuff, everything is disintegrated into entropy.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 56:08

And the interesting thing to me is for somebody who's not only studied but practiced Tibetan Buddhism for 50 years of war, is that this is the problem that the Buddha was wrestling with. He was confronted with people getting sick, getting old and dying. And if you now study the literature coming out of Harvard, you realize, now that we have the technology, that you don't have to get sick, you don't have to get old and you don't even have to die. And if you look at how that technology works, it gives you a lot of insight into how the businesses work and how the OODA loop works, because the human performance is getting, particularly in the military, in flying, a lot of human performance is strength, energy, power, focus, right. That is fundamental to fighter pilot and if you don't have that, you can't even get through fighter pilot training. You have to have a really high level of that even to get through the training.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 57:20

And this, a lot of this focus, is dependent on the cellular performance of the cells in your body and as you get older they start to lose track of the original blueprint. It's kind of like a DVD that gets scratches on it All of a sudden. The sound is funny and the video is clouded, and that's what you experience. You don't want to experience that in an aircraft in common, right, but as you get older you do. And what David Sinclair at Lab at Harvard has shown us that every cell actually has an original blueprint and you can cause the cell to look at that and reset. And that is the most amazing thing that science has found Error.

Steve McCrone: 58:25

I think the insurance we think.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 58:27

AI is going to change things. When the 60-year-old general can start flying around like a 22-year-old fighter pilot, it's going to be a really different world we're living in.

Steve McCrone: 58:43

The health insurance industry call that the actuarial escape velocity.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 58:47

Yeah, absolutely Escaping your life insurance.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 58:51

Hey, Jeff, I want to again thank you for not only being here today, but everything you did for getting us going, giving us the positive reinforcement ideas. Many years ago we reconnected again when the book came out.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 59:06

They're already doing twice the work and half the time. Back in 2014, you and I and some other members, we looked at the daily standup. You changed the scrum guide. So the relationships. We just worked with you at Scrum, at Scale. Everything you've done for not only our country but for businesses all around the world. I just want to thank you. It's fantastic to have you on the show. It's good to have you on a Rolodex to give you a call and ask questions and see what's going on Again. Just, I can't thank you enough for being here today. I want to turn it over to you to see if you have anything that you want to.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 59:38

Well, it's really great to connect up with you again.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 59:44

I just want to say I think we are at a time in history that is pivotal.

Jeff Sutherland, PhD: 59:49

There is more technology change going on than ever in history, and in another five years, the world is going to be a totally different place, and one of the things I really feel about Scrum and its value set is we need to train these AI to move into a positive place, because the alternative we don't want a Terminator scenario for the planet, and so what we're talking about here, particularly from the agile value side of things we need to work with these computers and get them thinking in the positive way that we've, the positive way and the human centered way that we try to create in the agile community. So I think we all those of us here and all of us in the agile work have a great responsibility right now, in the midst of the biggest change that's ever happened on the planet. So that's what gets me jumping out of bed every morning like trying to make it. You know, let's take, let's take whatever. Whatever good we've done so far with agile, let's take it to the next level.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:01:05

Couldn't agree with you anymore, steve. Any last comments.

Steve McCrone: 1:01:08

No, I think that's a really good way to end it. I think let's take that to the next level. Cheers Right, thank you.