Apr 16, 2023
Bio
As CEO of Agile Velocity, David Hawks guides leaders through their agile transformation with a focus on achieving business results. David is a Certified Enterprise Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer who is passionate about helping organisations achieve true agility, not just implementing Agile practices. He helps create transformation strategies and manages organisational change through leadership coaching and was the creator of Path to Agility®.
Interview Highlights
03:58 Stumbling into agile
05:25 Agile Velocity
09:00 Path to Agility
14:30 Applying a different lens to each context
20:25 Philosophy around assessment
27:20 How to lead transformation
Websites:
· https://pathtoagility.com/
· Agile Transformation Management Tool | Path to Agility Navigator
Books:
· Leadership is Language by L. David Marquet https://www.amazon.co.uk/Leadership-Language-Hidden-Power-What/dp/B083FXXNSP/
· Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet https://www.amazon.co.uk/Turn-Ship-Around-Turning-Followers/dp/B09BNR6L51
Social media:
· LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidhawks1/
· Twitter: @austinagile
Episode Transcript
Intro (Ula Ojiaku): Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.
Ula Ojiaku
Thank you, David, for making the time for this conversation.
David Hawks
Thank you for having me.
Ula Ojiaku
Awesome. So let's learn a bit more about you, David. Can you tell us about yourself?
David Hawks
Let's see. So, I founded a company called Agile Velocity about 12 years ago. I live in Austin, Texas, and have two kids that are in college, trying to figure out how to get through ‘COVID college’, which is quite the crazy time to, you know, one of them started college in COVID times, and so that's definitely a whole different experience. And, let's see, so I'm an avid Longhorn fan. So, Longhorns or the university here, we don't have any professional sports teams in Austin. So, that was my alma mater, and so I am known for long football tailgates and being at all the sporting events.
Ula Ojiaku
Awesome. Did you play any football yourself?
David Hawks
I did not play football, but I was, the surprising thing for me is that I was a, not in college, but an all year round swimmer for about eight years of my life. So, strong swimming background, started doing triathlons about five years ago. So I hadn't swam, I mean, I swam in like, the ocean, but like, I hadn't swam in any competitive way for like 20 years. And then I picked that back up and started doing triathlons a number of years ago. So, I put that on the shelf, but I'm starting, the itch is coming back. So I'm starting down that path again.
Ula Ojiaku
Awesome. So, could you tell us a bit about your background, you know, growing up, did you have any experiences that you would kind of see the inflection points that maybe guided you on the path that you're on today?
David Hawks
Yeah. I mean the one that comes to mind. So, my dad started his own consulting company when I was in middle school, and so I always had this vision of being an entrepreneur, starting a company. Now, when I was, you know, middle or like college and after college, I always thought it was going to be like, start some custom software. I can, I got a technical degree. So I thought I was going to be like a custom software development company or something. And then the dot com bust happened. And it was like, oh, that, and then I started having kids and it didn't seem like the risk to take at the time of going and doing that, so it took a little longer to get going, but what is interesting as I ended up starting my business when my son was in middle school, so it’s like, he's kind of got a little bit of the same type of like, hey, I've, you know, experienced, this entrepreneur kind of building a business. And, but that was always my bucket list. That was always the, like, that's, what I want to do is go build a business.
I stumbled into agile in around 2003 at a company where it was, you know, we were doing agile things and, you know, there weren't a ton of books at the time, right? Like, it wasn't until I think Mike Cohn's Agile Estimating and Planning book came out that I was like, oh, now I see how we can run our, you know, our projects, our work and plan and forecast and do all those things, and so I had the luxury of, I worked for a company around 2003 to 2005, where we started some things, but then the company I went to next, I was able to hire much of the team from the previous company. We continued our agile journey together, and then some of those same folks were the first employees of Agile Velocity in around 2011, 2012 timeframe. So, we all kind of had this agile journey over 10 years and then kind of ended up building this business to help organisations that are trying to adopt agile practices and agile ways of working. And so, yeah, those were kind of two pivotal things that like shaped ultimately building this organisation that's now, you know, helping companies across the world with their agile transformations.
Ula Ojiaku
That's very impressive, David. So what made you know, this is the right time to start my
David Hawks
To start Agile Velocity? I would say I kind of stumbled into it, right? Like it was, so I ended at the one company, I picked up what was supposed to be just this short term contract, a company that had just been bought by, that was like, it was called Wayport, that was bought by AT&T, but they were doing like all the wifi for Starbucks, for Hilton at that time. And they were trying to scale, and they were like, we're agile, but we just need help scaling. And so I just kind of went in as a consultant to help them with that, it's supposed to be like a three to six months engagement. Well, I got in there and I was like, y'all are not as agile as y'all think y'all are, right. And so I ended up, I remember putting together this, like, one page spreadsheet that was like, here's what I observe, here's what you could be doing better, here's what the impact of that would be. And they said, okay, go help us do that.
So I didn't even know, like agile coaching was a career, and all of a sudden I kinda stumbled into like coaching them, right, and helping them and guiding them. You know, I had been a, like director, executive over software development groups up until that point, but always was kind of focused on the process and the way we work and how we collaborate and how the teams are structured and all, that was always what was my focus less, about like, the technical architecture and other things like, other people were better at that than me, but like, thinking about the flow and all that before I understood lean, before I understood any of that, right, like that was just kind of innate and what I would always look at.
So then all of a sudden where I'm coaching them. And I always thought like, after that three to six month engagement, I’d just go back and get another kind of leadership role in one of the Austin companies and, but about six months in, I was like, this is kind of fun and I'm not half bad at it. You know, maybe I could build a business around this, right. And, and so that's when Agile Velocity was formed in 2010, about six months into that, where I go, okay, and then created the company and started doing, getting more active in the local kind of user group, which Agile Austin is pretty active, they've got over 10 meetings a month just happening within that umbrella. So I started getting involved in that, started kind of building a brand around helping folks in agile space. And then by the end of, well, I guess it was kind of into that next year that I started picking up other clients and then added a first employee and then like, oh, okay, like, now we're off, right, and it wasn't just that, you know, we got past that first engagement and then, okay, now there's a business here and more people are interested in, and really the beginning of 2012 is when we started getting, oh, we got this client and this client, and this client and this client now I'm stretched everywhere and now I need to start adding people. So, yeah.
Ula Ojiaku
That's really awesome. So let's move on to, because I noticed on your website and actually it was via your Agile Velocity website that I learned about Path to Agility, also known as P to A. So can you tell us what P to A is?
David Hawks
Yeah, so Path to Agility is something that emerged over, kind of our years of guiding transformation changes within big enterprise organisations. And it started out in kind of two forms. One was, we started in, for those that are on video, if you're not on video, you can go to pathtoagility.com It's like, we started to build out this kind of model, and the model was in response to a couple of things. One is every time the sales hotline would ring, it would be a leader saying, I need to do agile, can you come train my teams? Right. And we would be like, all right, we can do that, but it's not just a team level problem. Right? Like it has more levels to it. So we are trying to, how do we articulate that? And two, it's more than just a training thing, right? You're going to need more than training. You're going to need coaching and support and rollout. And you need to think about this as an organisational change. So we started to build out this model called Path to Agility. At the same time, we had a coach who took the Scrum guide and reverse engineered it into a set of stories that were like, you know, we're cards on a wall that we're like, all right, I'm here to coach you on getting a product owner in place. In order for us to know that we have a product owner in place, here's the acceptance criteria, right? In order for us to know that we're doing good sprint planning, here's the acceptance criteria. And we built out these cards and that really helped us as coaches to start being explicit about why are we here? What are we here to do? Because a lot of times people are like, the leaders are like, I have no idea what you're going to coach. Right. And so we started being explicit with that. Well, that all evolved into what we have and know in Path to Agility today, which is a capability model of 85 capabilities that have over 400 acceptance criteria for us to be able to evaluate where we are in our transformation, where we are in our adoption, in an outcome driven, kind of assessment versus a just, practice of what we see is too many companies that are just going through the motions of agile. It's like I have a daily Scrum check. I have a Scrum master check, which, that early version was kind of more like, are we doing the things? But we all know that you could do the things and still not be delivering faster or delivering with happier customers or anything like that. So we've evolved Path to Agility, to become a way of assessing from an outcomes perspective, from a capability perspective, are we actually achieving a, you know, let's say little a agility, as opposed to just doing the framework that's kind of in front of us. And so we're using that with all of our clients and we've got over a hundred facilitators across the world that are using Path to Agility to guide transformations in this much more outcome driven way.
Ula Ojiaku
I know that some listeners or people, well, if they're watching the video, they will be wondering, is this yet another agile framework?
David Hawks
Yeah. So we may, it's funny you ask, because we made the mistake of calling it a, like we think it is a framework, but it's not that type of framework. Right. So what we distinguish is, you know, Scrum, SAFe, those are implementation frameworks, right, they're telling us the, how, like, here's the practices that we should do, here's the rules of how we work. We think about Path to Agility as more of a transformation framework, right? A framework on how do I guide my transformation? So think of it as an umbrella on top of Scrum, SAFe, Kanban, LeSS, DaD, whatever, Nexus, whatever practices, you know, user stories, story points, whatever you're doing. Path to Agility is a lens on top of that to say, how do I guide the change? How do I, so we took agile adoption patterns and organisational change management techniques and combined them into a way of saying how do I get from point A to point B? Because, you know, I mentioned that that first engagement that I had, Wayport, and bought by AT&T well, one of the mistakes I made as like the first time as a coach is I had seen a hundred mile an hour agile, and they were maybe at like, you know, 10 or 20 mile an hour agile. And I tried to yank them to a hundred mile an hour agile overnight, and that didn't work. Right? Like, you can't do that. You’ve got to go from like 20 to 40, and 40 to 60, and 60 to 80. And sometimes when you go from 80 to 100, you throw out some of the things you learned that, you know, some of the, like the training wheels types of things that you learned. Well, Path to Agility is a way, a lens for you to see where are we? Are we at 20? Are we at 40? Are we at 60? Are we at 80? And given where we are, it informs our next steps, right? Because we can't jump and leapfrog all the way to a hundred. While you maybe could do that, if you were a 10 person company, an enterprise, you know, most of our organisations we deal with are in the thousands, in the organisation that's transforming. And, you know, you can't change like that. Like, you're trying to turn an aircraft carrier around and it takes time, right, and it's almost like we're trying to turn it into the wind, right? Like it keeps blowing back, you know? So, yeah, it's a challenging thing, but getting a better sense of where we are, and better intel on what to do next is what Path to Agility is trying to help organisations and leaders with.
Ula Ojiaku
You mentioned something earlier about, you know, helping organisations with evaluating where they are on the transformation. So that gives me the impression that it could be used for, you know, no matter what, you know, implementation framework they've adopted, it's still there, it still fits in seamlessly with helping them look at it from an outcome-based focus. So that's one. So that's a type of organisation that has already started, but there probably would also be organisations, let's say they're in the early stages, or they've not yet started. If they implement this with whatever they choose, you know, it probably would give them, save them a lot of heartache because they're starting from an outcome. That is the focus. So for the first scenario where an organisation is, has already started, how would you typically go about introducing P to A and how would they, you know, how can at a high level, you know, how would you go about
David Hawks
Yeah, I mean, yeah. So first one, like you’re, well, I guess the first thing is very few organisations at this point are on their first agile transformation, right? Like, and what I kind of, just like thought about it is that, you know, 10 years ago, or prior to 10 years ago, everything was grassroots agile, right? Like the one I told the story, it was like the developers were the ones introducing agile at that first company in the ARTs. Right. But in then about 10 years ago, everything was Scrum based. It was really team only agile transformation applying Scrum. Then, you know what, six, seven years ago, SAFe and other scaling frameworks started to emerge because it's really the team level unlocked the ability for us to think about how it could be applied across like the system as a system of teams, team of teams, in a, in a 100 to 200 person organisation, and so the scaling techniques. So then we started seeing all these scaling transformations and now we're on the cusp of introducing the next era, which are, which is business agility, and how, now that we've seen how it can apply at, like these kind of sub orgs. Now we could see how it could be applied across the whole org, right. And that starting to turn to that. So I would say all that's just an evolution, and so most companies are in a transformation somewhere along that horizon. And so what Path to Agility helps you do is figure out where you are. Right. And figure out when to, you know, again, you know, and some transformations have stalled, right? So it could be a way of reenergising, right, to get a sense of, okay, we, you know, a lot of times people think we're done because we implemented all the things, right. We did all the stuff in the picture. We have an RTE, we have an ART, we do PI planning. We're doing all the things. So we're done . Well, not necessarily, right? Like maybe, you know, we have five stages and paths to agility. Maybe you've learned those things, but the next stage is have you gotten predictable delivery out of those things? And then the next stage is, are you optimising for speed and reducing cycle time by doing those things? And then the fifth stage is, are you adapting based on what the market is telling you because you can now deliver quickly. Are you actually sensing and responding based on what the market is saying, and are you running quick experiments, are you testing and learning? Right? Like those are different levels of kind of maturity. And very few companies are actually at that fifth stage, most are actually kind of exiting learn, trying to get predictable and have an achieved speed. So, what I would say is for most organisations, Path to Agility can help them assess where they are if they already are doing some transformation efforts and it will better inform their next actions.
And then for the second kind of scenario, you said, where they're kind of more just starting. Well they're probably just starting somewhere along that evolution, right? Like, there's already some agile teams happening somewhere, right. So they're not necessarily starting, like I've never done agile before, but what it can help them do is determine what practices we need. So, we would say, figure out your business outcome. Like we want to deliver faster, whatever that is, then figure out the minimum number, like what capabilities do you need to enable that? And Path to Agility helps with that, and then do the minimal amount of practice change in order to support that. Don't just go implement all the things, right? Because you may not need all those things, and if you get lost in just doing all those things, you might not actually achieve the outcome that you’re after.
Ula Ojiaku
Awesome. So how would you conduct the assessments? Because some listeners might be curious to say, yeah, well, it sounds really interesting, but what's, how would the assessment go and how would you then go on to choose what capabilities you need and, you know, how are you going to measure?
David Hawks
Yeah, there’s two fidelities, I would say, of ability to kind of assess with Path to Agility, and then I think it's important to mention kind of our philosophy around assessment. So, we don't believe in assessing just to get a score, right. We believe in the process of self-evaluation or self-assessment enables the intelligence to determine action, right. The only reason, so we don't want to just turn assessment in to report card it, you know, we've seen that and then it's just weaponised and it's not really that useful. So that means anytime we do assessment, we want the people that can take action in the room doing it, right, and we don't want it to also, we don't believe in, just offline, fill out a set survey, because that doesn't invoke conversation and doesn't invoke action. So all of our assessment kind of processes are built around the notion of a facilitated session with the people, like, say we're going to do an assessment with just a single team, we could just do that and wait, but we would do it with the team, right, because then we would say, okay, given what you learned and where you are, and what Path to Agility is saying, hey, here are some of the next steps, then you can determine what actions do you want to take. If you're doing that across a system or, say, an organisation of like 150 people, well then you would want to bring the leadership team of that organisation in, because they're the ones that are going to need to prioritise action and take action based on that, right. So then you would do a facilitated session with them and work through that.
Ula Ojiaku
Okay. Now there's something you've been mentioning, which you've mentioned like team, system, organisation, for some people who might not be familiar with the term. So the team is like, you know, a normal team, the team that actually would do the work in a day to day, and you might have multiple of those teams. The system, is that the same thing as a program, you know?
David Hawks
It could be, yeah, and if you are, so, system, we're not talking about like a technical system, we're talking about the system of teams or the team of teams, the flow of work through the system, and if you're doing a safe implementation and system and ART are usually pretty synonymous, that kind of scale, assuming that you've formed your ARTs correctly, aligned to value and you know, some things like that, so it would be more akin to, all right, I need these 10 teams to deliver a product together. So however we're aligning around value and being more product centric, that's typically the system. And then the org is, typically, aligned more with kind of, a lot of times more of a hierarchical kind of context and an organisation could be like the VPs organisation, where is the transformation change happening? In some of our large clients where we have 5,000, so one of our case studies is out there as with Southwest Airlines, so I can mention that one. So, you know, they had 5,000 people in their technology organisation, but the cruise systems, that organisation was led by a gentlemen named Marty Garza, and he had, you know, 250 people in that organisation, and that was the focus of some of the transformational efforts. So we got his leadership team together, right, to look at kind of their transformational roadmap and backlog and plan and applied that organisational lens. And then we work with the marketing organisation, we apply a different lens, right, like, so, depending on that organisational kind of context, most of the time, these big transformations are, I say, are really like transformations inside of transformations inside of transformations, because it's really, you've got the larger scope, but then, all right, we're going to have a wave approach that we're going to do crew, and then we're going to do, you know, round offs and then tech ops, and like, we're going to roll out these different parts. We're not going to do all of them at once typically, right. It's going to be kind of a waved approach. And so that order lens is whatever that kind of context that we're looking at.
Ula Ojiaku
Okay. That makes sense. So what's next for Path to Agility?
David Hawks
Yeah. So, we’ve actually been, had the luxury this last year that we've taken what was, you know, in this card form that I mentioned originally, and then with COVID, we had to convert that to virtual Miro and Mural boards and do all of our workshops in that form. But over the last year, we've actually invested in building a software tool and product around Path to Agility called Path to Agility Navigator, and that's just enabling the assessment, the visualisation, the impediments, the tracking, the management of your transformation to just be done so much easier, and it's not like stuff hiding in a Miro or hiding in a Mural, right, and, or, in all these different PowerPoints or whatever. So we're actually launching that product this quarter, and so yeah, Path to Agility Navigator, we'll put a link in the materials. But that's something interesting, as far as the visualisation and management of your transformation, we're excited to have done a lot of work on that, and launching that this month.
Ula Ojiaku
And it does look cool. I was at the, you know, Path to Agility Facilitators mini conference and the demo was awesome, it shows a lot of promise. I can't wait to play around with it myself. So what do you then, because you have helped lots of organisations since you started back in 2010, 11, 12 with their transformation and evaluating where they are at now, so what would be your advice for leaders already on their transformation?
David Hawks
Yeah, so one, you know, we kind of have hit on it, but just to put a pin in it, it is to say, when you're thinking about your transformation, start with, you know, what, I guess the end in mind, but like, you know, like what's the outcome? What, not a goal. Your goal is not to be agile, right, or not to implement agile, or not to implement SAFe. Those are not goals, that's not going to motivate anybody. So what you've got to have, this kind of vision statement, mission statement that you're making really clear, that's a motivating change in your organisation that people can get excited about, the reason why we're doing this change is because we're trying to, we need to be more responsive in the market, if we're not more responsive, we're getting left behind, right. We're losing market share, whatever, what's creating the urgency for change? And if you can't find it, then don't do it, right. Because it's hard and it's difficult and you won't persevere through the change if you can't come up with this clear mission of why you're doing it. That's going to motivate not just the leaders, not just the Board, but like motivate more importantly, all the people, right, that are going to be part of the change. So that's got to be, and it's got to be a business outcome focused, not practices centric.
Second is, the leadership team has to lead the change, and it's not enough to say, Mr. VP, I support the agile, you know, you've got to be engaged in the transformation efforts, you've got to be identifying how you need to potentially shift your questions, your behaviour, your actions, right? I don't know how many times I've seen a leader say, hey, yeah, y'all go do agile, but what's the date and what's going to be in it? Right? Like you're still asking the same question, so I encourage leaders to change instead of asking these very delivery focused kind of questions to ask, what are you learning and how can I help, right. What can I do to support you? What impediments can I remove for you that are organisational? The leaders have to go attack the organisational and systemic impediments that emerge, right, and they've got to lead those change efforts while the teams are trying to change themselves, right, and how they're working. So it's not enough just to say, go train my teams or go train the people to do work differently. You've got to think about what are you doing differently that's encouraging? And the reason why I say, what are you learning is we want to start encouraging a continuous improvement culture, and so you've got to apply accountability to, are you taking, are you having meaningful retrospectives and taking action? What are you learning? What are you doing to improve? And if you don't ever ask that question, you're only asking like, are you going to make the date, then they're not going to focus on improving, right. They're going to focus on just delivering, but if they can focus on improving, then they'll actually start delivering more successfully, right? You'll get what you want out of it, you want them to deliver faster, you want them to do those things, but ask them and start putting the onus on what are they learning, right, challenging them in that way.
Ula Ojiaku
Awesome. So what books have you, you know, recommended most to people, and why?
David Hawks
I think, yeah, I’ve got it right here, you know, I'm a big David Marquet fan and so, you know, Turn the Ship Around, and I've seen him speak multiple times, is always great, but the one he came out with just like, I don't know, this was like a year or two ago was the Leadership is Language and, you know, he says there, the hidden power of what you say and what you don't, right, like, again, that if you're a leader and you're trying to think about, okay, how do I, you know, you say, oh, I need to operate differently, but I, you know, but I don't, but I'm kicked out of the room. I don't get invited to the sprint plannings and I'm not allowed in the retrospectives, so what is it that I need to do differently, you know, looks like that or things that, you know, start helping you see, okay, how can I lead in a more outcome-based way, right? Give people purpose, but get out of the way of the how, right, and I think that's, you know, that's kind of where I would point folks.
Ula Ojiaku
Okay, well, thank you. I’ve noted that and there will be links to both books, Turn the Ship Around, which you mentioned, and Leadership is Language in the show notes. And how can the audience find you if they want to get in touch with you or engage with you?
David Hawks
Yeah. So, you know, our two kind of brands that we've talked about here, so agilevelocity.com pathtoagility.com as well are kind of the two different things that we've talked about here, and you can reach out on both of those websites and we're small, but mighty. So, you know, that's an easy way to find me. There are three Davids on our team now, so you do need to be specific with my last name or else you might get to one of the other Davids. We actually hired two in December, so it was like, we went from one to three overnight. Now we actually have to use last names.
Ula Ojiaku
And are you on social media by any chance?
David Hawks
Yeah, so I’m actually Austin Agile is, but I'm not, I haven't been very active in Twitter in a long time, but that's, LinkedIn is probably a better, and I think my profile is David Hawks1 or something like that.
Ula Ojiaku
We'll find the link, no worries. So LinkedIn.
David Hawks
LinkedIn's probably the best. And then, yeah, that's where I'm more active.
Ula Ojiaku
All right. So would there be anything you'd like the audience to do, you know, based on what we've discussed so far, is there anything you want to share?
David Hawks
Yeah, if you’re involved in agile transformation, transition, adoption, trying to improve your ways of working, then I would just encourage you to think about, is there a clear business driver that everybody is aware of, right? Is it, you know, you might be aware of it as the leader, is everybody aware of why you're doing it? Or if you went and polled why we're doing it, would they say well, because you know, Joe VP told me to, or would they say because we're implementing SAFe, right, like what, why are we implementing SAFe, right? And the reason for that is if people aren't motivated to change, then you're not going to persevere through the, it's going to get, it's tough, right? There's some tough things that have to happen. So, and then I think changing, thinking about changing your language in terms of kind of applying more of an accountability for learning and continuous improvement versus an accountability, we have plenty of accountability towards like getting things done, right. So I would encourage folks to kind of shift that a little bit.
Ula Ojiaku
Thank you so much, David, it's been very insightful speaking with you and I can't wait to see what comes with, you know, comes up in the Path to Agility platform, so thank you again for your time.
David Hawks
Thanks for having me.
Ula Ojiaku
That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!