#136 | Unlocking the Future of Work: Insights from Atlassian's Work Futurist Dominic Price

Join us as we discuss modern leadership and effective teamwork with Dominic Price, a seasoned expert in tech-human collaboration and organizational success and work futurist at Atlassian (Australia's most successful tech start-up). With over a decade of experience at Atlassian, Dom shares his perspectives on the evolving nature of work, the intersection of technology and human collaboration, and strategies for fostering thriving teams in large organizations.

In this episode, we discuss: 

• Career insights and perspectives on leadership, teamwork, and organizational culture.
• The future of work: Why bosses may regret the return to work demand and implications for tech-human collaboration.
• Strategies for effective collaboration and modern leadership in large organizations.
• The evolving relationship between technology and human intelligence in driving innovation.
• Overcoming common challenges in scaling effectively and lessons learned from pivotal career moments.
• Rethinking productivity metrics and fostering creativity, collaboration, and employee well-being.
• Emerging trends in the future of work and advice for thriving in the modern workplace.

Tune in to gain valuable insights and actionable strategies for navigating the changing landscape of work and technology.

To connect with Dom reach out here: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominic-price-0892243?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=ios_app

To register for the PMO Coaching Cohort go here: https://agilemanagementoffice.com/workshops/pmocoaching/ 

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This podcast is sponsored by Agile Management Office (www.agilemanagementoffice.com ) providing high-impact delivery execution in an agile era for scaling businesses.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

You're listening to Agile Ideas, the podcast hosted by Fatima Rabouchi. For anyone listening out there not having a good day, please know there is help out there. Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode of Agile Ideas. I'm Fatima, ceo at Agile Management Office, mental Health Ambassador and your host. Before we get into today's podcast, I just wanted to quickly share and remind you that next month we will be starting the PMO coaching program. So if you are interested in uplifting or building a PMO from scratch, please reach out to us via wwwagilemanagementofficecom or one word, or reach out to me on LinkedIn if you'd like to be part of that PMO program, looking forward to running it next month and having you all being part of it.

Speaker 1: 0:53

Now on to our guest today, someone I'm very excited to have had the opportunity to get on the podcast. His name is Dominic Price. Dominic is currently the work futurist at Atlassian. For those of you who don't know, atlassian is one of the most successful tech startups coming out of Australia. Dom is passionate deeply about teamwork and particularly the intersection of technology and humans. He has spent over 10 years helping tech company Atlassian scale effectively by focusing on how teams and humans should work together and how technology can help to amplify that. In his time, atlassian has scaled from hundreds of staff to over 12,000 and from 35 customers to over 280,000 worldwide. Dom is passionate about modern leadership, building learning organizations and thriving teams, and none of this happens by accident. So please join me in welcoming Dom to the show. Welcome Dom to the show. Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 2: 1:57

I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Speaker 1: 1:59

I am too. I'm really excited because I was obviously been following your journey for quite a while and, for those of us that don't know, I've already told everyone that you're the work futurist at Atlassian. But what exactly is a work futurist? Because for many people listening they probably don't know what that means.

Speaker 2: 2:16

Yeah, it's a two part. First of all, we have to be honest to your audience, because they're all nice people, they're self-selected to listen in um, it's a made-up job, like we made it up um, just over eight years ago now. Because we we saw an opportunity in market whereby we've been focusing for years in Atlassian on how we worked and how we scaled, how we created what we used to call our secret sauce. And I sat down with our founders one day and we're talking about it and they were like, instead of it being a secret sauce, why don't we make it a source and just like, give it to the world, give it to our customers? Like, if we're getting better at how we work, why don't we gift it and pay it forward? And in doing that, we realized that what we were helping teams and organizations do was to discover their future.

Speaker 2: 2:57

Right, it wasn't that. A future was something you had to dream about and not the future something you had to buy from a consultant for 40 million dollars. Yes, a future was something you could deliver yourself on, but you had to think a bit differently and actually beg. Borrowing and stealing from other organizations was their way of doing that, and so I just became very passionate about two things that created the work futurist role. One was the future of work, but the second thing was the human part of that, and if I go back eight years at the time, as it kind of is now, everything was tech focused. Tech's going to solve the world. Tech's going to do this, and you're like you know what. We need humans to be working effectively as well. And so, for me, when I talk and focus on the future of work, it's very much. How do we unleash the potential of humans and teams, and then how do we use technology to amplify that? And that is something I'm very passionate about.

Speaker 1: 3:50

It's really good to see that, because we in our team have already engaged some of your content at Atlassian in terms of, like the my User Manuals and other things like that, and it's just so crazy how many plays that you have available on the website, like you, you said completely free to download, and they've been, you know, effectively helpful for us, let alone others that are downloading. So how do you, how would, how do you as an organization, with the amount of people that you have, come up with these things? You have like a, a team of people, or is it just ip that gets built on, based on having an?

Speaker 2: 4:22

idea. It's a a good question. So let's talk, because it's happened in different ways, right? So if you go back eight years, when I first, you know, moved into the role of work futurist, it was kind of hacky, right. We had a couple of people who thought it was a good idea. We're like, yeah, let's give it a shot. Right, we were a smaller company, you know. It was just easier to do.

Speaker 2: 4:45

Scrappiness was something that we were famous for and now as we've matured, we've gotten a little bit more systematic. The reason I mentioned that is, when people are starting their journey towards, like, a new way of working, they tend to look at other people's end product and say I want that. What they forget to look at is the work they did to get there, right. So the scrappiness was me, a product manager, a designer, an engineer and a program manager. There's five of us were like, should we have a play with this? Like, is it, is it worth trying? And it was such a small experiment even if it went wrong it wouldn't really cost anything, absolutely. Then, as it sort of bubbled up, we kind of sat there one day and went, oh, like, this is a thing now, this, this maybe needs a team. But does it need a team or do we make it a self-service thing? We've chopped and changed on that in the last eight years.

Speaker 2: 5:28

Sometimes we sort of take a step back and say let the system right, let the wisdom of the crowd do this, but it's everyone's last job in a week, right? If I say to we've got 11,000 people globally. If I say, if you land on a great way of working this week, can you please write it down? Someone's going to land on a new way of working and never write it down because they've got a million other things to do. Absolutely, the balance we've found is we've got a few people dedicated to it. We have a lab right of humans who do experiments and explore and wonder and try new things, but also we've got 11,000 people who are experimenting every day and it's the confluence of those two things that make it magical, because I've seen a lot of the other organizations do this and call it thought leadership, and a little bit of me dies every time I hear the words thought leadership, because I don't want a thought, I want a practice. Yes, and so I know that when a, a leader or a teammate in Atlassian shares an idea with me of here's the way my team works. I know they've tried it 15 times, so I know it works.

Speaker 2: 6:27

It's not me sharing something for marketing, it's me sharing something because we've tried it and it worked for us, yeah. And so we source from a variety of different avenues and then our mantra is share early and often. So. You know, as a fan of the playbook, you may have seen yeah, we removed a few plays a few years ago because we put them out there. They worked for a while and then they didn't, so we removed them. Right, it's not, it's not a finished product. You can't download it, you can't print it, it will never be finished. It's constantly evolving and that requires thousands of Atlassians every week to be experimenting with their new ways of working.

Speaker 1: 6:58

And as soon as we get something decent, we share it externally it's a really good um, yeah, really good way of taking that concept of iterative improvement and the fact that you've got that many clients. As you said, you're probably learning things through those client engagements we currently have and then you actually evolve that product or service offering and, like you said, not paying you know 40 million dollars for a consultant to just sell me or provide me gated theory that then actually doesn't help when we move the dial.

Speaker 2: 7:27

So but, fatima, there's something you've touched on there that I think the market's hungry for right now, which is lived experience yes, so so for every play we produce, not only do I get to play with thousands of teams in atlassian with it, but I get to go to the big banks in australia and a telco here and a company in the US and a company in Europe like I get to play. I mean, we've got over 300,000 organizations use our products who are all trying to experiment with new ways of working. When they try this stuff, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes they send us back a new version and say we made these changes.

Speaker 2: 7:59

I'm like, ah, now that that always helps me keep my my eyes open. Because I'm like just because it works at Atlassian doesn't mean it will work for you. The principles and philosophy probably will, but the exact practices it's written you might need to tweak and tailor. So I think that iterative exercise is something that we all have the capability to do in business right now. For some reason, so many organizations push it to the side. The ability to learn fast is there for every organization and we keep on going on these 18 month leaps and you're like why? Why wait 18 months to learn something when you can learn something in 18 minutes?

Speaker 1: 8:35

yeah, absolutely, and I think one of the things that stifles or at least what I see with some companies is the, the hierarchy. So unless it's made by a certain person, it's not considered as a deal where it could be the best idea in that company for that day yeah, I think.

Speaker 2: 8:47

I think hierarchy also there's. There's a weird sort of fetish in business certainly in australia, but I'm seeing it a lot in the us as well to manage everything through process or policy or procedure, like even if you take the you know, post pandemic, where do people work? And and every hr person in the world was like we need a policy policy. And you're like why? I mean, maybe the policy just says work where you're most effective. You're an adult, I pay you good money, I've given you the tools, like work where you can do the best work you can Like. No, no, you must work from home on this day, you must work from the office. And so again, we've gone down the path of policy. What, what we want is evolutionary.

Speaker 1: 9:21

Yeah, absolutely. Actually, that's a good point. So one of the challenges at the moment is the whole debacle and debate around returning to the work, and you know, different companies apply and I'm very aware of how Atlassian's approach to that is. I think I'm thinking, you know, organisations that have good measures of accountability and good practices in place and understanding around the guardrails of ways of working shouldn't really have a concern around how people return to work. But what are you seeing globally in terms of organisations and bosses maybe regretting the demand for people to return to work?

Speaker 2: 9:51

Yeah, I think, look, I've got this is going to sound weird, but I've got a huge amount of sympathy for legacy leaders, right, it's an odd statement to make, but I genuinely have. There's a whole lot of leaders out there who grew up in a very different world to the one we're in today and I I think to some extent, we're being a little bit conveniently mean to them by saying I can't believe you don't understand this new thing, right, and you're like I can believe that I I can believe they don't understand it because because, if, if you've been in the world of business for 40 years, everything was about the office, like where you worked was the office. You communicated in the office, you had meetings in the office, right, you had this lovely structure and ritual nine to five, monday to Friday. You also pre-internet turned off work when you left work, right, you actually left an office and work stayed there and home started. So there's a whole lot of things that happen in that environment. I actually quite like the sound of. I don't know that I want to be working 24 by 7. So sometimes we say, oh, flexibility is really cool. Fatima, I'm going to call you at 11 pm and I need you on this thing and you're like, under the banner of flexibility, you're like, yeah, now, like, so I think for those people there's so much unlearning to do of what worked for them, yes, to then embrace this new world.

Speaker 2: 11:06

And you can multiply that out for historical organizations, right, there's a couple of the banks that I work with are like 160, 170 years old. There is so much history and heritage in there. Yes, it's probably paid a dividend for them. The world around them has changed and they've woken up and gone. Oh, the world's changed. I think it's a bit cruel of us to expect a 50 000 person organization with 160 years experience to change on a dime right. And so I want them to change and I'm passionate about them changing.

Speaker 2: 11:35

I think sometimes we miss the empathy and we miss the patience and then we get this very convenient narrative. So like, I've just been laughing from the sidelines the last few weeks as everyone piles into nike, right, so nike was like ah, they returned everyone from the office, they wanted to be more innovative and their share price is quite low. They've lost a bit of market share, share price is quite low and there's a whole lot of convenient commentators going. Nike share price is down because they don't work from home. And here's this other random sports company and they do flexible work and their share price is up. So see, and you're like, hang on, that might be, that might be some correlation, but that is not causation, right? So I just think we need to like pause and go.

Speaker 2: 12:11

Maybe nike has got someone's legacy. It's hard to do distributed work. I'm in a company and I think we do well at it. That doesn't mean it's easy, and I think I think if we, if we make it sound easy and then people struggle with it, all we've done is alienate them. We're not taking the long on the journey we're going. I'm distributed, you're not, and you're you're, you're not as good as me, which I think is just unnecessary. This is saying how do we embrace this, how do we accept it as a new reality and embrace it? And that's just going to take a little bit of patience and for those organizations, a lot of legacy to let go of, yeah. And then this bravery to be curious again, right.

Speaker 1: 12:47

This bravery to experiment, which is hard in the current environment, right, when all your shareholders like I don't care where you people work, I need, I need more margin, I need more return and and it's interesting because, just on the mindset thing, you hear a lot about the fixed mindset versus growth mindset and there is a lot of fixed mindset in some of these organizations have to work with some of these banks and I think one of the challenges I know if you see this as well. But even when it comes to implementing new ways of working and you're under the agile umbrella, they're really trying to copy and paste what another organization has done, which is a bad start yeah, yeah, it's like, and I get why.

Speaker 2: 13:22

Because we're all trying to shortcut, right it's. It's funny that, yeah, we're still selling agile transformation. And agile's 24 years old right, it can, it can drink and vote in every country in the world. So you know, we can still pretend that it's new and it's not. But I think there's organizations waking up to it, going, oh, we need to now catch up. How can we accelerate this? Uh, let's go, let's go to spotify and let's go to Spotify and let's go to Meta and let's go to Google and let's go to all these other places and we'll copy them. Yeah, I was chatting to a senior leader of a telco a few years ago because they were doing a study tour in the US and they were telling me the list of companies.

Speaker 2: 13:56

I'm like, oh, you're a telco, right. And they're like, yeah, and it's like, you're not going to see any telcos. So don't tell me you want to be more like Spotify, because their business model is fundamentally different to yours. So what works for them? Understand the principles, the philosophies, right, the guardrails in there. But copy cutting and pasting is lazy and dangerous, absolutely. What you'll know and I've seen on steroids recently is when they do the copy, cut and paste. They copy on top of the other way of working A hundred percent. So their hybrid is not the best of both worlds, it's the worst of both worlds. It's policy, process, procedure, you know, waterfall structure with bits of agile in the middle. You're like, oh God, you've created Frankenstein.

Speaker 1: 14:36

Yes, absolutely that, literally that's what I'm living and breathing at the moment. It's just they don't actually take time to look at the what's in place at the moment and then obviously evolve that or even try to improve it. And, to your point, when they go and a lot of the banks have gone and copied the ing or the spotify model because I think that's worked and they haven't looked at telcos because they want to be innovative and you know, we want to be the best telco or the best absolutely.

Speaker 1: 14:58

They're trying to trying to go down that path, but not actually reflecting on what the maturity in their organization is the culture of reality, the reality of their own.

Speaker 2: 15:06

So there's there's a couple of uh sort of authors right now that if I could take their content and put it on every billboard that every business leader saw, I would. So one is um a guy called hega vera rao and bob sutton. They're from stanford uni, um authors. They've written a book called the friction project and there's a whole chapter on the art of subtraction and when I read it I was like, damn, that is what the if the business world needs a kick in the ass right now. It's like before you add anything, remove the things that are no longer valuable.

Speaker 2: 15:40

I remember reading it and going no one does that. We lay you in on top, but we don't do that. And then the second author is a wonderful friend of mine called Barry O'Reilly. Barry published a book years ago probably five, six years old now called Unlearning, and it's actually a leadership book, but I think you can apply it to the business lens of going what are the old habits I need to unlearn and leave in the past so I can do the experimentation? So when you talk about improvement, I think we've only got time to improve if we remove something from our calendar first, to give ourselves the space, otherwise we're never going to get around to it yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 16:14

It's actually a really good point as well in relation to unlearning and learning and just around this whole transformation. I find that leaders spend the least time learning and unlearning and they expect the organization to change, but they're meant to be leading from the front. Why do you think that is?

Speaker 2: 16:28

um, I think the whole host of reasons. You can look at the short tenure of leadership, like if you're an average ceo in an asx organization, right, maybe you're doing four to six years. Do you really feel the need to change? Maybe you've been hired and the board has told you we've hired you, fatima, because of your experience. We want you to do your playbook that you rolled out of those other fuckers. Just do that, and so you start to believe your own bs after a while. Right, and and so I see that Also.

Speaker 2: 16:52

I think humility takes a huge amount of energy. So does empathy, and it takes time. And a lot of these people are working on really tight timeframes where they believe that banging the table and getting people to blindly follow is the quickest path. And it might be quick. It's just not very effective because it's a path to somewhere, but it's just not the place we want to be.

Speaker 2: 17:17

I've been involved with some quite I won't even call it slow, just call it methodical change where we took our time over it but it's stuck. I'm like, yeah. So whenever I hear people talk about change fatigue, I'm like I don't think we've got change fatigue, I just think about it, managing it, to be honest. So I get it again. I've got a bit of sympathy with these leaders because they're often being given a challenge that they're not up for.

Speaker 2: 17:35

I think the average sort of agile transformation was given to probably a 55-year-old male CIO who has 35 years experience of waterfall technology software change. You're like yeah, I get why we picked you. I'm not sure you're the best person for the job. Actually, maybe there's someone not as senior as you but actually better at this skill right or this technique or this capability. But again, I think, as you mentioned before, our hierarchy is getting in the way. Yes, be more vulnerable and demonstrating empathy with their teams to get the change to happen. And it's probably some of the most fascinating coaching I do, because technically these people are often crazy smart but they've not done the thing they're about to try and do.

Speaker 1: 18:22

Yeah, absolutely, and that makes it hard for it to stick and you wonder why some of these fail, like the sense that these leaders are trying to drive a change from the top that they don't understand, and then they're trying to get other parts of the organization on board. Particularly in Agile, where operational teams are usually forgotten about and completely misguided. They don't understand project management fundamentals, let alone putting this thing called Agile on top, and it's a really confusing situation.

Speaker 2: 18:46

Yeah, if you ever want to see that play out, just put a CIO and CFO in the same room, because I do it on every giant agile projects. I'm like, before we do anything, yeah, I want those two people in the room and I'm like right. So, cio, you're about to roll out this thing called agility. Let's not call it agile, call it agility. What are some of your principles and philosophies? And they explain it and say how do you feel about that? They're like well, we're still doing annual planning yeah, exactly right, we're still doing this, we're still doing this kind of budgeting.

Speaker 2: 19:11

And so you're like well, if that's the currency of the business, in what way are you agile anymore? Right, if you're making people sign up for annual goals, annual budgets, annual everything I don't know? I mean, maybe agility makes you go a little bit faster in between, but are you going to get the nimbleness of agility, are you going to get the course correction of agility if you're just going to deliver what you signed up for anyway? So that's where this tension comes in.

Speaker 1: 19:32

Absolutely. You mentioned, I believe in my research that productivity is a shit measure Is that correct.

Speaker 2: 19:39

I hate it. I absolutely hate it.

Speaker 1: 19:40

If I could delete a word from the business language, it would be that I was going to say can you elaborate why and maybe provide some guidance on alternative metrics that you would use or approaches?

Speaker 2: 19:49

Yeah, so use or approaches, yeah, so, um, why so? I I think if you were, if you go back in time, productivity, as it's measured, right, its output over time, um, worked really well when we were solely or or proportionally manufacturing, right? Uh, when we're producing physical goods, um, and in a time when we weren't really using iq or even eq develop, there was no creativity or curiosity. The production line was people stood there doing a task, handing it over, right, and, weirdly, productivity ends up being a good measure for that. But if you look at where that's happening in the world right now, it's very rarely humans. That's the stuff that we've automated, that we have robots and machines doing. So I don't think we want that measure on humans. Humans, I think we want to empower with curiosity, with creativity, with empathy and vulnerability, with compassion, right, all these things that make us uniquely human, none of which gets measured in productivity not at all. And so when someone says to me, like how do I measure my productivity this week, let's take this conversation as an example right, how do we measure the time? Me and you invested in this conversation in the world of productivity? Well, productivity is output over time. So we spent time on this this week and we've gained no output, zero. So we're in a deficit, we fail, we shouldn't have done this. And you're like, well, that's a great conversation, we learned something from it. It goes out, it benefits other people, they learn, they learn, they get better. And you're like, oh, how do you measure that? That's that's impact, that's outcomes right, that happens after the event and it's the impact on someone else, yes, and people stray away from that. It feels too orthogonal. So, michael, measure, measure, uh, goals, measure effectiveness, measure engagement, like, if your teams are happy and they're engaged and they have a strong north star and goals, you probably just need to get out of the way and and stop prodding them and tame productivity, because you're actually making them less productive. So that's where I come at the lens.

Speaker 2: 21:42

Where this has got heightened, I think, in the last three or four years is around mental health, right, and, and it baffles me that we can still continue to talk about increases in productivity, so output, and then people go. I'm struggling with burnout and mental health. We're like, oh, okay, cool, here's a membership for something that might make you feel better, but I need you to be more productive, I need you to do more things in less time and you're like we're not going to correlate those things, Because I'm Dom when I'm a parent, I'm Dom when I'm a parent, I'm Dom when I'm a partner and I'm Dom when I'm in work. I'm the same person, I'm the same asset, I'm the same resource, but trying to squeeze out some productivity from a human feels like a false economy to me.

Speaker 2: 22:20

So I think effectiveness, right, alignment to goals, engagement are really strong lead measures. And then the lag measures. For me, the real stuff is impact and outcomes, and so I normally use a proxy of those two, and with my team, they're the conversations we have on a regular basis. Right, we're trying to look at those input measures Are they right? And then impact over time is what we really care about, but we have to give ourselves patience to do that.

Speaker 1: 22:47

It's interesting because you know you're right around some of those metrics and measures that could be used. But it still seems that in a lot of organizations, even when they've supposedly implored agile, they are still measuring the impact or outcomes of a project at the very end, after six, nine, twelve months. Like it's counterintuitive.

Speaker 2: 23:06

Yeah. So this is where the whole challenge of value drop right becomes an amazing essence to go. The real point of agility is adding value over time. So I don't, you know, I remember a leader I was working with years ago was very excited about cutting the ribbon on the agile room as part of their agile transformation and I thought they were joking and they weren't. I was like, well, I'm hoping you delivered value before the ribbon.

Speaker 2: 23:29

And, by the way, what is an agile room? I didn't know. There was a space that you a two by two you went into anyway, but what it showed me was this this, this waterfall approach to agile, which I think is alive and doing very well, like not serving any value, but but alive in many organizations, which is it's going to be a year before we see any value at all. And you're like, oh, I don't know why you do that. I'm not. I'm not building roads here, like I'm often. I'm building technology or software or things where I could at least experiment and get I can get directional feedback really early on. So we look, we look at very small learning loops, um, in atlassian, and we're fortunate to do that as part of our mindset in our world. But those learning loops mean we can add value very quickly, not huge value, but incremental value, and that just de-risks the whole thing.

Speaker 1: 24:15

Absolutely, and I think these large organizations just going back to what we said earlier, they don't have the, I guess, the desire to do some of these experiments, because there's so much red tape to actually get passed and there's usually no budgets to do that, and then people don't have the authority to do that. I mean it's crazy, but a lot of these organizations are doing, uh, doing things backwards and they are actually, as you said, heavy waterfall at the beginning in terms of their investment slate and they're managing in the annual budgets, but they call themselves agile and they're absolutely not agile well, I think you've touched on something as well.

Speaker 2: 24:48

There's this whole essence of like sunk cost. Like I've sunk so much cost into, I might as well finish it. So the the thing. Whenever I go into a new organization I always find you can always find this person. I'm like can you tell me about the projects that changed name? They're the ones I go looking for because it's the same project under a new name, hopeful that something changes. And you're like it used to be called project phoenix and now it's called project radar, and and you're like Project Phoenix was never going to ship and neither is Radar. Is it like neither of that? But you've changed the name and everyone thinks it's a new project. So it's like why didn't you kill it?

Speaker 2: 25:19

Or who's doing the pre-mortem to say how do we increase the chance of success or reduce the chance of failure, or an exercise we do sometimes. If we're starting again right now, would we do this? And sometimes the answer is no. We're like oh, we'll stop it then, because the next best thing is better, because it's an opportunity cost. If we finish this project, we're not starting another one.

Speaker 1: 25:40

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 25:40

The opportunity cost is often there and we're quite nimble in that regard, and we do so without damaging egos. But I think most organizations would finish those projects regardless, then do a post-implementation plan. That said, we should never have done that. You're like it's a bit late, you've spent all the money.

Speaker 1: 26:00

It's like there was a really large home loan program that I was part of and they had restarted it three times and on the third time, after spending about $20 million absolutely failure of a program they shut it down for the third time, mind you, and one of the biggest challenges was the operational sme knowledge in that bank that was over the last 50 years in home loans and the delivery team was completely agile. The two could not meet in the middle. Yeah, they just clashed yeah, and they didn't define their ways of working.

Speaker 2: 26:24

Their guard drives all that stuff up front to kick off the program successfully so they can see an output and an outcome but just just like, listen to that example right and multiply that out on steroids In every organization where you're like oh it's not that you had a bad idea, the idea was great. In fact, there was a market opportunity there. You boogied it up in your delivery. Your execution stopped that good idea ever making it to market and you had three attempts. And I don't think that's an abnormal story. I think every organization's got that story where they're like yeah, that's a great idea, why did we never ship it? It's because you had two teams that just had organ rejection that you they never found a way of operating together absolutely.

Speaker 1: 27:00

It's the strategy not meeting delivery and operations in the same place, which is exactly why we, um, we. I was having some conversations this week and one one of the person, one of the people I was talking to were saying oh so, so you identify changes needed in an organisation, but you execute them as well. And it goes back to your thought leadership comment, where everyone out there is happy to tell you the theory, but how many people are actually putting into practice and experimenting? Yeah, it's funny.

Speaker 2: 27:25

I've become aware recently, in the last few years, of a thing I call knowledge obesity. It's a whole lot of people that are just consuming endless knowledge and doing nothing with it. Yes, and you're like you know so. I did a talk late last year at South by Southwest on duocracy how do we move from knowledge obesity, from just gaining knowledge and doing nothing with it, to going hang on? What's the next best step? What's the thing I should do right now to drive improvement? So don't talk about continuous improvement, do continuous improvement. And it's funny how, like the minute I thought about that, I'm like I can think of all the people I've worked with in the past that are in the do phase. Yes, and all the ones that are, they can talk an amazing game, they're never going to actually do it yep, absolutely that's.

Speaker 1: 28:03

A lot of consultants these days can tell you what to do, but not actually execute, not roll the sleeves up, and actually do it with you speaking of um?

Speaker 1: 28:10

you know you talk about knowledge. Obesity just brought me to a thought. I want to sort of touch on ai. So it seems like with ai I don't know if you would agree with this, but it seems like most people are just content consumers and there's very little creation happening in well, at least where I'm seeing. What's your views on what's happening in ai and what do you think is like the most exciting things on the horizon?

Speaker 2: 28:32

Yeah, there's. I mean there's a spectrum of stuff I'm seeing, right, there's. There's a whole sort of backend AI stuff that is like fundamental infrastructure style technology stuff that looks a bit clunky right now, but once you get over the tipping point you're like, damn right. So I spent some time with the team from Amazon Web Services the other week and you look at the experiments they're running, you're like that's cool, scary stuff. That's also a huge investment and they've got the bandwidth to do that. So they're going big on that stuff, right?

Speaker 2: 29:02

If you look at most sort of normal organizations right now, sadly for me, the reality is they've gone. How can we use this as a margin play? I run a call center. How can I use ai to take on x percent of my calls so I can reduce my staff numbers? Because staff are expensive and ai is cheaper and and that is just a chase for profit and margin and shareholder return, which is not the worst thing to do, but I don't think it's the reason to do it. It doesn't feel like a sustainable, you know, societal way of thinking about it. Right? So that that bit I'm like, oh, I get it. Every time a new tech comes out, we're like how can it save us money so we can all make more um, or some people make more um.

Speaker 2: 29:40

The reality is is we're having there's two experiments we're running right now that I'm really fascinated by. One is responsible tech. Um, this was a bit of a curveball. So our legal, privacy and government affairs team partnered with our technology team and they were like what does responsible tech look like? How do we understand which stakeholders might be impacted? How do we understand truth? How do we understand ethics and morals? And you're like, damn, like, damn. So, um late last year, we we released our template that we use internally. So every technology change we're going through internally. We've, we've created this template of all these things that we consider, like, how do we avoid inequity with ai? And you're like, oh, that is a big, bold question. So we're going through that um all the time and with my colleague, uh, anna jaffe, I'm doing a presentation next week to a whole lot of tech boffins right on ai. But it's not about the tech of ai, it's about the responsibility of ai um and the second experiment we're running is how do we talk about this?

Speaker 2: 30:38

not from a technology standpoint here's a large language model and blah, blah, blah, blah, um but from a here's the use case. Yes, and and that's the thing that when I see it it really warms me because I'm like, oh, I get that, get that, I can consume that. But when I see the here's the technology and the network diagram and all the stuff it could do, I'm like, okay, but what is it going to do? And I don't think we've asked that question enough. I think we've got carried away by the toy but not yet worked out where we're going to deploy the toy in our world. That makes our life better, not just a transaction at work faster, but our actual lives more enriched.

Speaker 2: 31:11

So we're doing that and it's hard, it takes a while, because you want to like we've got a whole lot of tech people that just want to play with the tech. And I might not go play with the tech, but through the lens of what use case am I improving and what does this look like for an end consumer and how does it impact their day-to-day life, their work, their context, their happiness, their engagement, all those things? So that that gives me the warm fuzzies that we might do it right. But I think right now we're right in that midpoint of as a society as a whole. We're part curious and part petrified. We're hopeful it doesn't ruin everything, but deep down we're worried that it might. But actually it's humans making a lot of these decisions. Right, the technos is not making the decisions for us.

Speaker 1: 31:49

So I think there's more conversations to be had around the ethics and the morality part oh, 100, I think, just the ip risk alone, as some organizations are not even using it because they just don't know what you know.

Speaker 2: 32:00

Legal situation might end up coming as a result of that so, yeah, the fair, the fair fact is high, because I think that the upside, the upside, is potentially good, but the downside consequence is potentially high. Absolutely, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 32:11

You don't want Disney coming after you for using their IP and doing so illegally, Absolutely. I just wanted to come back to we're talking about mental health and mental wellness a big advocate of that, and obviously it relates to how organisations treat their staff and whatnot.

Speaker 1: 32:26

One of the things I'm seeing and I wonder if you're seeing the same thing is that organisations that are trying to deploy agile ways of working are actually starting to reduce layers of governance. So line managers but what they're doing is they're not reducing the work, they're not, as you said before, removing things, and then there's this pressure of workload shifting to the remaining resources, and then that's actually adding layers and layers of stress. Are you seeing that in places you're?

Speaker 2: 32:51

working as well. Yeah, it's a funny one, it's. Sometimes it's a short-term symptom of the change. Like in any change you go through, you've got an element of pain. Yeah, I liken it to um whenever, whenever no one talks about imposter syndrome, like if if you feel 100% comfortable and content in your job today, then you should be nervous, right, you? You, you probably grow by just stepping into that next level and being a bit uncomfortable for a bit and that discomfort helps you grow. And then you get good at that job and you're like I might go again and it might not be up, it might be across, you might move across.

Speaker 2: 33:24

It's the same in organizational change. People tend to sit there and go oh, this way of working is rubbish, it's crap, we need to fix it. And we put the new one out and they're like oh, I don't like that, oh, it's uncomfortable. And you're like it's probably going to feel uncomfortable for a while. The question is or are we just thrashing because we're missing an essential ingredient? So I would say about half the time it's companies missing an essential ingredient and the ingredient is either have they trained their people, have they got the right practices and are they amplifying it with technology.

Speaker 2: 33:58

But the reason I mentioned that is a lot of agile change is technology driven. They roll out a new tool but they don't train the people, they don't change the practices. No, as I've seen in other companies like I was working with a large bank recently they they trained all their people really well. Great training courses, right, great l and d that evolved all their practices and their ways of working and they had an archaic 1984 tool. So people like I want to work that way, but the system you've given me is the opposite of that and so you that tension you can genuinely feel. So you've got to get those three congruent and consistent right. If you get those consistent, I think you've got a chance. It's still going to be painful, but you've got a chance. So whenever anyone's in that this feels uncomfortable, I always ask them which one of the three is missing and that's the secret and it's interesting because a lot of the time I'm seeing organisations will start with the tech.

Speaker 1: 34:46

They'll make a decision on tech but not actually think of how that's going to impact their process and their changes as well. So, no, that's a really good way of looking at it, thinking about the people side of business and cultural elements. How do you scale culture in an organisation Because it seems like you've done that at Atlass from what, where you guys had started, all the way to now how do you think we scaled culture?

Speaker 1: 35:08

oh, I don't know there's so many. I mean it starts you. You had the opportunity to start. Start on the right foot as a civilization as a startup. That start mentality. Yes, you know, weeding out any bad eggs from the beginning, um, and then layering up from there. So I think you've got the opportunity to start right, but I guess what was it that you did at the beginning that helped you get to the point you are, and have you seen a shift in that culture and an organization so big?

Speaker 2: 35:33

yeah, I mean, when I joined it last year, we were about 700 people. Um, we're now over like 11 and a bit thousand. Um, we had 35 000 customers when I joined. We're now 300 000. Uh, we were privately listed, publicly listed. Like you know, competitions changed, texture, everything's changed, and so, um, the culture's changed as well.

Speaker 2: 35:52

Our values have stayed largely consistent, and so, having those as an anchor point, um, they get challenged. Occasionally. You reach certain milestones and and you know, certainly right now, in an environment where the economy is tougher and you've got to ratchet things up, you want to be true to those values, but you might actually be behaving differently than when we're in a rising tide, right, um, in the pandemic, when everyone was buying collaboration software, it felt like that was going to continue forever, and then the pandemic ceases, people start traveling again, things change and you get this true up and you've got to work harder for your dollar, right? So I think our values have largely stayed the same. Our culture has evolved, and I'd even go as far to say we don't have a singular culture. I think we have a mixture of cultures that aren't threatening or challenging each other, but are locally optimized challenging each other, but are locally optimized. Um, yeah, I, I spent time in our office in india. They, they have a slightly different culture to our office in poland, to our office in amsterdam, to our office in san francisco, to new york, to sydney, right, and I think that's right. I, I don't. I don't know that we strive for a mono culture. I've worked in environments in previous existence where I think I was part of a mono culture and it's very comfortable because everyone's the same, but really dull, there's no cognitive diversity there. So I think, embracing the difference in cultures there, I think we've got that balance right.

Speaker 2: 37:16

I think I think the way it's worked is is the a combination of almost like pessimism and humility, like we're always worried that the wheels might come falling off, and so we strive for more, for improvement, for better. You know, every time we finish a project, even if it's successful, we'll talk about the success, but we also want to talk about how we could have done it better or faster or quicker, and so getting that and that combination is hard right, you don't, you don't want to ruin someone's mojo. They've just shipped an amazing, amazing project. How could you have done that better? You're like, right, but simply, if you just clap all the time, then we all become mediocre and I don't want to celebrate mediocrity anymore. So finding that balance is hard, I think. The other thing is like and this is always a funny one to talk about I try to talk about this as much as possible and no one wants to listen.

Speaker 2: 38:01

We, we get a lot of things wrong, um, and whenever I talk about the people like now, like your share price and your products and your culture and you win all these awards, I'm like, but we win those awards by experimenting and half our experiments go wrong. And when they do, we're like ah, we got that wrong, oops, right. And then we're like what went wrong? What was our intent? How did we do it better? And that's normally nine times out of ten a very open dialogue. And when you see that from people of all shapes and sizes, you're like oh, this, this is a safe environment where, where I can explore and experiment and be curious and I'm not going to get punished. In fact, I might get recognized for it.

Speaker 2: 38:39

Um, and so our recognition system. We have a system called kudos. You know, someone does a great job and they get a kudos within sort of 24 hours. You know, fatima, here's the thing that you did, here's the value that you lived, and here's a 40 gift factory. Go and get yourself a coffee or a treat or whatever. And it's not the monetary reward, it's the recognition from your peers of you did a great job above and beyond um, that stimulates a a lot of our cultural and so it's like osmosis. It's not, there's not a culture champion, it's not owned. We don't have a people and culture team. We have a people team. They don't own culture, neither do I, neither does Scott or Mike Like. No one singularly owns it, but collectively we all contribute to it every day. So how do we not walk past bad behaviours? Yes, that's probably the biggest question I ask on a daily basis, and that is harder in a distributed world where it's harder to see bad behaviours.

Speaker 1: 39:28

Yeah, absolutely I like that idea, even thinking about the cultures being different in different countries and different regions around the world. It makes logical sense because you visit a country and they have different cultures and different governance requirements and different ways of working and different delivery, but you're still following that same central essence as well.

Speaker 2: 39:47

So I think Fatima, go back to your point before about those two teams coming together, right? Yes, so my engineering team in India is working with my marketing team in San Francisco. Right, they have different cultures, but therefore, one of the most important things is when they start to work together, what's the common way of working that unites them so you keep your cultural elements? I'm not taking those away exactly. I'm only going to have one way of working as you unite as a team, because I'm not paying the translation tax. Absolutely, and that's the bit of the conversation that often gets forgotten. We, we celebrate the diversity of culture, but we forget to bring people together absolutely it's.

Speaker 1: 40:21

It's interesting. It's like one organization I was working and they had all these different agile tribes across the company and what they were trying to do is get everybody to work the way that they work, because that's what worked for them in their tribe and it's actually more disconnect than actually connectiveness.

Speaker 2: 40:35

It's yeah yeah, we can work any way we want, as long as it's my way yeah, absolutely, it's simple.

Speaker 1: 40:40

Things like even aesthetically, you know formats of powerpoints and the way that it's just like that's what you're focused on, then you're really not going to be successful.

Speaker 2: 40:47

Well, you said it before, fixed mindset this is the way, it's a singular way.

Speaker 1: 40:51

And makes them comfortable, as you were talking about before. Thinking about, you know, just thinking about teamwork and the distributed teams. So people ask the question a lot of how to get the most out of their teams when they are distributed. What's worked really well for you so, culture side, what's worked really well for Atlassian to have that?

Speaker 2: 41:14

Three really simple steps. Step one accept right now your teams are distributed. Stop fighting it, stop debating it. Accept it. Virtually every company of any size I work with they're distributed in some way, and I don't mean work from home versus work from office. I mean you're in Melbourne and I'm in Sydney. We're distributed right. Even if we're both in an office right now, we're still distributed. So step one accept it. Step two is build it so that it works right most of the time.

Speaker 2: 41:38

So my favorite exercise right now is the working agreement play which I do with any team I work with. Like when we first come together, what is our social contract of how we're going to work? Don't assume that because it's lazy. You just need to invest a tiny bit of time working on that and once you've got that social contract, you're bringing people together. And then the third step is on a regular basis, do a check-in on team health.

Speaker 2: 42:01

Team health is something that I know at Atlassian. We care about a lot, a lot of organizations I talk to. They nod and they're like I get it. We don't do it and I'm like why? But like, why are you not checking in on a team to go? I know you've got that social contract. How's it working for you, what is working, what's not, and what's one thing we could do differently the next two weeks to be better. That's free, I didn't cost you anything. Um, and the teams that do that. You genuinely see they focus on the environment and when they create an environment where people can thrive, those teams thrive Like it's not rocket science. So dealing with that emotional side, as well as the kind of IQ side, has been very important. Those three things together create formidable teams that are resilient and can achieve pretty much anything.

Speaker 1: 42:42

And please don't create team social contracts, like I've seen them do, organizations do and then completely forget about it.

Speaker 2: 42:49

File it and they never see it again yeah, yeah, and that's what we said.

Speaker 2: 42:52

I mean, yeah, you've seen that as well, the set and forget. You're like it's not a tick box exercise. I mean, I, I went with a team, uh, middle of last year we came up with one and then, after about, I think about three weeks, we all sat down it's not working for us. So we revised it, we tweaked it and they were like, let's try this. Three weeks later we're like there you go, version two, that's. But then it changed again because we got a new team member and so on maternity leave. Like each time we had a milestone change. We revisited that social contract. But again, social contract, not a business case, not written in blood, not a compliance document. How, how are we choosing to work together and is that effective for us? And it's different for every team absolutely you.

Speaker 1: 43:27

You talked about, um, making mistakes, um, and learning from them. Is there a pivotal moment in your career, either in your current line of work or previous roles, where you've made a maybe a significant mistake, but a big learning came from it that you can share?

Speaker 2: 43:41

there's. There's a whole load for me there's. There's been no like huge, like epiphany moments, and that's because I'm probably making lots of little mistakes all the time, and so there's no like, oh, my god, I think there's. There's a favorite bit of feedback I got. There's a a keynote presentation I built a couple of years ago and I was really happy with it and, uh, maybe my ego got in the way. It was a good, it was good deck and I was delivering it at a conference once and the usual thing anyone got any questions, feedback at the end. And there's this one guy hanging around afterwards and I'd had 10 minutes of people going. That was amazing, it was inspirational. I learned so much. I was like yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 44:17

And there's this one guy hanging around. I'm like I don't know, I don't think compliment that my little spidey sense went off and he said um, would you like some feedback? I was like yeah, no, of course. He's like no, honestly, you do you want some feedback? And I was like yeah, no, I actually I do. He's like cool.

Speaker 2: 44:34

He said I feel like in your presentation you've just told me what fit looks like. He's like at no point in your presentation have you acknowledged that I'm fat and I want to get fit, and I was like tell me more. And he's like. He said I feel like your presentation was like Instagram you know I see a super fit, healthy person, but they you've not helped me understand where to start.

Speaker 2: 44:56

You've not acknowledged me and who I am and he's like so you telling me what a high performing team looks like has actually just pissed me off, because I'm not in one right now. I want to be. You've not told me how to do it and I was like honestly, mate, that is an absolute gem, like it was the biggest gift I got. Because I went back and I'm like my, my presentation had good intent, but it was missing the point. So I reverse engineered, like, instead of talking about what a high performing team looks like, I then start to talk about here's how you create, here's the conditions for creating a high performing team and here's how you acknowledge where you might be today in your first step. And so that, for me, was a great nudge and I've been very fortunate with coaches, mentors and feedback that I get these regular nudges that help me improve but that that was one where I honestly like eyes, eyes wide open. I thought that was a great presentation until someone told me it wasn't, and it's just a great reminder.

Speaker 1: 45:48

It's so important. It goes back to what you said around team health as an example getting feedback from the team, whether you know, you're rolling out certain metrics or measurements and getting that directly in stand-ups or other. You're getting it from a prospective customer and then applying, applying. You went and applied something so you didn't just put it on the backlog and forget about it anything with it.

Speaker 2: 46:09

That's so powerful yeah, I literally got on. I got on the plane and started playing with the slides. I'm like the. The narrative doesn't really have to change, it's the perspective, it's the lens that changes. It's how do I help, instead of me showing off and massaging my ego by going I know what a high performing team looks like. I flipped it to. I do, but what I'm going to talk about is what are the steps to start to build that and how? What does that feel like?

Speaker 2: 46:32

yeah, and that was a way more powerful presentation it makes sense.

Speaker 1: 46:35

There's a lot, a lot of um, you know um speakers out there at the moment that are sharing the theory and how what good looks like oh yeah but nothing to actually help you move from nothing tangible.

Speaker 2: 46:45

We're in like framework frenzy heaven, like if one person gives me another framework, come on, I don't need any more frameworks like what's the thing I'm meant to do.

Speaker 1: 46:52

Like, don't give me a three by three exactly and and so then, thinking about all the speaking that you do, what's the most common question that you get asked?

Speaker 2: 47:01

um more so now, because I'm doing a lot of kind of activation type um, uh, keynotes and workshops is where do I start? And that? That, for me, is when I get that as a question. I know I've started to do my job because they've gone through the theory that they're sold on the idea. They're now thinking about implementation, um, so that that's really good. What I get a lot from people is can I come and work at atassian? And normally when I unpack that it's because they're unhappy where they're where they are. And I give every single person the same advice try and do it where you are first, like use the human capital you've built up in that environment and try it there, because if you improve it there, you might like it and you might stay, which is good for you, and if you don't improve it there, you've got a great story for an interview.

Speaker 1: 47:44

But if you run away from it because it's crap, I don't want to hire you I want you to be willing to do the hard work oh, absolutely and in and you know, work through that challenge so that you become another learning experience for yourself absolutely what do you think has been?

Speaker 1: 47:58

you know, as, as a small business ourselves and, uh, with aspirations to grow big. What do you think has helped Atlassian to get to where it is today? You know, aside from the culture that we talked about, what do you think? What did you think you think it was making? Making the tech easy for people. Do you think it was? You know what? What are the key characteristics that have helped the organization grow to where it is today?

Speaker 2: 48:22

I'm going to try and pick two things. There's many things, but I'm gonna try and pick two.

Speaker 2: 48:25

One is our focus on teamwork so there is no superhero, there's no lone person, lone ranger that stands on the soapbox and says I won, we. We only ever say we won, uh, and similarly, we, we screwed it up, not I screwed it right, we, we, we share our celebrations as a team and we share our losses as a team. That that share our losses as a team, that seems like a no-brainer ethos, really hard to do when egos and success and failure is like a whole lot of stuff going on. But that's been a profound part of my existence in my nearly 11 years now at Atlassian. And the second one is we've got distracted occasionally by getting bigger. Uh, but if I could give you a free coaching moment, fatima, I'd say don't, don't have a dream of getting big and have a dream of getting better. Um, there is an art form to scaling gracefully and many organizations I work with uh, scaled, but they didn't scale gracefully. They didn't get better. In fact, as they got bigger you, you got less inclined to work there. Um, and I think that's a sad reality for so many organizations. You hear people go oh, like we used to do, we used to do this or the good old days, and you, there's always some of that. But you get so much of that. You're like when did we lose that? When, when, when did we lose the goodness, the, the rich, tapestry, the, the fun? Right, because they were the growth days. That's when we're delivering value, because it was like when did we grow up? And so there's a mindset coach.

Speaker 2: 49:50

I work with Ben Crow who used to coach Ash Barty, the World and World Tennis player, and a whole lot of other sports stars. But whenever I talk to him he's like the opposite of play isn't work, the opposite of play is fear, and I isn't work. The opposite of play is fear, and I think there's too much fear in business and in Atlassian. I've certainly always been fortunate. I don't know if everyone else has the same experience, it's. It's quite a playful environment. That doesn't mean we don't take life seriously. We do. We take our customers and our responsibilities very seriously, but we do do it in a playful manner and I think that's been a secret to our scaling gracefully. Is that the, the playfulness or the humility that's in there?

Speaker 1: 50:26

and you know what they say.

Speaker 2: 50:27

Fear is fake events appearing real yeah, yeah, it's very true, right, and we've all been in that environment, right, and you're just petrified, you're like this this, this seems real, but it's not, and and you just it's a huge amount of self-doubt and and weird stuff happens with it. I just I get it there. A lot of leaders who choose to lead that way. That's their choice. I would rather lead through playfulness.

Speaker 1: 50:47

Absolutely. And, like you said, if you've got permission to fail, you can just do something. Just move the dial, do anything.

Speaker 2: 50:54

Yeah, like trust your gut instinct and take a bet right, Because you're not betting the house.

Speaker 1: 50:58

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 50:59

You're betting something not everything Exactly.

Speaker 1: 51:02

As long as you're not, I say to my team, as long as they're not going to sink the business to my experimentation, experimentation is completely fine.

Speaker 2: 51:09

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 51:10

So we're almost out of time today. My last question for you is if there's anything else that you'd like to share with our listeners, a call to action, a piece of advice or a question to ponder today.

Speaker 2: 51:29

One one, one thing. One thing, uh, self-compassion. Uh, I've been been noodling this for a while. If, if you want to be a sustainable uh leader, partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, you know, parent, uh team, whatever it is we're all members of many different teams in in life, society, business, whatever you have to start with some level of self-compassion. And I think in the world right now we're so distracted by external motivations like, as a company, I want to do this to be more like spotify no, no, I don't do it to be better for your customers and better for yourself and a great place to work. Do for those reasons and they seem selfish, I don't know. I don't think it's bad, right, and so for me, that, that self-compassion. If leaders and employees and teammates could start with that right now, I think we've we've got a really good chance of creating a wonderful future.

Speaker 1: 52:14

Sounds really good and it will probably help on the mental wellness side as well.

Speaker 2: 52:17

A hundred percent.

Speaker 1: 52:18

Thank you so much for joining us on this has been incredibly valuable. We could have talked for a lot longer. Joining us on this has been incredibly valuable. We could have talked for a lot longer. I feel I know you've probably got a million and one things to do, but thank you so much for that's all right, it was a great conversation, thanks for hosting.

Speaker 1: 52:29

Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. Please share this with someone or rate it if you enjoyed it. Don't forget to follow us on social media and to stay up to date with all things Agile ideas, go to our website, wwwagilemanagementofficecom. I hope you've been able to learn, feel or be inspired today. Until next time, what's your agile idea?