Scrum Day London is our second conference of the year, and we’re thrilled to bring you more exciting episodes from this renowned event!
As we continue our TalkInTen series, we have a special episode featuring Marcus Dimbleby, an expert in applied critical thinking and Agile transformation, who explores the intersection of these fields to enhance organizational agility.
In today's complex business landscape, the ability to think critically and apply those insights is crucial for driving innovation and sustaining Agile transformations. This talk dives into the vital role that applied critical thinking (ACT) plays in enabling agility within organizations. By fostering deliberate challenge and diverse viewpoints, ACT helps break down barriers and enhances decision-making processes in Agile environments. This discussion highlights the transformative impact of ACT on team dynamics, executive leadership, and overall organizational success, offering practical strategies and tools to implement ACT effectively.
Episode Highlights:
- Applied Critical Thinking in Agile: Understand how ACT can improve decision-making and organisational agility.
- Practical Applications: Learn about real-world use cases where ACT has been successfully integrated into Agile practices.
- Enhancing Team Collaboration: Discover techniques to foster psychological safety and enable effective communication within Agile teams.
If you enjoy the show, please leave a review!
Use code PRODUCTAGILITY24 for 15% off training courses at Sheev.
Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.
Scrum Day London is our second conference of the year, and we’re thrilled to bring you more exciting episodes from this renowned event!
As we continue our TalkInTen series, we have a special episode featuring Marcus Dimbleby, an expert in applied critical thinking and Agile transformation, who explores the intersection of these fields to enhance organizational agility.
In today's complex business landscape, the ability to think critically and apply those insights is crucial for driving innovation and sustaining Agile transformations. This talk dives into the vital role that applied critical thinking (ACT) plays in enabling agility within organizations. By fostering deliberate challenge and diverse viewpoints, ACT helps break down barriers and enhances decision-making processes in Agile environments. This discussion highlights the transformative impact of ACT on team dynamics, executive leadership, and overall organizational success, offering practical strategies and tools to implement ACT effectively.
Episode Highlights:
- Applied Critical Thinking in Agile: Understand how ACT can improve decision-making and organisational agility.
- Practical Applications: Learn about real-world use cases where ACT has been successfully integrated into Agile practices.
- Enhancing Team Collaboration: Discover techniques to foster psychological safety and enable effective communication within Agile teams.
If you enjoy the show, please leave a review!
Use code PRODUCTAGILITY24 for 15% off training courses at Sheev.
Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.
Hello and welcome to the Product Agility Podcast. I'm your host Ben Maynard and for the next few days we have extra special episodes coming to you from Scrum Day London 2024. This event is a beacon for agile enthusiasts and professionals and I'm thrilled to bring you insights and new ideas from some of the brightest minds in the agile and product community. For those of you who are new to the podcast, the Product Agility Podcast is your go -to resource for practical tips, strategies, and stories from world -class products and agile thought leaders. Our goal is to increase your knowledge and motivation to experiment, so together we can create ever more successful products. Before we dive in, I'd like to thank our sponsor for this episode, Sheave. Sheave is my company, and we specialize in helping organizations simplify, focus, and align through embracing a product mindset. and using Agile as a means to drive success. Whatever your product or Agile challenge, learn about how Sheave can help your organisation thrive or extend out your own Agile journey at www .sheave .co .uk. That's S -H -E -E -V. And to get a whopping 15 % off of all of our courses, use the code PRODUCTAGILITY24 at the checkout. Now we have an exciting line of speakers from Scrum Day London 2024 who will be sharing valuable insights and practical tips for you to experiment with. So grab a pen and paper, perhaps a hot drink, and let's dive into a talking tent. Enabling agility with applied critical thinking was the name of one of the opening talks from today's Scrum Day London 2024. That talk was delivered by Marcus Dimbleby, somebody who we've had a couple of attempts to get on the podcast, but for reasons I think mostly due to my children or something I had to reschedule, we never actually had a full interview. So you can expect a longer interview with Marcus in the foreseeable future. But for today, we're going to get his talk in 10. Now, There's a lot I would love to unpick about this and we've only got 10 minutes. So we'll start in the same way we start all of the talks in 10, which is with an introduction from you and a little overview of what your talk was about. Cool. Thank you, Ben. And it is great to be able to meet finally face to face as well. So my talk, my background. So my background, 20 plus years in the military. I retired about 12 years ago, went into consultancy, got into the world of large scale transformations, digital change, et cetera, agile. Went through that with a consultancy left there went into Lloyds Bank Became the head of agile there doing group transformation and then went into Royal Bank of Scotland So a lot of financial services work then into oil and gas with BP a lot of enterprise level coaching going on to really understanding about enabling agility not just the team face co face but obviously the the executive level where it's really important then I moved into looking at the concept of red teaming which I'd learned in the military and I applied critical thinking. So this process of deliberate challenge. So how can we make all of these processes that we're doing in the agile world better by deliberately challenging our thinking, by deliberately challenging what we're trying to achieve, and that all comes into this umbrella of applied critical thinking. So that was hence the title. And as Nana's theme today was breaking the barriers to critical thinking, I thought it'd be appropriate to bring in looking at ACT, the applied critical thinking concept, into the world of agility. So that's where it came from. Sweet. So is applied critical thinking different to critical thinking? Yes. Because if you don't apply it, it's no good being a critical thinker, is it? The whole premise behind that is we all have the ability to think critically. We all think we do, but we don't, but we can do. But it's no good if you then don't apply the outcomes of that analysis and that depth of thought and different perspective that it brings to you. So the whole concept is how do you enable that? We all know why and what. but very few as know how. So the whole concept behind ACT is bringing the tools, the techniques, the processes that allow you to shift that behavior to perspectives, to mindset. Okay. So what are some of the ways that we can, I mean, not all of it, I don't want to give away too much, but I know during the talk you shared some ideas of maybe how people can use or begin to kind of embrace ACT. What are some practical things that our listeners could mull over perhaps? in relation to this. Absolutely, great question. So one of the main things that we talked about in the talk was psychological safety. So how do you enable psychological safety? Everybody thinks they have it until it comes to the crunch and then people don't speak up for many reasons and fear of many different things is often one of those reasons. So a couple of the tools we talked about today was ESOBAST where everybody speaks once before anybody speaks twice. So it's a way of allowing everyone in the meeting. to have a voice and to be heard in order. And then if you've got seniors in there, it'd be leaders speak last. So that allows everyone to speak in order and be heard. But if you don't have the psychological safety to speak up, the other tool we discussed was something called think, write, share, where you pose the question to the audience. They think about their answer, nobody speaks up, and then you ask them to write it down. And you can do this in an anonymous way by having it done online, mentee, mural, or you can have them all write on the same post -it or, you know. five by eight postcard, writing a sharpie with the bold capital letters, and then you just bring all the answers in. So nobody knows who said what, then you can all discuss what's on the cards, nobody knows whose idea was put forward, and therefore everybody's ideas heard, everybody gets to see other ideas, and invariably from that situation, you get a hybrid outcome. Nobody just picks the highest persons, paid opinion in the room, or what the boss said, so you get a really good varied outcome. And the premise behind that and the whole apply critical thinking concept is you're now sourcing the wisdom of the crowd. As I talked about the whole premise, what we're trying to achieve here is unlocking human capital. Because we believe that all the answers any organization needs lie within. You just don't know how to get that information out of the people because people are disengaged. As we saw from the Gallup reports, 23 % globally, 13 % in Europe. So how do you re -engage people? Because people want to be. Nobody comes to work to not do good stuff. They all want to be engaged and do good work. How do you enable them to do that? So for ACT to work, is there a critical mass of people that need to be engaging with it? Because I think maybe some people may have thought, OK, this is something that I can do and then magic will happen. But then that last section there, you were saying, this is something where we're unlocking the wisdom of the crowd and we're tapping some of that human capital. So is it like a critical mass then of a proportion of a group which needs to be applying it for it to be successful? Indeed, great point to bring up there. So ACT is both personal and professional. So you can use it one -on -one yourself, take it away and benefit from that way of looking at things and getting different perspectives. But as you rightly said, to have value, you've got to get the critical mass. So you've got to have a number of people who understand this and engage with this, which is why when we work with clients, we always make sure we go in at the executive level. However short that may be. If we're doing a 10 -day train, the trainer program, we'll ask to do a half an hour session with the executives so they understand it because there's nothing worse than seeing this challenge capability morph in an organization. And if you're not aware of it, it's quite a threatening thing. And you can imagine the egos of some certain individuals might go, I don't like that. So we make sure that we engage everybody at the appropriate amount of time and the appropriate level so everyone understands it. And then when you see it, so if we do a mid -tier managers, train the training program for 10 days, we'll give a 90 minute overview to the 5,000 people who work there. So everyone understands what's happening. We'll give a half day workshop to the executives so they understand the challenge that's going to happen and how they can use this as a force multiplier, if you will. So they're going to be able to unlock their people with these tools and techniques. So yeah, and the more people you can do that with, the more the merrier. And once you do teach people, as we say, immediate efficacy, instant applicability, the whole premise behind the learning here is it's so simple. I teach you today, you're using it tomorrow. and you're teaching your teams at the day after. So you get that permeation across an organization that very quickly becomes the default way of everybody operating and thinking. You made a reference in your talk to children and their relentless inquisitiveness. Indeed. What is it that happens in an organization or just as we turn to grownups, use that term loosely, that lets this skill dry up? It's a sad thing, isn't it? So we're all born natural contrarians. We've all been that little kid asking why sticking our fingers in holes we shouldn't do and pushing the buttons. And that's normal. But as we go through life, and as I said, it starts in kindergarten, and I call it the conformity conveyor belt. We're all expected to conform. As a society, that's the way humans sadly operate. So we get in line, we sit down, we put our hand up, we use the same pen, we answer the questions in a certain way, we hang our coats up. And that carries on through school, sadly now through university, which was one of the few remaining places where critical thinking and free thought was welcome, it seems not to be anymore. And then you get into the workplace. And although we all want to challenge and talk about it, people don't really want it. And I see this in both the military and in the commercial world. So you're on this conveyor belt. And nobody wants to be on there by choice. You tend to go onto it because that's what everyone else is doing. We talked about groupthink and this false harmony, faux harmony, where you're going along to get along. You don't want to rock the boat. You want to be part of a tribe. It's natural. People will feel uncomfortable by not speaking up and go against their own ethics if it means they remain part of a tribe and feel welcome. Nobody wants to be ostracized. And we're seeing more so today how quickly you are ostracized if you go against the crowd. And you only have to go on LinkedIn and Twitter and see that. So it's really important, I feel, to be able to teach people how to go against the grain. If you want to call somebody out, if you want to argue with your boss, if you want to say that's a bad plan, there's a certain way of doing it. And if you can teach people to do that so it's received, we call it disagreeing agreeably, and have that collegial contrarian behavior. If you can teach people to do that, and if you can teach children to do that. All four of my kids are mini -red teamers, mini -critical thinkers, and I've educated them on this. It makes conversations fun. can't win an argument anymore with them, but it really helps them to almost hold their own in the big bad world when they go out there. And I think that's what's really important to reinstill this into our children and not let it go out. Fascinating. I would love to delve deeper, but our time is up. But we will delve deeper because Marcus, I will get you on the podcast and we will record that episode, mate. It will happen. It will happen. Thank you so much for what is a really, really fascinating topic. And I think it is something which is... broader than the narrow kind of agile focus here. We're talking about life skills and I think that's just so massively important and just so fundamentally interesting to me. The joys of having my own podcast is that I can have on whoever I want and talk about whatever I want. And generally speaking, you at home, wherever you are listening to this, you seem to like it. So we'll get Marcus on them. We're going to explore applied critical thinking in more depth and maybe go down a few rabbit holes because I have more time. But I just want to say, I want to say Marcus, thank you so much for coming on. And it's so nice to meet you in the flesh. It was such a treat. And actually, I must admit, Marcus, you're the reason I'm here. Because when I think I became a member of Scrum Day London, I saw that you were here and Aisling was here. And so I messaged you and I was like, so who's the organizer? You made an introduction. And here we are. So thank you very much for helping make this happen. I really appreciate it. And hopefully everyone at home who's listening to this or wherever you are also appreciates it too. It's a pleasure Ben. One of my main mantras is life's about relationships and I find if you follow that one, things tend to work out pretty good. And as you said, here we are meeting the flesh and doing great stuff with some good people today. So appreciate it and I look forward to the longer podcast downrange. Well, make sure you're following us on the podcast platform of your choice, hit that bell and you will be made aware of all future episodes. So everyone, thank you for listening. Again, Marcus, thank you for coming on. We'll be back again at some point soon.
