Joe has a book “Agile Kata” in the making, if you like to be the first to know when it launches, please visit www.agilekatabook.com.Transcript: Agile.FM radio for the agile community. [00:00:05] Joe Krebs: Thank you again for tuning into another episode of Agile FM. This is the Agile Kata series. And today we're going to explore Kata from a leadership's perspective. And I have here with me Mark Rosenthal who is with Novayama that is his company. He's out of the West coast, United States, and we're going to explore a little bit together, leadership in conjunction with Kata, which is Series all about.We're gonna explore that angle a little bit. Welcome to the show, mark. [00:00:40] Mark Rosenthal: Thank you very much. It's looking forward to the opportunity. [00:00:43] Joe Krebs: Yeah, this is awesome. I wanna go back in time with you and talk a little bit about an employment you had where you worked from home. [00:00:52] Mark Rosenthal: Oh, yeah. . [00:00:53] Joe Krebs: You didn't get a lot of phone calls until you got one.[00:00:56] Mark Rosenthal: Yeah. [00:00:57] Joe Krebs: And that was the one you got terminated. [00:01:00] Mark Rosenthal: Yeah. Bu Yeah. [00:01:01] Joe Krebs: But the interesting thing is you in your reflection, you had a, let's say a moment of realizing a lack of leadership skills. [00:01:14] Mark Rosenthal: Yes. And yeah, and really that was, and this is even better because this is really the kind of leadership that most conduct practitioners have to engage in, which is influence.You don't have formal authority you rather, you've got to, you have to find a way to influence the lead, the line leaders in the organization to be effective. And this is true for lots of cases. It's true whenever I'm bringing groups of people together that I can't tell what to do. And actually it's more true that you think even in the military, which is where I learned leadership.And it really was that. We tend to do, we practitioners tend to engage with the technical artifacts, and we put in the tools, we put in the mechanics, and we don't, and then we complain when the line leadership doesn't embrace the changes. And that is on us because if you look at a traditional Kaizen event approach, for example, in the world of, you know, of CI, but this would be equally true for somebody trying to get scrum in place or somebody trying to cause any change in the way the organization does business.I can describe the mechanics of the daily standup perfectly. I can describe, I can get all the scheduling. I can get the artifacts into place.If there isn't a engagement of the conversation about how we do it on a daily basis too, then it's going to fall apart as soon as that that, that goes away in the situation you're describing. I mean, it was even worse in a way, just because of the nature. It was an international organization and it didn't really matter where I worked, so I didn't work anywhere.Although I got a lot of frequent flyer miles. You know, going to Europe once a month, going all kinds of places. But what I was doing was making technical recommendations. And then, you know, they weren't getting picked up. And frankly, I wasn't earning my money. Yeah. And the key here for a change agent.Is it's not about the tools you're putting into place, the tools are there to create the kinds of conversations that need to happen in the organization between the leaders and between people, between groups of people. And once I understood that, then the paradigm changes completely because the experiments I run are testing whether or not I'm effective at moving the needle.About how these conversations are taking place. And that's kind of what I was talking about in the, you know, in the story that you're alluding to. [00:04:20] Joe Krebs: Yeah. So this is a life changing event for you, but also in your career, right? You had a lot of learnings coming out of this. [00:04:27] Mark Rosenthal: A lot of them, and they came later on.You know, I had, I was familiar with Toyota Kata at the time. But I was still in the position of trying to make people do it, and I can't do that. What I have to do is look at the dynamics in the organization and think in terms of it's not the mechanics of standing up a storyboard and getting them to go through the starter kata of grasping the current condition and all of that.It's about what actions what small experiment can I run? That I think that I hypothesize will nudge the conversation into, for example, talking about something a little more concrete than we had a good day or a bad day, which moves them toward measuring how they're doing, you know, in that example, that particular organization really had disdain for numbers because they made people look bad.So they didn't talk about them. I mean, they had them on displays, but nobody ever talked about them and the numbers they had on displays were lagging indicators. Yeah. It's interesting because you said like the words, if I remember ...
