PES_Remote AF: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

PES_Remote AF: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Andrew Blain:
We believe that in that future employer, future workers will view 9 to 5 office work as some sort of weird industrial age relic. They'd be like, are you serious? People used to get on the train, stick their noses into other people's armpits, but pack into trains that were going into this central business district and doing work from 9 to 5 before going home to their families. But we think that that's going to sound really weird in 30 years.

Niko Skievaski:
Hello, fellow remote worker. Welcome to episode eight of The People Everywhere Show. I'm your host, Niko Skievaski, and I'm joined by my co-host, Andy Kitson. On today's show we have Andrew Blain of Remote AF. This is a remote agility framework that combines the best of Agile with his years of experience leading remote teams and groups of teams at scale. In this episode, we dive into the framework, including walking through an example of how it's implemented and some of the core philosophies behind how it works. We also explore key mindsets and skills leaders need to develop to support remote teams. I found this conversation to be wildly practical and I walked away with strategies to implement right away. So without further ado, I present The People Everywhere Show with Andrew Blain. Andrew, welcome to the show!

Andrew Blain:
Thanks, Niko Nice to be here.

Niko Skievaski:
Great having you. Just to start off with, I'd love to hear what, what's your story like? How do you find yourself at the helm of Remote AF?

Andrew Blain:
Hey. Sure. So as I started my career in digital, so working in the UK, actually back in the early 2000s, post the dot-com bust doing digital projects. When I came back to Australia, I moved into more enterprise tech. So I was working with big banks and big telecommunications companies on major multibillion-dollar transformations. And off the back of that I found a bit of a disconnect between how digital teams worked, how productive they were, how engaged they were, and how much fun it was compared to the work that people did in enterprises, which was largely pushing paper around. I met a couple of people, Nam and Paul, who became business partners in a consultancy called Liberate, and we spent the next 12 years basically building great workplaces that did pretty amazing things for our customers. And that business we built up from ground 0 to 150 people working all across Australia and in New Zealand and into Asia and the UK. Two or three years ago, we had some strategic challenges to navigate with the pandemic, and one of the things that we decided to do at that point was to launch this new venture at the time called the Remote Agility Framework, or Remote AF as it's become known. And the idea behind that was, the pandemic was a forcing function on organizations and a forcing function on innovation, and we identified that pretty early. So what we figured would happen was we'd have mass movement of people into remote settings. People change really quickly in a crisis and then behind that mass movement we'd have a mass capital injection, so there'd be money flowing to the problem of remote working, there'd be intellectual capital flowing to the problem of remote working. So people going out and teaching their grandparents how to do zoom calls in retirement homes. There'd be people teaching kids how to do remote learning, there'd be universities kind of throwing their weight behind, how do we create a university experience? And plus, the big capital shift was in trust because prior to the pandemic, you had to build trust with your employer in order for them to be comfortable with you working from home. The pandemic just flipped that on its head, and trust became implicit overnight, so it shifted the relationship between employer and employee. And yeah, we figured that's going to be amazing for the future of work. It's going to be great from an equitability perspective, I think we saw some significant changes in differently abled people and there I think there's a great New York Times graph a few weeks ago, it's been 10% rise in differently abled people in the workforce since the pandemic. We thought it'd be great for a sustainability perspective and take cars off the road, we'll take planes out of the sky. I personally, I think, I worked out in the first year after the pandemic, I saved like 500 carbon miles or something like that. A huge, huge impact there. And also we kind of felt that as people got comfortable with the idea of remote, then people become comfortable with the idea of work from anywhere. And we break the idea that people have to live in the wealthiest places in the world to work in the wealthiest places in the world, hopefully stop a bit of brain drain from second and third world countries, keep people in the places that they grew up, grow up, in earning good money and spending it in their local communities. So everything seemed like that shift seemed like something that we really wanted to be part of, and we wanted to be in the driver's seat of that.

Niko Skievaski:
Nice! I love that. Can you, can you talk a little bit too around the kind of intersectionality of what you learned from the consulting world and how you brought that into creating the framework?

Andrew Blain:
Yeah, sure. So Elaborate was a consultancy that specially, specialized in Agile. For those who don't know what Agile is, Agile kind of came into prominence in the late nineties, early 2000s. It was a little bit of an anti-management thing, so software developers had been used to working in project management processes that were more useful for construction projects or for large infrastructure projects than they were for the management of knowledge work. So you kind of stack up teams at different project phases and you'd, the first team would do the business case and work out what problem are you going to solve, the next team would work out how we were going to solve that problem and what the scope of things were, the next team would work out what the software architecture would look like and what the screens would look like, and then the next team would build things, next team would test things, etc. So you just kind of passing knowledge at each stage in that process. What that ends up with is long lead times, really quite boring work and pretty poor outcomes. In fact, a lot of the data on software projects back in the nineties and 2000s was really terrible. There was lots of failures, really poor quality, lead times like multi-years to do things that really shouldn't have taken multiple years. Then off the back of that, we kind of had this rise of the Agile movement, which was how do we bring the people together to work on a problem for a period of time, get good at working with each other, and really kind of just go what's, what's the direction we're going in? How do we shape that up? How do we execute it and how do we get it out to customers as quick as possible so that we get feedback that actionable, actionable feedback from those customers and we can build stuff that really works. Running a consultancy we had, like I've led teams of up to 60 to 70 people are really worked in the same building as those teams. They're all always off on different customer sites. So we'd have small teams dispersed everywhere. You need to have really good remote infrastructure for that. We also worked on lots of programs where we were working with teams in India, in China, in the Philippines. I remember on one particular program we had six or seven different geographies coming together to try and execute on a pretty complex piece of work in the financial services space, and you learn how to do things better when you, when you have to work in that way. So we were kind of like, all right, we've spent ten years trying to get high-performance agile teams. We worked with distributed teams. We know how to run remotely and we've set ourselves up really well to run remotely. Our offices were kind of like places that people visited rather than places where people worked. We brought all that stuff together to create the framework and yeah, I think it's been really useful for organizations who are trying to tackle that problem for the first time.

Andy Kitson:
Could you talk a little bit about how you developed the framework? It sounds like this was like a pretty big strategic shift for pretty large, like consultancy, and just would like to hear kind of like, is what you have today, is that kind of where it started? Did it start small and grow? Like how did you reorient the company around that, just to, kind of, take us into that story?

Andrew Blain:
Yeah, sure. So we basically just use the principles, we built the framework using what became the framework, if that makes sense. So small fast team, we had a clearly articulated strategy. We had six or seven people working together. We went, this is the strategy, we asked the team to shape how we were going to execute on that strategy, and then we just went really hard at it for two or three months, bringing in a whole bunch of stuff that we've kind of had in our heads and hadn't had time to write down for a long time. So it was, yeah, we, we just basically smashed out the first version of the framework in 2 to 3 months. I have a background in complexity theory, I spent a bit of time with a few of the thought leaders in that space. My major thing with any framework is that it needs to be emergent rather than prescriptive, so that was a primary focus as well. How do we design something that will emerge to help help people to merge a working system to context rather than prescribing how things have to be done.

Andy Kitson:
Could you give an example of emergent versus prescriptive?

Andrew Blain:
Yeah, sure. So if you think about a framework like a framework, like Scrum framework, a framework like Scrum, Scrum kind of says these are the things that you need to do to be an effective team. So these are the events, these are the roles, this is how you're going to break things up, this is what you're going to do to make sure that you're getting feedback, and it's quite prescriptive in nature. The key difference between what we're trying to do and Scrum is that we believe that each team has unique context, has unique individuals, and what we need to do is help that group of people to find the optimal way to work through provoking questions and through really kind of shaping things up. So you become a guide rather than a coach or consultant. You're sort of helping people on the journey to build what works for them rather than trying to tell them what has worked in another place and bring that in. We've had, I don't know if you've had the same thing in the States, but we've had some of the larger consultancies running around Australia for the last few years selling Spotify's engineering model. Well, not actually Spotify.

Andy Kitson:
...

Andrew Blain:
What's that?

Andy Kitson:
Which they don't use.

Andrew Blain:
Which they don't use. So they're selling like an old version of Spotify's engineering model that has evolved a long way from when it was actually documented by Henrich. And they're telling large banks with mainframe systems and cultures that have been, that, where the trust of the teams has been damaged by years and years of cuts, that they can adopt this working practice that worked for a high paced digital startup with no legacy, with high trust leadership that came out of northern Europe like they're just completely different cultures and working practices. So the idea that you can pick up something from here and drop it in there and it's going to work is something that we've always railed against.

Niko Skievaski:
Okay. I think I think I'm ready to hear about the framework, I'm primed. What is the, give us an overview of the framework, like how does it work? What teams is it suited for? What are the problems that's trying to solve? That sort of stuff.

Andrew Blain:
Sure, I'll give you the, I'll give you the kind of 5 to 10 minute version. Try and do it as descriptively as possible. We don't really have images here, but look, effectively, there was nothing in the marketplace to help organizations with how to take strategy into delivery with remote teams. There was a fair bit out there about how to work at a team level, so how to run a, an effective remote team. There's some really, really great stuff out there from, from a bunch of organizations that talk about that. There's a little bit of stuff out there that talks about how to lead a remote team, but it's not particularly comprehensive. And there wasn't really anything out there about how you get groups of teams working together towards common objectives. So they were the primary problems that we were trying to solve for organizations. How do you work with a group of remote executives to shape a strategic vision for the organization? How do you take that strategic vision and work out whether your organization has the right team set up, has the right divisions and structure and operating model set up, has the right governance set up in order to execute that strategy. How do you launch effective teams? How do you launch effective programs? How do you get remote leadership teams working together effectively? And then how do you take strategy, decompose it into the things that need to be done in order to execute it and manage that work as it gets done by a group of remote teams? And on top of all that, how do you keep things visible so that leaders can have the perception of control that they need because they understand what's going on and where they can effectively intervene to get things back on track.

Niko Skievaski:
And is this suitable for like launching a big project, and we want to get everyone on the same page and understanding what we're working on? Or is it, or is it for like a company that's remote and trying to figure out ways to organize the company? Or is it both? Like what types of organizations or projects is this framework best suited for?

Andrew Blain:
We've designed it to kind of handle anything, so we've worked with scale ups on how to plan across the organization. So one of the most common problems that we solve is ..., I need to execute strategy, my teams are remote, how do I do it? And we've got a bunch of artifacts and processes that help people with creating digital spaces, where you can do that effectively. We've helped organizations, I currently help helping an organization that is big and chunky and global, and has a pretty heritage approach to how to do things to really rethink the way that they're going to do delivery. So shifting away from phase-gated processes, shifting away from functional teams where you allocate people into temporary structures like projects to deliver value and into an operating model where you've got a persistent set of teams that are delivering to strategy. I've worked with a multibillion-dollar company that had a distributed leadership team on aligning that leadership team, which had a few new members on the strategic direction of the company and building out a compelling strategy, without having to be in the same room. And we've also just worked with teams. There'd be thousands of teams that have been launched using our team launch pattern, which you can use for just about anything. There's also been some really random uses of ref. So we've had people plan events with it, we've had people kind of, we've had people look at how rethinking how they might do music events when their audience is remote, how to do weddings, how to do just, just random stuff. It's kind of designed because it's designed to evolve to the context you're in. It's not really limited in terms of what you can use it for.

Niko Skievaski:
Nice. I think it would be great to talk through an example, and I'm going to throw this out there and it might be might be crazy and you might want to go to something else. But like, let's say the three of us were planning to do a podcast together remotely, and we need to, we need to trust each other, we need to understand who's going to do the work or figuring out what we're going to talk about. All of that, like how would we work together? And maybe we use this the launch guide, but like, what are the steps that we would take to, to do that and you know, this might be too small of an example because I don't know if this project is big enough, but like, I think that might be a cool way to think about it. Like, if you were going to get us through that and if not, you can totally go into a real life example that you worked on too, if you think that'd be better.

Andrew Blain:
No, let's play with that.

Niko Skievaski:
Cool.

Andrew Blain:
So the first thing we do is actually get a bit of understanding of who each other is. So we've got a little technique called Story Me. One of the things that is really critical when you're working remotely, like when you're in an office, you, some people have things on their desk that start conversations. You might end up in just an interpersonal chat at a coffee shop or something like that, and you kind of build those social bonds because there's, you're around people, there's, there's a reason for that. I think Dave Snowden often talks about the challenge with community, communities of practice and with mentoring in that if you assign someone a mentor or if you assign someone to community of practice, it's you opting them into that community or into that relationship. And those sort of relationships are unsustainable. It's the relationships that you yourself opt into that are the sustainable relationships in your life. So Story Me is about trying to find the things that we have that are in common with each other in a more rapid fashion than you'd do otherwise. So we share some photos about our home lives, about what we're into from a hobbies and an interest perspective. We'd have a look at what our roles are in, in our past organizations and what we think we're bringing to the table in this organization. And we also have an exploration of our strengths and weaknesses, that's the icebreaker. It sounds silly, and whenever I get executive teams to use Story Me, they always tell me it's going to be a waste of time at the start of the process. It ends up being the thing that they find most valuable about the process because they discover things about their team mates that they haven't learnt before. When I worked with a major company that you've never heard of in Australia, they rubbish the process of doing it for the first 15 minutes and then they decided they were going to put one Story Me from the executive team into every town hall from that point forward because they just learnt so much and they built bonds. So once we've done that we go into what are we trying to achieve? And you mentioned that the goal of the team was to create the podcast. The goal of the team is not to create a podcast. The goal of the team is to do, to have some sort of impact. So we would spend time thinking about our strategy. So what, what is the impact that we want to have that we think the podcast is the vehicle to, to drive that impact. We then launch our team around that goal. So this is the impact we want to have. We spend time building an alliance between the three of us, which is basically getting a bit of empathy for everyone's home situation. It's really important when you're in an office, the environment is controlled. When you're in the remote environment, it's really important that you understand that, so I think Andy was saying earlier he's got kids at home or a kid at home, the, there are some caring requirements that come with that. And if you're a primary careaverse, this is a secondary care, the level of care you're going to have to provide then changes. Some people have caring responsibilities for adults, they have different cultural roles in the home. So just building a bit of an empathy for the home environment that everyone's in helps us to kind of know when to push and when to pull. And we'd also build a behavioural contract which kind of says this is how we, the vibe we want to create in this team. And when things inevitably do get tough, this is how we want to manage conflict. We then look at the system of work. So in order to achieve the goal that we have, which is some sort of impact, we're going to have to do some work. So what's the nature of demand that's coming into the team? How are we going to break that way up in a way that uses our individual strengths as best possible? And how are we going to make sure that we're delivering things iteratively and that we're getting things out to our customers on a prompt basis? We'll look at how we make decisions. So in a small group like this, we might just say, hey, we can all make decisions individually and there's no need for us to collaborate on anything but the really serious stuff. But just make sure that you tell people when you make a decision. In larger teams, we might have a bit more of a delicate dance between what needs to come back to the team for decision making versus what we can do at an individual level. And we'll also look at metrics. So if we're going to have this impact, what are the things that are going to tell us we're on the right path and how are we going to measure those things? So what are some really lightweight things that we can measure. In the context of a podcast, ot might be visitor number growth, it might be listening time on the podcast, that sort of thing. But we're going to build that system of work for you out. And the final thing we're going to do is our operational cadence. So when are we meeting? Why are we meeting? How are we going to make those events as optimized as possible for remote work? One of the things I constantly hear from remote leaders and executives is that they're just so sick of Zoom meetings. So, yeah, we've got rough rule of thumb. If teams are meeting for one hour a day on Zoom, then leaders are probably spending about 4 hours a day on Zoom calls and executives are probably spending about 8 hours a day on Zoom calls. There's no, no one is effective spending 8 hours a day on Zoom calls, that just doesn't work. It's, the science says it's fatiguing, and it's also like it's just a bad way to make decisions. If you're not switched on and you're a bit bored, you're not going to be engaging your teams and you're not going to be making great decisions as a leader. So really designing our events so they take advantage of the constraints that remote work creates rather than just doing what we used to do on a Zoom call is critical to being effective. Then we just run and that process works for a three person team, it works for an eight person team, it works for a 15 person team. You just make it a little bit more lightweight and do it a little bit more rapidly when teams are smaller. But fundamentally, I believe that is the key capability that organizations of the future need, it's the ability to rapidly form and reform teams.

Andy Kitson:
And is there anything about this that's specific to remote work? Yeah, all this stuff sounds like it's healthy pretty much for any team. There are some considerations like, sure, you're like you're working with Zoom in the remote context, but being thoughtful about how are we spending our time and is that synchronous in person work or with other people if it is over Zoom versus, versus async like all this seems like like it could be healthy for any organization, but maybe a remote just kind of like raises the bar in a way for, for how much, how intentional you need to be about this. And I'm curious like your thoughts like are there pieces of this that are really truly unique to remote versus like, this is healthy, but remote teams need to do this?

Andrew Blain:
Yeah, I think there's a couple of minor things. Yeah. So I think you just have to be more intentional about the social contract, contract. You need to be more intentional about building empathy for each other. And when we get into bigger teams, you also have to be more intentional about thinking about the work, particularly if you're doing hybrid. So if you're doing a couple of days in the office, you need to make sure that you're taking a view of the work and thinking about what is the best stuff in the backlog for us to be spending that in-person time together on, and kind of planning around that. But the rest of it, yeah, it's most of it comes from high performance team science and it is good practice for all teams to do it. I think the, the key thing that we've learnt in the last three or four years is that things are becoming, events that we used to think were uncommon, are becoming more and more common. The world is more interconnected. There's a, there's a lot more mist than there used to be. So the idea of you're setting yourself up with an operating model for five years that a consultancy came in and did for you and that's going to work for the next five years is a nonsense. So organizations kind of have to have this ability to rapidly form teams, rapidly change the operating model as they need to change strategy. And that'll be, like the organizations that are most adaptable and can do that stuff the quickest and the most most effective will be the ones that thrive.

Andy Kitson:
Are there particular? So you were talking about how it's a super flexible framework, can work for different sizes of organizations, teams that are focused on producing different sorts of impact. Are there particular things that they need to be in place in order for this to be effective for a team? Things along the lines of, say, mindsets that, that leadership has or, or even maybe just kind of like an effective organizational structure to begin with. And then like once you have say like an organization that works, this works great within that or just like, what are, what are some of those prerequisites for, for using their framework, if there are any?

Andrew Blain:
Yeah, look, it's it's a really good question. One, both the operating model design approach and the governance approach start with constraints. So in operating model design, we say these are a set of principles that are pretty good for the, we think are pretty good for running a group of remote teams. And it's things like we prefer to work in small teams. We, we like to minimize dependencies. We like teams to know what their purpose is. We want teams to be able to make decisions about how to solve problems. We want teams to be really clear on where the organization's trying to go and what their role is in that. We want teams to be able to learn and develop new skills, like just a laundry list of good things that make teams effective. But the next step is we ask the organization what are the constraints to doing that here? I've spent a lot of time probably beat my head against the wall from 2010 to about 2016 with organizations going, hey, we've got this amazing thing called Agile. I've worked in these really high performance teams, the teams have been engaged, we've done amazing things, we'll do that here. And then you go in and you drop the practices into the organization and you suddenly find all the constraints. So one of the big things we do with RAF is get those constraints, work them out up front. So it might be that the way we found things means that we are stacking up teams from all over the organization and we have cost recovery processes that we have to run and budgeting process and stuff. And a lot of the work we're doing is actually justifying spend rather than executing. It might be that we have business case processes that require us to do a whole heap of upfront design estimation, planning and locking to benefits and costs before we start things which prevents us from working in a certain way. We might have vendor contracts that say we have to work really explicitly in a really explicit way with certain vendors or that we can't do certain things and we might have slots and stuff in place. We might have rigid policies around working from home or risk management or, or that sort of thing, or they might even just be human resources stuff in place because of government or enterprise bargaining agreements, we call them in Australia, where the actually the bargaining agreement between the employer and the employee makes the working relationship very rigid and you have to do only a list of certain things. So all of those things can constrain us from moving into a model that's better for people and for the business. We surface that stuff up at the start, have the argument to start, and if those constraints aren't going to be lifted, that's really a walk away point for me. If you're not going to change that stuff, then there's nothing that I can do from a framework perspective or from an advisory perspective to help you that what, what you have is what you'll have.

Andy Kitson:
So there's kind of like a certain set of commitments around. Like these are things that we think are good and healthy for an organization, how teams should run or constraints within the org about like how actually you're able to deliver on having those teams run in that effective way and you really just want to be up front about like, what are those constraints? Are those things that you're willing to change, like really push on? And it's not that you expect organizations to have no constraints at first. It's more of a kind of like sensing out what what's, what's the willingness to to change at that level that needs to be in place before the framework can be useful?

Andrew Blain:
And the whole thing is you get a really good sense of whether leaders trust people during that process. The larger the organization gets, the more, it's a balance in organizations in governance, there's red tape versus risk and you want to get the balance right. You don't want to be too excited about taking risk on, but you also don't want to have too much red tape. So kind of navigating that balance is really critical. And in environments where it's there's a lot of red tape instead of term that works in the states. Environments where there's a lot of red tape, it's just like the most you watch, you basically watch the engagement and motivation of people sap over time because they're just reduced to cogs in a wheel, they've got no connection to customer, they've got no connection to outcome, they're just pushing paper around. And there's not much that you can do to make that sort of environment more effective. I think they're the organizations where the market for remote workforce monitoring solutions has come from to make sure that people are pressing their spacebar every 5 minutes because that's, that's how you manage people in the modern age.

Andy Kitson:
Just to be clear it's not. So this might sound like a silly question, but, but what does the team, how do you define, say, a team versus a group of individuals who maybe do similar work or have similar roles or have the same manager but are not a team?

Andrew Blain:
To me, the team is a group of individuals with a collective purpose. Now when you start to get to scale, you need to think about how to organize people so that groups of teams can have that collective purpose, and that becomes critical in remote. One of the things that ... from our team says is that in remote, the silos in your organization become chasms. So working across organizational boundaries is a lot harder when you're not in the same space. So getting those team structures right, making sure that teams understand how they contribute to the goal that you have, making sure they're really clear on the interactions they need to have, and designing those interactions carefully so that everyone really understands who's on the other side of the fence and how are we going to work together effectively. That becomes pretty critical. It's kind of free networks in organizations. You've got the the formal hierarchy, which is the organizational top down structure, and that can have many layers, spans of control can be different in the more creative parts of your organization. You want that to be quite flat in the more operational parts of the organization. You probably want it to be deeper. Then you've got the process hierarchy, which is when I've got a value value that I'm trying to deliver, how does that, does work flow formally through that hierarchy and through the different teams into and divisions to get things out to the customer. Again for creative work, you want that to be pretty simple, without too many hops. For the operation or the run of things at scale, you don't mind if things go through multiple teams because that's how you can can make things run efficiently and get get that economy of scale. But the third network is the informal network, and that's the opt in network. That's the social relationships you build with people. It's the, it's the group of smokers that stand outside of the bottom of the building and chat about stuff, it's the people who go to the same coffee shop or pub. That is the network that decays in remote work and that network is critical if the formal structures in the organization don't permit you to execute on strategy. So when something comes up like the first two networks give you robustness, you can do stuff effectively, providing it looks the same as stuff that you've seen before. It's the informal network that gives you the resilience. So making sure you're spending time building that informal network becomes really critical. And that's why it's good to spend time. So leaders could kind of need to move away from individual performance management and move up to that kind of team performance management and managing the space between teams.

Niko Skievaski:
Oh, I think a lot about how important it is for remote teams to get to know each other personally and individually, to build empathy for each other and to be vulnerable with each other to, to help build that empathy. I think that your Story Me process is certainly along those lines, but your way of describing the way that these networks work is kind of the first time that I really got a sense of like the deep purpose of these, of this informal aspect of, of work. And I've gotten feedback within my organization that sometimes the activities that we put forth to try to build those relationships can feel kind of forced, you know, because going down for a smoke break and having a conversation with someone down there is very natural and it's there's nothing forced about that except for your addiction to nicotine. But yeah, how do you approach that and how do you justify that? And to people who, you know, might not want to bring that into a zoom environment, for instance?

Andrew Blain:
Yeah. So again, come back. Social relationships are opt in. You can't opt someone into a social relationship. They happen through serendipity, like you didn't find your friends because someone did an arranged friendship for you. You found your friends because you found something in common that you were both interested in and you developed a relationship from there. So when you think about the things that you want to be doing on Zoom, it shouldn't be about trying to stimulate an environment that everyone has to be in, to be uncomfortable in. Think more about how can I do things that bring people's interests outside of work, that their hobbies, the things that they do for their side hustle, their the things about their family that are unique or family backgrounds, think about that stuff. And off the back of that, you might find that people are opting in to social relationships. And if you're running a hybrid model, make sure that when people are together in the office, they're not, they haven't got the headphones on, they're not doing Zoom calls with other people. They're putting situations where they have to collaborate on stuff, where they have to find the work in the back log that requires the collaboration, the really tough conversations, the whiteboarding sessions, and make sure you're doing that stuff in the office. And if people are taking 2 or 3 hours off for lunch or maybe going, going early and spending the rest of the afternoon at the bar, that is a really good thing. That's, that's actually the best work that they can be doing in the office. You can do the deep work at home. You can work through the stuff that's, that, that really brings you your personal skills to bear that need concentration and focus. You can do that in a nice, quiet space that you won't. It's the collaboration stuff that you want to be happening in person and that bond building.

Niko Skievaski:
I love that. So one of the one of the things that is, I don't know, foundational to, to this approach that you mentioned is figuring out how to distribute the authority of how teams work to the, to the teams themselves. So we're talking about a large group of distributed teams. We want each of those individual teams to figure out how they work together. And I feel like that's almost in conflict, or I would like you to tell me why it's not in conflict with essentially, you know, the management structures where we're trying to get everyone on the same page and work together in the same ways. And I feel like a lot of the times within management, we're trying to get people synced up and on the same kind of cadence so that we're all rowing in the same direction, for lack of a better metaphor. How does that technically work if you have teams that might actually work differently but we're all trying to in that process hierarchy, like put, put a product out in the world and these teams depend on each other?

Andrew Blain:
Yep. So scale changes things. And I think Andy mentioned before that he's working with companies kind of in that space between a hundred and five hundred where you need to get a little bit more rigorous around certain things from a, from a governance perspective. For small teams, you just want them to execute. So if you're a small company with a small team, work out what the impact that you want to have is on the world and then build the team around that impact and just go at it. You line up your events with what works for people, etc. As you start to get bigger, you need to start making trade offs. So the trade off is kind of between central command and distributed autonomy. For some things you want to be autonomous, for some things you need to take more of a central view. So part of launching a program or a division is really thinking about what is the stuff that we are going to give the teams basically free range to work out for themselves versus what is the stuff that we need to be consistent so that we know what's going on. And that might mean that we need some common language. So that is as an executive, you don't have the whole heap of cognitive load walking from event to event. We might need to think about how value decomposes and what are the right words for the different levels of value in the organization. We might have some key metrics or some key things that we want to track globally, but we also want teams to have the freedom to work within what more guardrails than really rigid structures. So it's really about right sizing it for the context you're in. In industries where there's genuine risk, like risk to life, risk to, risk to customers, risk to the big stuff, you need those guardrails to be a little bit more rigid. In, in more innovative organizations where there isn't that risk, you can open things up a bit more.

Andy Kitson:
Do you have any heuristics for kind of more? You mentioned like, okay, like depending on what level of risk there is, that's that's one, or the other is more for like if you are a given company and you're at a specific point on that risk spectrum, how you decide what to direct centrally versus really have the teams just figure it out on their own?

Andrew Blain:
At least to try and use kind of little sheets link. We put in numbers and stuff like that and calculate which ones should be central and which ones should be not central or just take a different approach these days, which is dump all the decisions that need to be made in the we decide as the leader bucket and then shift as many of those as you can to the left into the decide as an individual bucket. But when you're shifting them, just work out what are the frameworks that you would need to have in place in order to know that when individuals are making decisions, the risk in that decision is controlled. So it might be do we have a delegated expenditure framework that tells people what they can spend money on. Do we have a prioritization framework that helps people to bring the central logic of what we're trying to do as an organization into individual team prioritization decisions? Do we have the central logic around risk management that enables people to make good decisions about when they can directly mitigate or ignore a risk or when they have to escalate that for visibility at management or board level, like those sort of things. As you get to scale, you kind of just need to make sure that the things controlling the logic of the decision are in place so that you can shift decisions.

Andy Kitson:
I love that because it makes the leader's job not so much like making the decisions, but building the apparatus so that the rest of the team can make the decisions.

Andrew Blain:
100%. And then it's kind of shifting away from making being, being there, doing the work and making decisions and you really steering and enabling the organization. Yes, ...'s got a model called SEEM, which was published in the ... Journal a few years back. She talks about steering, enabling, enhancing and making. One of the things that we really try and do with leadership teams is get them to think about how much time they're spending in each of those categories of work and really try and lift their eyes, because the most effective leaders spend more time in steering, enabling and enhancing rather than making. If you're constantly firefighting, if you're constantly making decisions for people, you're not being a leader, you just kind of, you're basically just being a constraint to productivity.

Niko Skievaski:
So you're touching on some of these key mindsets or kind of skills that leaders need to have to support remote teams here. And I'm wondering if that rounds out the list, you know, seeing yourself as a steer, an enabler and enhancer rather than a maker, or are there other skills or mindsets that leaders should have when they're trying to lead remote teams?

Andrew Blain:
That's another tricky question. So there's a couple of things I think that leaders really need to bring to bear. The three ... actually. First one is how do you build environments where people can thrive? So how do you build an environment where the people that are working in your teams can build working relationships and arrangements between each other that help them to get the most out of remote work rather than just sitting in an office 9 to 5, allow them to build their schedules around the things they want to do in their private life so that they're motivated and engaged and connected to the team and build that sense of kind of accountability between each other that, hey, we're remote, we're not in the same place, we're all doing our own stuff, but we are going to commit to smashing this goal that we're that we're driving for.

Andy Kitson:
I think build an environment is something that, like some people is automatically like get and understand what that means or others who will kind of be scratching their heads and be like, well, there's not like an office that we're going to and I won't get to decide what color the walls are painted and what motivational posters are hung on the wall. So it's like, what does building an environment mean in the context of a, of a remote company or a remote team?

Andrew Blain:
I certainly don't think it's going and ordering a bunch of motivational posters from Etsy and delivering them to you, to your team. To me, if you look at, like I think we spoke about Dan Pink last time we got, Niko, but he did a whole bunch of research, basically did a massive research review on what motivates people. So the three themes that came out of that were autonomy, mastery and purpose. So autonomy, people have a sense of control that the stuff they're doing, over the stuff they're doing to make the goals so they don't feel like they're being directed to, they don't feel like they're just taking orders and doing the stuff they've been told. They feel like they've got some autonomy over how to get to the place you're trying to go. Mastery is, mastery, I think it's kind of mastery and pure curiosity. I think some people are motivated to really get amazing at the thing that they are good at. Some people are more motivated to learn lots of new things and lots of different things and get good enough at them to be effective. So I think a great team has a blend of curious and masterful people because you've got the T-shaped curious people and the really deep experts, the masters, and the last one is purpose. So sense of the goal, a feeling of connection to the goal and a feeling like the work that you're doing is in line with your personal values and what you want to be, what you want to be doing. So to me, if you're a leader and you establish the conditions for those three things, then your job becomes very easy because people self motivate, they self manage. Then off the back of that, there's a few things that you're going to need to be aware of from a personal productivity perspective, and you need to be aware that people have dips so there can be stuff going on outside of work that can fundamentally change people's motivation. I've been dealing with some pretty intense family issues with one of my kids for the last 12 months. I have not been able to contribute to the same extent that I'd normally contribute to work, but it's building up enough trust with your people and being vulnerable enough as a leader that when they've got that sort of issue, they'll come to you and they're happy to share that with you so that you can kind of, first of all, lower your expectations of them for a bit. Secondly, provide them with the support they're going to need to get through that hump. And thirdly, give them a little bit of coaching around, alright, you're in a rough spot, we probably have to fall back on habits. So how do you make sure that you're really building good habits into your workday to take some of the mess out of what you do?

Andy Kitson:
And I took us down a rabbit hole. What was number two on the list of skills for leaders?

Niko Skievaski:
Well, so. So yeah, number number one was building the right environment for people to be motivated, which was the autonomy, mastery, purpose. I love that approach. Number two was building the right relationships so people can come to you and so you can adjust your expectations and help them and give them the support they need to be able to get through whatever they're going through.

Andrew Blain:
Yeah. And number, number three was personal productivity. So knowing the right stuff to coach from a personal productivity perspective, patterns of behavior habits, yeah, some of the training that we do, we've got kind of, we go through a whole bunch of different ways of looking at personal productivity because I've found in practice what works for one person doesn't work for another. You've got James ... stuff, the atomic habits stuff, that's really good for some people. You've got person Jim, Jim Benson's personal Kanban, that's really good for some people. Like there's, there's probably four or five different approaches to personal productivity. You kind of got to find the one that fits the individual because everyone's a bit different.

Niko Skievaski:
Nice. You mentioned to me before that you don't like the title head of Remote in an organization. Why is that?

Andrew Blain:
Yeah, I wrote a blog on this because I've seen Head of Agile before and I've seen head of, what are some of the great ones We've got head of Lean or head of Six Sigma or the Six Sigma Black belt in the executive team or the head of Transformation is a kind of history with these roles that goes back 30 or 40 years. And it's the idea that you put someone into the executive team, you give them this fancy title and they're going to make your organization lean or they're going to make your organization Toyota production system, or they're going to make your organization Agile, or they're going to make your organization do market based management or whatever the current management ... Inevitably they get a tiny little budget, so they've got this grand role that makes them sound really important, but they've got a tiny little budget to execute on and their job becomes about how do I convince the other people in the executive team who actually own the people and they own the money to do the stuff that I need to do? I think that pattern tends to fail unless you've got an extraordinarily good person at kind of the relationship piece in there. So someone who has good established relationships with other people and who can convince the other executives who have KPIs and incentives that are probably not tied to making lean work or making remote work work to, to focus on things that are going to drive that outcome. That is a really tough gig. The pattern that we have seen that's effective is enablement teams. So you put enablement teams into the divisions of the organization. So in Agile you put a product coach, a method coach and a technical coach in as an enablement team in a division. They report into the person with the budget and the funding, you make sure that person's KPIs are incentives aligned to what that enablement team is trying to do. So let's drive engagement, let's drive retention, let's drive productivity, let's reduce lead times by making a remote work practices really effective and you'll let those enablement teams run. I think the head of remote, it's nice. I don't, I understand why a head of remote replaces the person who used to be a head of work places. I don't think there's fundamentally any difference between that kind of, alright, we've just got more workplaces now and our we've got some cloudier boundaries around what's our responsibility for safety and comfort in the office when it shifts outside of our direct control? That's just my personal perspective. I know that a lot of people, I think the one real benefit with the head of remote is it does say that, hey, we're taking this seriously and it's important to us. But I just find that those roles, they're hard to execute on. I wouldn't want to do it for that reason. And I think that they kind of sometimes it's just kind of it's a way of saying that you're doing something without actually doing anything.

Niko Skievaski:
So rather you think that like remote enablement teams that are focused on helping teams adopt and build the skills necessary to actually execute remotely is a better way of creating more effective habits within a remote environment.

Andrew Blain:
Yeah, enablement teams are a fractal pattern that has been proven to work across decades and they will work for this. I don't know that you necessarily need to like it might be a team of two or three people and they might have like a pseudo team structure around them that says, alright, well we're working across the organization and let's make sure that we have some commonality in terms of the way we're doing things. But yeah, it's kind of like, they need to make the recommendations into the existing leaders about how much budget they should be putting aside for things like workplace set up, how much, what are the key things they need to sell from an onboarding perspective? What are the key things that exist from a working practices perspective and driving that stuff out within those divisions. And ideally, it looks a little bit different, like it doesn't have to look consistent across a large organization. There is a bit of a thing in organizations of scale that everything needs to look uniform and similar right across the organization. It doesn't necessarily have to, coming back to what we were saying earlier, if you can align on some key principles, aligning the things that you want to centralize, but then kind of let everything else evolve to context, you're going to have you're going to do much better.

Niko Skievaski:
Nice. Well, there comes a time in every show where we transition to the rapid fire questions. These are questions that may seem a little random. Many of them we ask, we ask all of our guests to kind of get some different perspectives. But are you ready for them? We'll throw them at you one by one and and you can tick them off.

Andrew Blain:
Yeah!

Niko Skievaski:
Okay, So I'll kick us off here. What's a story that illustrates what culture means to you personally and in your own career?

Andrew Blain:
This is a great story that came out of .... So one of the guides for the, for the ... that we trained very early in the piece, we've got 200 guides across 15 countries now or something like that. He was working with a team and he ran the situational empathy exercise with a government organization. One of the questions in the situational empathy exercise is kind of identify if you feel more comfortable with your camera turned off. So that lead into a conversation. There was a guy that was in that team. He'd recently been through chemotherapy and he basically said, look, I find it really uncomfortable being on camera. I don't like the way I look at the moment, I don't like the fact that I'm bald. I don't like the fact that I'm a bit bloated and I'm working on that stuff, but it's a bit uncomfortable for me being on camera. I'm paraphrasing there. Anyway, the team said, hey, look, completely understand that, that's really valid and sorry for putting you under pressure and for making you do that. At the end of that session he said, look, this is the this is the most comfortable I've ever felt with a team, thank you for listening, thank you for understanding. And those are the sort of moments that I think are really critical. That's what culture is to make. Culture is an environment where people feel free to express the stuff that they might not be comfortable about. And the rest of the group of people that they're working with steps up, is accepting and does the stuff to make things happen. No one's at their best 100% of the time. Great teams in great organizations, they know when people need a bit of help and they step up and they do the things, whether that's a great sporting team or a great organization, it's a common, it's a common thing.

Andy Kitson:
Excellent. How does your background in complexity theory impact your leadership style?

Andrew Blain:
Oh, it makes it really hard.

Andy Kitson:
Expand on that.

Andrew Blain:
So complexity theory is all about trying to understand the nature of problems and how to, and what the right kind of, what the right approach to solving problems is, depending on how complex they are. So there are some things that you need to deal with where there's a really detailed playbook or just an operating instruction that you need to complete and you'll get the thing done. There are some things that there is no way of writing that, that manual, because no one actually knows how to do the thing yet. And there are some periods where, there are some periods where things are in crisis and you have to shift to a different operating model entirely. So I think trying to understand that helps a bit and understanding that you need to change your leadership style to match the nature of problem is, is really useful, but it can also be a bit crippling because you spend a bit more time trying to work out am I in the right mode or ....

Andy Kitson:
Of getting into your own head? Yeah. Is there an entry point you would recommend to listeners for if they want to just understand complexity theory more? Something they can read something they can watch.

Andrew Blain:
Yeah. Look at Dave Snowden's connection framework. ... Is very good. I've done three, I think three master classes with Dave now, and I think I'm almost at the point where I know what's going on. But yeah, it's really kind of about thinking of the world more from an ecosystem perspective or more from an organic perspective and recognizing that there's patterns to everything. And if you can identify the pattern, then you can adjust your approach. And it's really about doing things in a, you know, in a one size fits all way.

Niko Skievaski:
What book do you want everyone you work with to have read?

Andrew Blain:
Yeah, I'm a massive nerd, so there's lots, depends on the team. What are my favorites? I had everyone at Elaborate read An. Everyone Culture by Keegan and Lahey, which I think is a really interesting book about organizations of the future. I had, I always have technical teams read, Don Reinertsen's principles of product development flow. I think Beyond Budgeting is an amazing book, by ... Borders. The Phoenix Project and accelerate by a group of people that they're not nice fiction books. Yeah, I don't know. Lately I'm reading a whole bunch of stuff on strategy. That was a good one the other day called Good Strategy Bad Strategy by a .... That was, that was a good book. Yeah, I don't know. I just like people to read. I think if you're reading, you're probably doing the right thing.

Andy Kitson:
What non-business hobby or pursuit most influences how you approach your work other than reading?

Andrew Blain:
So in my spare time and I haven't had much of it over the last 12 months because of the family issue I mentioned earlier, I make wine, so we do small batch Chardonnay, Pino Noir, and Shiraz and Cabernet from regional Victoria. I find wine-making to be, it's a really fascinating hobby because you kind of do the work, but you don't see the outcome of the work for at least 12 months and decisions that you make 12 months ago have a fairly significant bearing on the end product. So yeah, it's, I think it's a good, good way. I haven't spent the time from planting vines through to producing wine at this stage. It's, it's buying great grapes from good producers and doing the winemaking piece. But I imagine that planting a vineyard, drawing your own grapes, making wine, and seeing the results would be a pretty great metaphor for, for running a successful business because it's the work you do at the front end of that process. Site selection, getting the planting right, choosing the right varietals, doing the things to get things set up that kind of create 20 or 30 years of future for you.

Niko Skievaski:
It's funny because that strikes me as kind of the, a business that has a like a waterfall approach that, you know, you do planning and then and then you have a production team and like so it almost falls into, you can fall into a lot of the traps that you might fall into with the older styles of, of software development projects, like you mentioned at the beginning of this, this interview. So it strikes me as like a very big contrast from trying to shorten cycle time and work in progress and stuff like that.

Andrew Blain:
Yeah. So in the winery where, I work with another mate who's a CEO of a tech company and we're both process nerds, so there's just kind of like we're constantly trying to work out how to optimize the different processes that we have and we're also trying to work out well, how do you work in smaller batches and take the risk out of it, the larger the batch? So if you're doing like 300-liter barrels or 600-liter barrels, if something goes wrong with that 600-liter barrel, you're in all sorts. So that's kind of yeah, it's a bit of that. I think, knowing that part of the process, you want to know that part of the process before you think about the front end of the process, because the lead time from that front end of the process to productivity is around five years. He's just bought himself a vineyard, he's planted out four acres. He's going to put a heap more vines down. So we'll get, get to watch him make the mistakes, and then maybe I can never go a little bit late.

Niko Skievaski:
Amazing.

Andy Kitson:
I'll let your friends make the mistakes. The real agile approach.

Niko Skievaski:
Yes, I love it. So, yeah, that's. That's our time for today. And I'd love to ask, you know, just any if you have any parting words for the audience or requests or anything else you want to share before we wrap it up.

Andrew Blain:
Yeah. Look, if I talk about what our team is trying to do, we believe that in that future, future employer, future workers will view 9 to 5 office work as some sort of weird industrial age relic. I'd be like, are you serious? People used to get on the train, stick their noses into other people's armpits, pack into trains that were going into this central business district and doing work from 9 to 5 before going home to their families. We think that that's going to sound really weird in 30 years and the kids that will be coming through, then we'll be like, why on earth would you have done that? I think there's a, there is a unique opportunity at this moment in time to forever change what work looks like. As I said earlier, people change quickly in a crisis. They're pretty slow to change outside of a crisis. So we're in this. I think what I'd like the audience to think of is what can you be doing to make sure that we make the most of this moment in time and make work better forever, if that makes sense.

Niko Skievaski:
Amazing. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for taking the time to share with us. If people want to learn more about Remote AF, where can they find you? What's your website? Are you on social media? Yeah. How do people find you?

Andrew Blain:
Yeah, I think we're kind of everywhere. So www.RemoteAF.co is the website. You can find us on LinkedIn. You can find us on, I'm not really using Twitter at the moment because I'm a bit annoyed with the current ownership. I think we're honest, we're on, we're on Facebook, so you can find us through a variety of channels or just contact me directly. You can find me on LinkedIn and I think it's Andrew James Blain or one word and reach out and we'll have a chat.

Niko Skievaski:
Amazing. Well, thank you so much.

Andrew Blain:
I thank you guys.

Niko Skievaski:
Well, there you have it. That was Andrew Blain from Remote AF. On the People Everywhere Show. If you have feedback, questions, suggestions, please reach out to us at Hi@PeopleEverywhereShow.com and at that URL you'll also find notes for this and all of our episodes along with our mailing list where we notify listeners of new shows as well as up and coming events we're planning. And that's really designed to help bring more interactivity to these discussions. So sign up at PeopleEverywhereShow.com. And finally, I so appreciate you listening and in doing so, investing in making and creating the environments where your remote teams can thrive. So thanks for listening.

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