27. Today's marketing mantra: doing more with less

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes. 
 

00:03 
Dom Hawes 
Welcome to Unicorny, the antidote to post rationalized business books. This podcast helps you find out how senior executives, just like you, are building value through marketing. Each episode gives you an insider's perspective of critical marketing issues, why our guests make the decision they make, how they structure their marketing departments, how they build and measure value, and also what they see coming down the road. This is a story that explores a solution to one of the biggest challenges facing all businesses and their marketers today doing more with less. Now, that's a neat sound bite. It's an easy thing to say, but creating more value, increasing pace, being more responsive, all while consuming fewer resources? That's no mean feat.  

 
00:53 
Dom Hawes 
We have tools and technology that can help us, of course, and we'll continue to explore those in future shows. But today's guest is going to talk to us about people and process, because today we explore how an agile approach to marketing can increase effectiveness and consume fewer resources. And I guess that should be music to your ears. Today we meet Scott Stockwell, senior brand strategist at IBM. As well as being a well known agile marketing thought leader, coach, and facilitator, Scott leads global messaging for IBM's sustainability and ESG campaign, including the role that AI can play. He spent five years as Editor in Chief for IBM EMEA, after two and a half years as a content strategist at IBM's Internet of Things, AI and data platform Watson. And he's done much more too. Today, Scott is also B2BCouncil Chair at the Data and Marketing Association and Strategy and Leadership Ambassador at Propolis, the B2Bmarketing community.  

 
01:52 
Dom Hawes 
Now, since I first met Scott, I've been desperate to get him to influence our business in some way. But he's a busy man, and like you, I suspect I've also been very focused on existential issues of late. Because when times are tough, it's hard not only to see wood, but as the Idiom informs us, answers come from trees, not wood.  

 
02:15 
Dom Hawes 
The big picture matters. And that's what I want to talk to Scott about.  

02:20 
Dom Hawes 
When I last met Scott, I was asking him how businesses could do more with less, and he said,  

 
02:25 
Scott Stockwell 
Dom, do. You remember It's a Knockout?  

 
02:27 
Dom Hawes 
Now, in case you don't, It's a Knockout was a BBC One game show that aired in the last century. It was on air for quite a long time, but it was a Saturday night staple. Channel Four picked it up and aired it between 1999 and 2001. So I said to Scott, well, of course I do.  

 
02:40 
Dom Hawes 
And then he said, everything I know about Agile, I learned from. It's a knockout.  

 
02:45 
Dom Hawes 
And that is why we're here. There are scores of people who can talk about agile marketing, but none in a more entertaining, educational, or big picture way than Scott Stockwell.  

 
02:54 
Dom Hawes 
And also, Scott, you've got a very amusing story about It's a Knockout, and.  

 
02:58 
Dom Hawes 
The shape of your nose?  

 
03:00 
Scott Stockwell 
I have. So the reason my nose is this shape is the UK actually won one of the rounds of It's A Knockout, and in my giddy excitement, I ran around our 70s coffee table made of glass and tripped and fell into it and my poor parents had to take me to Casualty to deal with it.  

 
03:16 
Dom Hawes 
Wow.  

 
03:17 
Dom Hawes 
So it's a knockout. Had a lifelong impact on you.  

 
03:19 
Scott Stockwell 
It's a knockout. Really was a knockout. Nearly.  

 
03:22 
Dom Hawes 
Excellent. Now, as I just explained, I feel.  

 
03:24 
Dom Hawes 
Like this is a show that's been a long time coming. So I'm delighted you're here. I'd like to find out a little.  

 
03:31 
Dom Hawes 
Bit more about you, but first, it might be a good idea to give our listeners a little bit of an understanding about your history with Agile.  

 
03:38 
Scott Stockwell 
Sure thing, Dom. My first experience with Agile was back in 2015. We'd had some technical teams running agile marketing in the US and decided to expand it. So IBM set up a marketing innovation group and I led that for EMEA and we set up a very nice design studio in London when were in the South Bank offices. Had some training in the US, brought it into the UK and set up seven teams. So had some formal training and then was very much live and on the ground delivering it. Okay.  

 
04:10 
Dom Hawes 
And if anyone's not familiar with Agile Marketing, maybe you could explain a little.  

 
04:14 
Dom Hawes 
Bit about it and the difference between it and a more conventional approach to marketing.  

 
04:18 
Scott Stockwell 
I'd liken it to yoga, so it is a practice that comes in a number of different flavours or varieties, so there's a lot of different styles that you can perform it in. There's a set of principles, there's a set of practices, and there's a set of tools that you follow when you're implementing agile marketing. And all of them lined up, in my experience, have been probably the most productive teams I've run.  

04:44 
Dom Hawes 
Well, we're going to dig in, if we have time to yogic thinking a little later, because I like the sound of that.  

 
04:49 
Dom Hawes 
But in the meantime, I gave a brief overview of your resume in today's introduction. But what I didn't do was talk about Design Thinking or Lego Serious Play, both of which appear upfront in your LinkedIn profile. And I think we're probably going to bump into design thinking in one shape or other today. So why don't we start by looking at design thinking? What is it, how do you teach It and who do you teach it to?  

 
05:10 
Scott Stockwell 
So, design Thinking, a company called IDEO originated this some time back. It really puts the user experience right at the core. It has three things that it focuses on. It focuses on the human desire, it focuses on the technology feasibility, and it focuses on the economic viability. And if you imagine kind of a Ven diagram with all of those three things overlapping in the middle, you've got design thinking again, a little bit like Agile. It has a set of practices; it runs very iteratively. So it starts off looking at the customer really getting into what's the emotional payoff for their behaviour, then looks into the journey that they're going to go on with you as a provider, looks for opportunities and pinch points. Once it identifies those, you then work on how could you make the good things better and remove the bad things for a B2B journey or a B2B experience, then gets into prototyping.  

 
06:09 
Scott Stockwell 
So you look at what could you do to take a customer through that on something which is almost the minimum viable product that's getting into a little bit more of the Agile side of things, but it's very much test and learn. How is the new experience consumed by the user? What's their feedback on it? What have you learned? How do you iterate and then how do you ultimately get a much better product out there?  

 
06:31 
Dom Hawes 
So some of the received wisdom I have is that a relentless focus on what the customer wants but also on feedback and criticism are essential in both disciplines. What would you say to that for.  

 
06:43 
Scott Stockwell 
Both design thinking and for Agile? I think those two things are fundamental. So for Design Thinking, it very much runs on a loop. So you're going through prototyping testing, getting feedback iterating for Agile again, you're going to go through sprints, which are short time boxed periods of work. At the end of each one, there is always a review of what's been delivered. There is always a check when planning the next sprint. What's the value to the customer? Are we still, if we deliver what's planned, going to deliver what we promised? Or is the customer giving us some feedback on what they've seen so far that actually they want to revise things, their priorities might change, they might feedback on how a product is working, but it's always rooted on what does the customer think.  

 
07:25 
Dom Hawes 
One of the things when we talked about this in the pre production meeting with both Agile and with design thinking, which plays into something that I'm obsessed about is organizational design and how the best results come from self. Managing or self organizing teams where the decision making is decentralized and pushed out as far as possible to the point of impact with the customer. Talk to me a little bit about organizational design as it impacts both Agile and Design Thinking.  

 
07:56 
Scott Stockwell 
I think it's one of the key points of what differentiates particularly Agile as a way of working. It's very much geared to a self directed team. There's some things that you need to have in play for that to work. You've got to have the leadership support for the team to do that so that they've got, if you like, the psychological safety to test and learn themselves. The team needs to be able to self-organize and it takes some teams some time to actually get into a routine and a method where they actually can do that, because most teams in most organizations are used to more of a command-and-control structure. So it takes a little while to think, I actually have as a team member the flexibility to do this. So self-organized teams, super important. The third thing is a very clear objective that everybody agrees on, and it's not often you get both the clear objective and the team agreement that is fundamental.  

 
08:49 
Scott Stockwell 
You might call it a North Star, but that underpins the self-organized teams.  

 
08:54 
Dom Hawes 
So organisational design, as I say, it's one of my hot topics at the moment and I think we might come back to that later. I think in particular, you've got a story about IBM's partnership with the Wimbledon tennis tournament that brings those topics together and to the fore. But right now, let's go back to talking about Agile marketing, because you told.  

 
09:10 
Dom Hawes 
Me that It's A Knockout taught you all you know about Agile.  

 
09:14 
Scott Stockwell 
I was watching a video on YouTube, one of the older episodes, which has three teams of four members each chained together in different sized dummy outfits. The three teams chained together all have to run through a gap which is only wide enough for one player to fit through. So you can imagine you've got one small gap, three teams of four people who in coordinated timing, all need to fit through the gap, go through the gap and come round the outside and then run back down the course that they've run up. So there is plenty of opportunity for collision. And if you like a three legged race that's got four people in it, that's a lot of legs. And my experience with Agile felt very similar to that. The breaking down of work into small products and getting the team organized and agreed on who is going to do what in which sequence.  

 
10:09 
Scott Stockwell 
And their timing over a sprint or an iteration felt very similar to that particular game. And then when I watched it on the TV and you see the people go through, the first team sort of gets through with a bit of pushing. Second and third teams really battle it out. The first team then does a really good job of running back in time. So the team is very coordinated. The second and the third teams, particularly the third one, that's under the most pressure, the timing goes, and you can just imagine it's like a domino effect. One goes, the rest are on the floor. And for me, Agile felt very much like that. When you've got a team that is very coordinated, everyone understands their role, they're all working on time, brilliant. Anything that is out of line disaster.  

 
10:55 
Dom Hawes 
Okay, well, we're going to put that clip, the YouTube clip, on our show notes at Unicorny Co UK, because not only is it funny, but it does illustrate that point perfectly.  

 
11:05 
Dom Hawes 
There's a specific method, isn't there, within Agile that allows that kind of agreement between team members of what they will and won't do. Do you want to talk to me about that a little bit?  

 
11:13 
Scott Stockwell 
So, social charter is something that a team will make at the start of a project. They will agree how they want to work. So things like file sharing, the number of meetings, the method of communication, they'll often talk about their practices, what they want to bring to the piece of work and what they want to take from it and the things that they really don't like doing, the things that can't work. Now, we obviously don't get to cherry pick all the things that we like to do and we obviously don't get to work the way we would love to work 100% of the time. But when you've got a team that has had those conversations at the start of a project, you're building that social agreement, that charter, that gives them that safety to work the way that they want to. And that really enables things like retrospectives, which come towards the end of the work to be easier to undertake because the teams have been very honest up front, how they like to work and what they won't tolerate.  

 
12:08 
Scott Stockwell 
So it's easier to go back and say, well, remember, at the beginning we agreed we'd like to work this way. Are we now working this way? If you don't have that agreement at the beginning, when you do the retrospective later, things are a bit more surprising and not always in a good way.  

 
12:23 
Dom Hawes 
Great. Let's dig into that a little bit more now because during our production meeting you told me that you were running an innovation group to introduce Agile marketing into your organization. You got involved in a LinkedIn conversation with others who were ranting about Agile marketing, saying it wasn't all that. Tell me about it.  

 
12:39 
Scott Stockwell 
And I thought it was all this. So the two of us had a LinkedIn dialogue. They'd started with a number of points that they felt weren't working. My experience was counter that I'd found that it had been very productive and very useful and I'd had a very positive experience from the teams. So I went back with well, here are all of my reasons why I think it does work and the techniques I've used and the results that they've delivered. A few months after I'd posted that article, NewsCred were running an event on Agile marketing because it was being picked up by more organizations. They'd obviously done a search on LinkedIn to see what are the topics of conversation and where are they getting the views and the comments and the interactions. Found both of our articles and then invited us to their event to talk about our experience of Agile.  

 
13:29 
Dom Hawes 
Excellent.  

 
13:30 
Dom Hawes 
And you made seven strong points in both the blog and the presentation. Again, we'll link the blog on the show Notes. If you want to read it's a good read. Now, I mentioned at the top of the show, the big theme we're seeing across all of our interviews at the moment is the imperative to do more with less. Do you think agile marketing might be the way to do this?  

 
13:51 
Scott Stockwell 
From my experience, yes. The two things it really keeps to the fore are value to the customer and constant improvement. So when your bellwether, if you like, is what's the value to the customer? If you're constantly asking that question, it stops you doing things that aren't valuable to the customer. It helps you make choices of time and resources where they are best spent, which is for the customer. The constant improvement looks back at how the work was done very frequently. So anything that's been causing friction or equally anything which has helped the fluidity are reviewed and built on for the next cycle.  

 
14:33 
Dom Hawes 
And you've got a specific method you use to illustrate this, don't you, when you're teaching agile?  

 
14:38 
Scott Stockwell 
I do. So there is an exercise where you build an aeroplane and many agile coaches, I think, will be familiar with the exercise. You have a number of people in a team, you build one paper aeroplane, you explain to them this is how it needs to be built and what it needs to look like. You check that they're happy with that standard. You put a pile of paper one end, you sit them in a row, you give them a time and you ask them to build aeroplanes. And in the first cycle, quite often, they will serial process. They will start at one end, somebody will build the first bit, pass it to the next one, build the next bit, pass it to the next one. They'll get to the end of the cycle with a number of planes delivered, but a lot of planes as work in progress.  

 
15:22 
Scott Stockwell 
And when you talk about the total number of planes delivered, you look at the final quality of the end product, reduce it by the number that is work in progress, because you can't sell that, it's not viable. And the team finds themselves instantly frustrated that work in progress doesn't count. So when you're talking about efficiency instantly, you've got that as a start. How often do we have things on the table that is incomplete when we need to go to market? You then say to the team, now you've got the opportunity to reorganize yourselves where you think you might get a better outcome. For cycle two, give them a period of time, off they go in cycle two and teams vary how they adjust themselves, whether or not they all build a plane individually, they divide it up into two different parts, but they will go through a second cycle.  

 
16:07 
Scott Stockwell 
And usually in that cycle they're rushing very quickly and the quality drops and you take the first plane, you used as the exemplar to see how the final planes look and quite often quality dips. So the lesson from cycle two is you've always got to be the quality the customer is looking for. And that was built in the very first cycle. Then you go into cycle three and the team is now starting to self govern it's, starting to understand quality, it's reviewing the way that it works, it's learning how to iterate, and invariably the third cycle far outperforms the first.  

 
16:45 
Dom Hawes 
Let's take stock at the top of the show, I mentioned that one of the most pressing challenges facing marketers at the moment is doing more with less. What I didn't say was that this is not the first time that such an imperative has been handed down to marketers because I recently found two sources that use exactly the same phrase. And by the way, both were written in 2000 and 910, which is right after the financial meltdown. What's different this time around is what Scott's been talking to me about agile marketing. Now, Agile isn't new. In fact, an Agile Marketing manifesto was codified in 2012 and I'm going to link that on the show notes. Now, I'm not saying that is where agile marketing was invented, so please don't write to me to make that point. Frankly, I'm not enough of a subject matter expert to know either way.  

 
17:32 
Dom Hawes 
What I thought was interesting is that while we're talking about doing more with less and interviewing an expert in Agile, that its genesis was immediately post the Great Recession, which kind of feels a bit like now times of downturn. So agile marketing is clearly an important way of doing more with less. Now, while agile has been used in marketing for well over a decade now, it still isn't common practice everywhere and believe me, it has its detractors as well. But if we are going to look at it seriously and understand it because it's a solution for now, you can't get a much better place to start than it's a knockout. Or at least the lessons that Scott drew from it. Breaking down work into small chunks, getting the team organized and agreed on who's going to do what and in what sequence. What really struck me from the conversation about Agile is the importance of customer focus.  

 
18:26 
Dom Hawes 
My takeaway is that every marketing team needs to understand what their customers truly value and prioritize delivering that it's so easy to get caught up in delivering the things that we find important or that we think deliver value. But we are not our customers. We can't decide what they value unless, well, unless we know them really well. And even then, it's probably better to ask them. Think of it this way. If you genuinely know the one thing that your customers truly value about your product or service, and you decide to cut out absolutely everything else that you do, you've just created, let's call it a minimum viable campaign. Having created that clarity doesn't necessarily mean you only do that thing, but it does mean that you prioritize value over vanity. Maybe I'm oversimplifying, maybe I have got this wrong. What do you think? I'd love to hear from you.  

 
19:22 
Dom Hawes 
You can leave me a voicemail about this subject or any other by clicking on the voicemail link on the right hand side of the screen at Unicorny.co.uk Right, let's get back to the interview. Now, I do want to tackle those seven points you made in your blog, but first up, let's talk about learning Agile, because, as you've already mentioned, it has a whole language of its own. So if I wanted to learn about Agile marketing, where would I go? Like, is YouTube a good starting point?  

 
19:48 
Scott Stockwell 
I'm going to ask you a question, Dom. Can you swim?  

 
19:50 
Dom Hawes 
Yes.  

 
19:51 
Scott Stockwell 
Did you learn how to swim by watching videos on YouTube?  

 
19:54 
Dom Hawes 
No.  

 
19:55 
Scott Stockwell 
Do you think you could learn how to swim by watching videos on YouTube?  

 
19:58 
Dom Hawes 
No.  

 
19:59 
Scott Stockwell 
Agile is very much the same way. You can understand the principles and the practices, you can read about the manifesto and that will get you so far, but you only really learn by doing. There's a Japanese martial arts phrase which is often used in Agile, which is called SHUHARI. It's broken into three parts. Shu is a near religious repeating of what you are told until it almost becomes muscle memory. Ha is when you've mastered how to do the basics and you're able to act independently. So you start to add in your own style of doing something. And re is when you've moved into the mastery phase. You're able to innovate, you understand how this works. And if you think about all of those things that you do that have muscle memory, things like riding a bicycle, things like swimming, things like driving a car you have to go through those very painful early experiences where you're just doing what you're told because it's not something that comes naturally and it's not something you can really learn from a video.  

 
21:02 
Scott Stockwell 
Once you've found your feet, got the buoyancy in the water, then you can start to actually take a bit of flexibility and you've got a bit of freedom. And then once you've got that, you're into the ability to innovate and put your own style onto it. So it's very much learn by doing, start by watching, but you've got to actually have practical experience.  

 
21:22 
Dom Hawes 
I've got that. Right, let's talk about the seven points you made in the blog, which we are going to link, and the first of that is stakeholder engagement. Now, I spent the last 25 years in startups and entrepreneurial organizations. I guess even then, stakeholders is like investor stakeholders and it's important to have investor stakeholder support for something new or experimental. That's kind of really important. When you work in large organizations, though, it's different. You're trying to change a large organization. If you're transforming your marketing approach to Agile, I guess it's a really complex thing. How do you get stakeholder support and kind of who are you looking to get support from?  

 
22:03 
Scott Stockwell 
Leadership support in any project is fundamental. I think with Agile, my experience is where leaders have first-hand experience, it works much better. One of the things that can make or break the way that Agile works is responding to changes of requirements. We're all very familiar. Something comes in, we need to change what we're going to deliver. We need to accommodate the requirement very quickly. There needs to be an understanding from the leadership team that the team that is doing the work needs to work out how to accommodate that additional request. Leaders that are used to the way that Agile work understand that leaders that don't will tend to add the new requirement in and say you're working Agile, we're expecting you to just do this quickly. That's not the way that Agile works. So stakeholders who have experience or certainly high degrees of empathy can be super supportive.  

 
22:59 
Scott Stockwell 
It works less effectively where that is less the case.  

 
23:02 
Dom Hawes 
Do you need to start a communication or education program if they don't have experience before you kick off the activity?  

 
23:09 
Scott Stockwell 
I think if you can get your leadership team to have first-hand experience, even if it's just the aeroplane exercise, just to understand how the principles work, that really gives you a good head start.  

 
23:20 
Dom Hawes 
That's a great tip. Next up, I love the phraseology of this one because who doesn't like a little bit of poker? The third point you made in your deck was that Agile marketers need to play Planning Poker a lot. That sounds like fun to me. What is planning? Poker.  

 
23:36 
Scott Stockwell 
Planning poker runs on something called the. So, Dom, are you familiar with the Fibonacci sequence?  

 
23:43 
Dom Hawes 
I am familiar with the Fibonacci sequence because I am a Dan Brown fan.  

 
23:48 
Scott Stockwell 
Perfect. So for those that aren't familiar, you make the following number by adding the two preceding numbers together. So 1235, 813, 21, et cetera. When you're looking at pieces of work in Agile, you divide it into smaller chunks so that you can allocate the work across the team and you estimate how many pieces of work you're going to be doing in a sprint or an iteration. The first part of that is estimating the size of that work. Now, the size isn't just the resources that are needed or the cost, it's a lot of other factors. So Planning Poker says to the team, here is the piece of work from your perspective. Give it a score using the Fibonacci Sequence and you do this with cards, hence it's called Planning Poker. Everybody pulls the card out that they think is the size of that piece of work and together you declare what you think that score is.  

 
24:44 
Scott Stockwell 
It's a brilliant way to see the differences or hopefully the similarities in the understanding of what's involved in that piece of work. Straight away you can see if people have got a high value or a low value and it prompts the conversation. How have you determined the value that you've given it? The reason this is really useful is all of the team's perspectives are discussed before the work starts. So things that might have been unseen, might have not been understood by members of the team, are declared and clarified before the work starts. So you go through a few cycles with each piece of work, with the planning poker and with the scores until the team comes to pretty much an agreement broadly on what the size of that piece of work is useful for two things. Number one, consensus and understanding. But number two, you then add up the size of all of those pieces of work in a sprint to estimate how many pieces of work you'll complete in a cycle.  

 
25:42 
Scott Stockwell 
And that comes into a calculation on something called Velocity, which looks at how quickly is the team able to deliver in an iteration.  

 
25:50 
Dom Hawes 
That immediately brings me back to more with less, because the phrase it's easy to say it and it sounds like it's just about more, it's not. Obviously it could be more effective, it could be more concentrated or it could be faster. And it sounds to me like the planning poker is a way of really focusing effort into those things that are going to have the biggest impact for the customer.  

 
26:13 
Scott Stockwell 
Absolutely. In each packet of work, and often they're called stories. In Agile, there are three things you look at. You have a card, a conversation and a confirmation. The card is the details of the story or the piece of work. The conversation is the planning poker people talking about what's involved, what's the size and the scale. The confirmation. I'd call the Whitney Houston moment, the how will I know? How will I know when that piece of work is done? How will I know when that piece of work has given value to the customer? And when you're talking about that for each piece of work in each project, that's when you're starting to see the efficiencies. Now, I come from a consulting background. I started in Cooper's and Lybrand, and Cooper's methodology was called goal directed project management. And the way that worked is quite similar.  

 
27:05 
Scott Stockwell 
You would start with the goals. What is the ultimate outcome? When will we know we've delivered this? What will we see? So if you imagine your lovely Gantt charts and you've got those rather intimidating black diamonds that come at the end often a lot of solid bars, that's where you're starting. When will we know we've delivered something and now can we work back from that? Rather than starting from, well, what is the work? And if we all do it, where will we end up?  

 
27:31 
Dom Hawes 
Right, moving on.  

 
27:32 
Dom Hawes 
Russia is not top of the pops. For me right now, but I like the sound of a sprint planning tool you use that has the fetching acronym of Moscow. Sounds like a great prioritizing process someone like me could use almost daily. So what is Moscow?  

 
27:46 
Scott Stockwell 
This is along the lines of coulda, shoulda, woulda. So Moscow is must do, should do, could do, won't do. So once you've looked at all of the packets of work and you've done all of the sizing, you put them all up on a board and you have to decide what's the sequence we're going to do these in, what's the prioritization, let's look at what we must do. That goes almost in a row on the top. Let's look at what we should do. We're going to need to do those then let's look at what we could do. You're starting to get into the nice to haves anything left over. Let's all be honest. You're probably not going to do so we won't do. Once you've done that breakdown and you look at that must do row, that's becoming your minimum viable product. If you can deliver those things in that top row, you're probably going to deliver something of quality and value to your customer.  

 
28:32 
Scott Stockwell 
That's when you get into MVPs, that's when you get into economies of scale and efficiencies because you're giving something useful immediately. You're not trying to wait for a massive project to be finished before you deliver anything.  

 
28:45 
Dom Hawes 
And that plays to less obviously, I guess. So delivering more value, but for less committed resource.  

 
28:50 
Scott Stockwell 
Absolutely. The other thing it gives you is the iteration and the insight. So if you give somebody a taster of something and very quickly they give you feedback, you're off the mark, you've got the time to go back and iterate without wasting a lot of other product or time to keep rising, something that you've already moved forward with.  

 
29:08 
Dom Hawes 
And that kind of brings us on to the importance of being able to say no. So with an agile approach, why is no such an important word?  

 
29:16 
Scott Stockwell 
This is all about responding to late changing requirements and always keeping customer value at the fore. We know things change, we know that circumstances change, priorities change, timings change and you have to be responsive. And agile is very responsive, but it needs to be responsive within the sprint or the iteration. So when a new requirement comes in, there's two ways that you can approach it. You can accommodate it into that particular cycle. It's actually the less preferred option from my perspective. But you would then choose to say no to something that you are already doing. You would take some work out of the sprint because you are bringing some new work in. The second thing, which is probably the better approach, is to say let's wait until the end of this sprint for this new requirement, then test how that will fit into the next sprint to see how we can accommodate it.  

 
30:06 
Scott Stockwell 
Now, the key point here is the team has to have the ability to say no. Either no, we're not doing it right now, or no, you'll have to wait until we do this. In the future, if you have a leadership team that will not accommodate that and just expect that work to be done as well as the existing work in the sprint with no change, that's when Agile starts to break down. And it's that leadership support and the confidence the team has that it can say no. That's fundamental for agile working.  

 
30:36 
Dom Hawes 
Absolutely.  

30:37 
Dom Hawes 
Now, standing up to feature creep and peer pressure and genuine scope creep is important. But I know stand up has a particular meaning in Agile.  

 
30:46 
Scott Stockwell 
It does. I was going to ask you to actually do this, Dom, but realizing now that if we stand up, people probably won't hear us on the microphones. However, when you stand up, you actually feel different, you behave differently. And to be honest, we're all so used to sitting down that standing up isn't the most comfortable thing for a long period of time. Stand ups are meant to be short. They look at what is the work that you've delivered, what is the work that you're working on and is anything getting in your way? They're meant to be very snappy, they're meant to be run round into a team very quickly. They're meant to be done every day. They give everybody a level set, an understanding of who is doing what's working and where do they need some help. So stand up physically stand up. Stand up.  

 
31:28 
Scott Stockwell 
Actually do know sometimes there's a tendency to say, well, we all know what's going on, we've all looked at slack, we've all looked at the Trello board, everybody understands what we're doing. No, this really needs to be done religiously and it needs to be done swiftly. It's not a big commitment in time, but it just gets everybody on the same page. So be a stand up and stand up at standups.  

 
31:48 
Dom Hawes 
And the last of your seven points is interesting. We alluded to earlier with when we're talking about design thinking. It covers what can often be seen as an unpopular activity in any Iterative process, which is honest and blame free. Retrospectives, how are those best run and why are they so important?  

 
32:06 
Scott Stockwell 
So a retrospective is looking back at how the work was done, not so much into what work was done. We talked a little bit earlier about stakeholder support, we talked a little bit earlier about the need for that social charter for people to be comfortable with. How are we going to work? What are we not going to accommodate? What are our preferences? When running a retrospective, you're then looking back and saying, were we true to that charter? Did we behave the way that we said we would have? We behaved in ways that aren't working, are causing friction, or aren't keeping us as fluid as we need to be. Let's forensically really look at those and what can we do to eliminate those factors? It's not a personality clash. You really hacked me off by doing this or I'm having a complete love in with the way that you do that.  

 
32:54 
Scott Stockwell 
It's understanding what is working and what is not working and making sure that you're constantly improving, which again, is one of those underpinnings of Agile and keep doing that for future cycles.  

 
33:05 
Dom Hawes 
Well, there you have it.  

 
33:05 
Dom Hawes 
Seven key learnings from Scott's article about his early forays into. Know Agile needs a louder voice right now, I think, because there are two factors in particular that point to it being a highly effective technique. Firstly, we've mentioned, I think a few times already today that we're all being mandated to do more with less. And as Scott has already explained, agile really can help us get there. Secondly, though, and we haven't talked about this, we're all kind of having to work or learn how to work in a different way at the moment, particularly since COVID whether you call it hybrid or blended or flexible, it doesn't really matter. The way we're actually doing the work at the moment in many cases is different. And Scott, you think Agile might play a role in how we together can work and how we can process our workflow and deal with our project management.  

 
33:49 
Scott Stockwell 
I've run Agile teams in three different modes, if you like, so entirely around the table, so entirely physically colocated, entirely virtual, nobody around a team, everybody on web meetings and a blended approach. Of the two, the least efficient has been the blended approach. Of the two, the most efficient is everybody around a table because you've got that instant feedback. If you've got a question, it's instantly being asked. You can sense the mood of the room. If you've got a team that suddenly feels gray, you've got the opportunity to say, there's something going on here. What is it? What do we need to do to fix it and keep moving? That's harder to do. Virtually. Virtually. If you're going to do that, you need a lot more interaction with everybody concurrently. Now, you always have the stand ups, but you might need to add another moment during the day where you get people together.  

 
34:42 
Scott Stockwell 
Technology is a complete underpinner for this. So if you've got an always on communication channel, something like Slack, you've got the ability to have those interactions virtually that you would have physically. You've got the opportunity to have a pop up huddle. So the technology is really important. The other thing that I think is a real enabler is asynchronous working. Now, how many web meetings have we been on, or even physical meetings where somebody stands up and says, I'm now going to walk you through my 52 slides, which will have at least one, which they'll say, you're not supposed to be able to read this and yet you're presenting it and we're apparently trying to read it. We don't really have time in business today for Jack and Nori, for listening to someone narrate a story, the more that you can maybe talk something through, record a how to as you're talking through your own presentation, the better.  

 
35:36 
Scott Stockwell 
We're all, I think, familiar with that speed up button. So instead of watching that at one time, we'll go to like, 1.5. As long as people aren't talking too much like Daffy Duck and we can still understand it enables us to consume the background material before we have a meeting. So the meeting is about the value add conversation, the questions, the discussions, the agreements, not a lot of chalk and talk.  

 
36:00 
Dom Hawes 
Well, that is a blog that didn't disappoint. Half the show was about it. And I'm going to list the seven key points that Scott made in his blog on our show notes, which you will find either on this Pod platform or also for the extended notes. You'll find those at Unicorny.co.uk You know, I think also we're going to ask Scott back for another episode in the future to take a look at a case study of how he puts everything he's just been talking to us about into action. Now, this was a podcast about doing more with less. And Scott's advice to us is to focus our efforts on the things that matter most to our customers. Basically do more of the things that they value and less of everything else. And the Moscow framework helps him prioritize this. And I love that must do, should do, could do and won't do.  

 
36:50 
Dom Hawes 
Now, marketers tend to be positive and optimistic people. We all like to say yes, we love a challenge, but being the man from Del Monte, always saying yes doesn't win your friends. Saying no is so important, because when you have less, you need to make sure what you do have is used well. So won't do becomes just as important as must do. Then you can weigh up the relative values of your shoulds and woulds. Both design thinking and an agile approach to marketing can help you get there. They work from the outcome backwards instead of from the present forwards, and that encourages leanness and effectiveness. Next up, I think we need to talk about the way we're all working. Now, I may get tarred, feathered and run out of town for this, but hybrid working? Is it working? I've blogged about it in the past, so I'm not going to go over the same old ground here, but I thought it was super interesting to hear Scott's experience of three different working arrangements when operating agile.  

 
37:53 
Dom Hawes 
Everyone in a room, no one in a room, and blended. His observation is that the least effective was the blended approach, exactly what most of us experience in our day to day. And by the way, I agree with him. The people who are not in the room are at a disadvantage unless no one is in the room. Scott's one of the brightest and most progressive management thinkers I've met, so I was genuinely surprised that he articulated this so plainly. While we're seeking to do more with less, we need to be as productive as possible, and that means that we may have to make tough choices about our ideals. Now, my ideal is that people should be able to work from wherever they deliver most value to clients, and after that, wherever they want. But I'm not sure that practical reality likes my ideal, because blended is the least effective, and I don't want to sound negative.  

 
38:48 
Dom Hawes 
What I'm worried about is that our mission as marketers is to do more with less. And if we don't take note of the things that make us ineffective, we end up doing less with less. But what do you think?  

 
39:00 
Dom Hawes 
This is a really big issue, and.  

 
39:02 
Dom Hawes 
I'd love to hear your point of view, and you can let us know that at Unicorny Co UK, either by leaving us a text message or click on the icon on the right hand side of the screen and leave us a voicemail. That's all for today, folks. Thanks for listening and until next time, see ya.