Mike Leber:
What a pleasure having Jim Highsmith today as our guest at the AFP podcast. Um, no need to give a big introduction for Jim, probably because most people might know him from many different initiatives. And we just had a little conversation about the Apollo project where Jim was part of it and Maybe we can start with that. And that's been quite a long time ago, but in your latest book, Wild West to Agile, you wrote about this era too. You were there as an engineer, right?

Jim Highsmith:
Right. I graduated from college in electrical engineering in 1966 and I went to work for actually Pan American World Airways, had an aerospace division, and that aerospace division ran the missile site at Patrick Air Force Base. It's

Mike Leber:
Right.

Jim Highsmith:
where they sold off a lot of the military rockets. And so I worked a little bit on the Apollo program and specifically what I worked on, oh, let me go back just a second. I mentioned Patrick Air Force Base. So one of the things that happened is in front of Patrick Air Force Base, the main building, there were a bunch of rockets that were of different kinds that had been used there on, had been launched there. And one morning, a friend of mine and I walked into the office and we had white shirts and ties, thin ties, pocket protectors. full of pens, you know, typical engineer of the time. And we walked up to the one of the rockets and started talking to each other. And then we started counting down 10, nine, eight, and ran. And the tourists took off in all directions.

Mike Leber:
That's a good one.

Jim Highsmith:
We never lived that one down. But anyway, in the mid-60s, early to mid-60s, the communications were not very good. And so there was some concern that they wouldn't be able to communicate with the spacecraft coming back as it came back in and landed in the Pacific. So they built five ships. And these ships were supposed to go out into the ocean. And they had miniature control centers just like in Houston. And they were going to track the spacecraft as they came back. So I worked on those ships. And it was really interesting. We had a militarized computer that they used on the Navy ships. And it even had a battle switch on it in case you were in a battle. It would run until it overheated. Because you. And we had 30. 32-bit words or 36-bit words in 32K. So when I got out of engineering school, we designed transistor circuits with transistors about as big as the end of my finger.

Mike Leber:
right?

Jim Highsmith:
Today you can get 5 billion transistors on a chip. And that just is a little indication of where the technology has gone over that 60 years.

Mike Leber:
It's unbelievable actually. And this is technology, right? But if we,

Jim Highsmith:
Right.

Mike Leber:
if we zoom into, and even of course the times were different. I mean, the context, I mean, military has been, I think a big background for developing respective methods in project management, in software engineering and so on and so forth. But you still, even given this endeavor, Apollo, the Apollo program, you still have the same challenges, right? Communication. And when I say communication, I don't only mean computer to computer, it's like people. So

Jim Highsmith:
Right. And

Mike Leber:
how much, yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Jim Highsmith:
back during that period of time, you know, when we were on base, the input to the computer was punch cards. When we were out at sea trials on the ship, the input output was paper tape. And we had a console that was about three or four columns and six or eight rows. And every intersection was a button. And that button rolled one program out of the computer and the next one in. And you had acquisition software, you had tracking software, and I forget what the other ones were. But we had two types of radars. We had telemetry. We had a lot of different, we had a navigation system that was still secret because it was one that was used on the nuclear sub.

Mike Leber:
Hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
And all of that information fed into this computer. that was miniscule by today's standards. And writing the software for that, for example, the acquisition of the spacecraft was very difficult. And the ship had polarized light beams that they shot the length of the ship from one radar to the last radar. And that measured the flex of the ship, and that was ground into the calculation.

Mike Leber:
Amazing, amazing.

Jim Highsmith:
So it was quite a feat.

Mike Leber:
It reminds me a little bit on the rockets of Elon Musk's company called SpaceX, right? How they land

Jim Highsmith:
SpaceX right

Mike Leber:
the rockets must've been the initial technology for this to make it possible.

Jim Highsmith:
Right.

Mike Leber:
But yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
Well, let me tell you how technology advanced. Another piece of technology. They used to have when they shot off like a Titan missiles, they used to have a range safety officer. They actually had two of them. One set perpendicular to the rocket and had a wire in a two by four frame. And the rocket was supposed to go up the wire and go this way. and not inland. And the other guys, the Air Force guys, sat behind the rocket, and it was supposed to go up the wire and go out like this. Well, they automated that function. And the first time they used it, the rocket went up, went the wrong way, and they blew it up. And then they came to find out the wires were crossed on the engine of the machine. And they had blown up a rocket that was actually going the right way. So.

Mike Leber:
That's an

Jim Highsmith:
Primitive

Mike Leber:
expensive

Jim Highsmith:
technology.

Mike Leber:
mistake.

Harald Wild:
Yeah,

Jim Highsmith:
Ha.

Harald Wild:
the press of a button.

Mike Leber:
But that exactly and I think that brings us to this point. Of course, in the 60s, nobody talked about agile. And the as you wrote and just described the discipline of software engineering was a different one. It was different kind of organizations. But I mean, how could you how could you have ran? a program like a space program without being adaptive. So the question is, I mean, looking backwards, and I think you wrote about this in your book extensively, could you in hindsight recognize adaptive capabilities in these days, how the organizations were run, how these teams work together?

Jim Highsmith:
Well, one of the things that happened back then was you didn't have the different roles. Or you basically had, you did everything yourself.

Mike Leber:
Hmm

Jim Highsmith:
You did the analysis. You did the design. You did the programming.

Mike Leber:
Right.

Jim Highsmith:
There were, there were no guidelines. There were a few books about the different languages. So there was a Fortran book. There was a Cobalt book, but we basically wrote in a similar language. on the ships. And there wasn't much to go on except other people's experience. And when I got to my next job, which was in business systems, you had punch cards in and you had tape drive, I mean you had printers out. And today that would be like hitting the, programmer hitting the enter key and having a 12 hour wait to get results.

Mike Leber:
Hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
And so the ability to be agile was much, much less. The technology didn't really allow it, but you still were doing things iteratively because that was really the only way to do it back then. So there was a way that you could be at some point iterative and learn, but we really didn't have the technology to make that a real way of working. It was really. I'll sit in the pant.

Harald Wild:
So was

Mike Leber:
Right.

Harald Wild:
it like because you had to discover so many new things that you had to use an iterative approach? Because it's like inventing, then testing, then adapting, then inventing, then testing. Was that a bit like an agile or

Jim Highsmith:
Right.

Harald Wild:
iterative approach?

Jim Highsmith:
Yeah, it was. So for example, for my master's degree project, I got a master's in business, a master of science in business. I developed a GPSS simulation model. And none of my professors knew the language. The only thing I had to go on was a book about the language that was wrong in a lot of different places. And so I was continually trying things out. And on a slow turnaround, I was able to do Maybe I got a few turnarounds in an evening if I worked at the school computer center. And it was really learning, trying something new, reiterating, because there was no help in that particular project. There was nobody, even a mentor, to help me because nobody else knew the language. And why I picked that, I don't remember. Because it was a really tough. project but it was for a company there in Tampa where I went to school. And so I actually it provided some benefit to the company.

Mike Leber:
Right. So I mean, in your book, you I think you literally write about six different areas or is it four, four different

Jim Highsmith:
Four,

Mike Leber:
areas

Jim Highsmith:
four major areas

Mike Leber:
or

Jim Highsmith:
and

Mike Leber:
major

Jim Highsmith:
some sub

Mike Leber:
ones?

Jim Highsmith:
areas.

Mike Leber:
Exactly. Sorry,

Jim Highsmith:
Yeah.

Mike Leber:
sorry for confusing that. But and usually the one which has been, you know, nearest to us is the one we remember best and might have been more proud about. But somehow. because we're just attached to it. Is there any of those where you feel closest to, where you feel like there was the, you know, there was most learning for you, but also for generations, for society, and the biggest progress, is there anything like that, if you compare

Jim Highsmith:
Well,

Mike Leber:
them?

Jim Highsmith:
I think the primary thing was the evolution.

Mike Leber:
Mm-hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
And so one of the things that I talk about is that the art of software development was really tightly connected to the technology at the time and the business needs at the time. So for example, during the structured era in the 1980s. structured techniques came in as a way of understanding more about requirements and design. And so there were some different kinds of diagrams and there was some different process. And we began to put some kind of process into place. And that was a period of time when all of the systems that we built were internal to the companies. It was accounting, it was finance, it was payroll. It was manufacturing. And so you actually had a process in place that you could go and learn from and then automate. As we moved into the next Agile era, a lot of the projects, a lot of the software was built for external customers. And we didn't have nearly as much to go on. And so there was a lot more exploration that was needed in that period of time because of the change in technology going from non-internet to internet era. And it caused a lot of issues, and you just couldn't do kind of a waterfall approach. You had to do more of a learning approach to get through those challenges.

Mike Leber:
Yeah, it reminds me on I mean, the speeches from Steve Jobs, who in his early days, you know, like saw the personal computer as the revolution, or

Jim Highsmith:
Right.

Mike Leber:
how can I say, freedom of personal creativity. And, and I'm not sure how that how that was perceived on your side where you were coming from the, you know, more business related systems and organizations who got challenged by the smaller units, which became more affordable.

Jim Highsmith:
Right.

Mike Leber:
And then developers who have no access, because I think before it was like a privilege to get computer time at your university or anywhere and put your code or card in. And suddenly everybody could create. And that, I mean, you mentioned evolution before, to me it... If I think about it, it feels more like a revolution that I'm not sure if, if agile was just an expression of this evolution at a, at a later stage, because all of this started somewhere in the seventies, but

Jim Highsmith:
Right, I think it was, and for example, I wrote about the 90s, the 1990s, as really a period of the roots of Agile.

Mike Leber:
Right.

Jim Highsmith:
And that's when the technology was changing. So for example, I dabble in the stock market, have done so for 40 plus years. In the old days, I would call the broker, talk about the stock, place an order. He or she would input it into a terminal, it would execute, they would get a message back, they would call me and send me a paper receipt. All that changed in the mid-90s as the internet came around and now I sit down at the computer and I order the stock, place an order and get the response back fairly quickly. Cuts the broker out entirely, except as an advisor. So it's a very different role for... for investment advisors in that kind of environment. But it was a total shift and we had a lot to learn in doing that shifting. The other thing that happened during that period of time is we went from character-based screens to GUI

Mike Leber:
Exactly.

Jim Highsmith:
graphic screens and the Mac led that transition.

Mike Leber:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
And then of course, Windows came up. And I remember using Windows 3.1 and it was a slug. But it ended up changing the technology. There were kind of three technology things in the 90s that changed. There was the internet. There was GUI interfaces. And there was object-oriented programming. And those three things were behind or helped drive the transition to Agile.

Mike Leber:
Yeah, and

Harald Wild:
in your

Mike Leber:
that is

Harald Wild:
in

Mike Leber:
quite

Harald Wild:
your

Mike Leber:
interesting because, sorry.

Harald Wild:
In your book, you mentioned the phrase, prepare for the future by learning from the past. And I would be interested in what do

Jim Highsmith:
Right.

Harald Wild:
you think we did learn in that timeframe and what do you think we have missed to learn during that time?

Jim Highsmith:
Well, I think mostly we learned to tackle projects in a different way, because during the 80s and the early 90s, the whole emphasis was on big, what I call monumental methodologies with lots of process, lots of documentation, lots of checkoffs, and they just weren't appropriate for a high learning environment that we got into as the internet era. came upon us. And so I think what we learned is to do things a little bit differently. I think what we have not learned well enough yet as an industry is the difference between methodology and mindset

Mike Leber:
Hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
and that it's the mindset. of learning and adapting that's really important. And some of us have gotten it and some of us haven't. And I use the term prescriptive agility, which is an oxymoron, and I shouldn't need to do that. But a lot of people practice that. And unfortunately, it is kind of in some ways a throwback to the 90s.

Mike Leber:
That gives me, I have to take a note of the thing because I never wrote it this way. Command and control agility or command and control agile. So like

Jim Highsmith:
Right.

Mike Leber:
do it or die, right?

Jim Highsmith:
That's right.

Mike Leber:
But we would, we would love to, to at least, you know, look a little bit at, at this whole agile manifesto thing, because again, we think we still learn from all of this and you've been a co-author and one of the main, um, authorities around this. And I'm not sure how often you've been already asked about this adaptive

Harald Wild:
Thanks for watching!

Mike Leber:
naming versus the agile naming. And I know Alistair, I think once mentioned, no, he can't, he can't remember there was anything like that at the table, but is it true? I mean, you, you have your book out, right? Adaptive,

Jim Highsmith:
Right.

Mike Leber:
adaptive management already. And, um, and then there was also a possibility to name this thing in 2001. adaptive. The adaptive manifesto

Jim Highsmith:
Right.

Mike Leber:
could have been a possibility.

Jim Highsmith:
It could have been.

Mike Leber:
Was

Jim Highsmith:
One

Mike Leber:
that

Jim Highsmith:
of

Mike Leber:
a

Jim Highsmith:
the

Mike Leber:
story?

Jim Highsmith:
things we did is there about, as I remember, 15, 20 potential names on the board.

Mike Leber:
Right.

Jim Highsmith:
And we started eliminating some, and so the list got smaller. And adaptive was one of the ones up there. And I didn't want it to be adaptive because I didn't think it should reflect any of the individual methodologies,

Mike Leber:
you

Jim Highsmith:
but it should be a term, an umbrella term for all. And so I actually was one of the ones that pulled adaptive off the board.

Mike Leber:
All right, very humble, very humble. And

Harald Wild:
truly.

Mike Leber:
I mean, of course, agile is a thing today. I'm not sure what you think about, before it was lightweight and in your book you describe, I think Alistair, some others were not happy about, I mean, calling themselves

Jim Highsmith:
Right.

Mike Leber:
a lightweight consultant.

Jim Highsmith:
Hahaha

Mike Leber:
Although sometimes if we look at our bellies, we might be more happy

Jim Highsmith:
Hahaha

Mike Leber:
in our later days about that. But. more interesting. I mean, we've been talking a lot about, and this is an industrial thing. And I think your friend Martin Fowler once coined this term, agile industrial complex. Not sure how your relationship to this term looks like. But there is something right, which is maybe different from, as you said before, the original core idea, which is maybe also bad mindset. What do you think about this development where this finally went to?

Jim Highsmith:
I think it's inevitable.

Mike Leber:
Hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
You know, there's money to be made

Mike Leber:
Mm-hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
and some people have made a lot of money off of Agile. And there's different methodologies, there's a different framework, there's different tools. By some measures, you know, 70, 80% of the companies in the world do Agile.

Mike Leber:
Right.

Jim Highsmith:
Now some of them may just wave at the name and I always... Excuse me. Go back to Jerry Weinberg's law of raspberry jam, which is the further you spread it, the thinner it gets.

Harald Wild:
Thanks

Mike Leber:
Hmm.

Harald Wild:
for watching!

Jim Highsmith:
And I think that's happened to the knowledge of Agile, which is it's been spread pretty thin if 80 or 90% of the people in the world are using it, or at least saying they're using it. So it's gotten really thin in terms of the understanding and knowledge. of both the methodologies and the mindset. And so I know there's been people who would like to say, we need to rewrite the manifesto. The manifesto was written at a particular time per point in time where the lightweight methodology community was very small. Now it's huge. And there's some major whims on the tree. There's scrum, there's safe, there's... modern Agile, there's different kinds of limbs that have grown off of that tree. And what I would say is that there's something about the Agile Manifesto and the Agile Movement that got started that inspired passion in people. It was really a passionate response because it really hit people where they were back at that point in time. And so what I would like to see is us really think about What is it about Agile that is the core thing that needs to stay the same? And what are the extensions that might need to be made?

Mike Leber:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
And so we don't throw everything out. We are not going to rewrite the manifesto. I've been involved in several email exchanges over the last 10 years with the manifesto offers. There's no way of getting them together again.

Mike Leber:
Yeah, that's another one. Which is fair enough,

Jim Highsmith:
You know,

Mike Leber:
yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
there's some of them that are pissed off at where it's gone. There's some of them that are still trying,

Mike Leber:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
you know, and looking. Who today would listen to a bunch of old white guys rewriting Manifesta? What we need to do is to get people involved and get back to the passion and get some younger people involved and people that have been doing this more recently and have a different outlook and maybe... Some of us can be involved in helping out or being advisors, but somebody needs to push this forward in terms of what I've called rejuvenating the adjunct.

Harald Wild:
Do you think or what do you think is the reason that so many companies still think that it's a modern and new approach to get agile even though it's 20 years old or the approach has started 20 years ago?

Jim Highsmith:
You know, things get dispersed in ways that sometimes are a lot slower than you think. And sometimes they're faster. I know major corporations that have big Agile initiatives that started in 2014, 2015, 2016. I got a call from somebody like in 2011 wanting to know about going out, you know, doing this Agile thing. And I'm thinking, where have you guys been for the last 10 years? Now I can say, where have you guys been for the last 20 years?

Mike Leber:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
But a lot of them are moving in that direction. And part of it is the technology. You know, we've got another onslaught of technology that's about to hit us in terms of AI and quantum computing. It's gonna be some major changes. We've had some big technology changes. in the mid 2000s would be when social media started and big data started. And those that changed the environment too. I think long term what we've got to do is focus on agility. Not necessarily agile methodology, but the end result has got to be better agility for the businesses themselves. And so I think. There's still some companies that are going to lag. That's always going to be that way. And there are some companies that are going to lead, and it's always going to be that way. And I just think that the laggards are going to drop off at a faster rate than they have in the past because they just won't be able to keep up with the magnitude of the changes.

Mike Leber:
That's an interesting point. And I think you mentioned the term business agility in your book. And you're probably also aware of this. This is a term which splits a little bit of the communities or some are just saying, what is that here for? I mean, we're already talking at the core about this thing and business agility, that's what they say is just another blown up balloon. Um, which doesn't add any additional value. And then some even say, and you're a native speaker, Hey, agility and agile. Are both, I mean, the same kind of words. What's your stake on that? I mean, yeah, just.

Jim Highsmith:
Well, I think there are many ways to get to agility. And I think... to people who are not. proponents, if you will, of business agility, don't understand the world we're living in. Because it's not just projects and software and products that have to undergo this agility, but everybody complains about the fact that their middle and upper managers don't understand. Right? That we would really be able to get Agile involved, embedded in the company a lot better. if our senior leaders understood what it was all about.

Mike Leber:
Right.

Jim Highsmith:
So if that's the case, then won't business agility or enterprise agility or some higher level organizational agility be a good thing, both for the business itself and for the digital transformation part of it. And so one of the things I've done recently is I know that there's been a lot of people in the Agile. business community, business agility community, who have said, here's what management needs to do. Here's what they need to do. The

Mike Leber:
Hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
C-level leaders need to do in order to be more manageable. So they're saying, they're pushing this information up. They're saying, here's what you need to do, to C-level executives. And I decided, I was reading a book recently from a CEO. It actually was a woman,

Mike Leber:
Uh-huh.

Jim Highsmith:
Jenny Ramadie, who was the CEO of IBM for

Mike Leber:
Mm-hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
eight years. And this book to me epitomized what a senior leader has to do to be agile. A lot of the things that she did were very oriented, were very agility characteristics to me.

Mike Leber:
Right.

Jim Highsmith:
And so what I think we ought to do is we ought to do more learning from senior executives. what they think agility is, as opposed to trying to tell them what we think agility is. So I'm kind of off at that direction.

Mike Leber:
Yeah, thanks for this view. It totally resonates with me. I'm not sure about you Harald, but I think we've discussed these things already also at length. And this idea of, if I was a software developer, maybe coming from this agile community and then tell somebody running a 10,000 people business or a hundred thousand people, more business, this is how you're going to change it.

Jim Highsmith:
Hahaha

Mike Leber:
It might be. It might be okay to say it because we've got social media, everybody can spread it out, but

Jim Highsmith:
Right.

Mike Leber:
it might not be substantial enough.

Jim Highsmith:
Well, it may be in social media, but the social media is not going to be looked at by C-level executives.

Mike Leber:
Yeah, yeah, that's one. I mean, I don't want to blame anyone here. It's just, I think what I hear is business agility is just a, I mean, there is agile in its core, but there's a bigger game, right? Regarding business,

Jim Highsmith:
Yeah,

Mike Leber:
running a business,

Jim Highsmith:
right.

Mike Leber:
and there are many aspects, and you mentioned some of them.

Jim Highsmith:
Well, if you think about the transition within the Agile community, and I set up three different periods of Agile. So the first period was the rogue team era,

Mike Leber:
Hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
and that's when individual teams got to work on Agile, but it didn't penetrate the larger organization in most cases. And then the second era was kind of the courageous executives. When we started bringing Agile into IT organizations. And then the third era started in 2010, 2011, when people started thinking about digital transformation of the whole business. We don't have a digital Agile transition of the whole business unless the business people know what you're doing and understand the mindset. And so there's a need for agility at the... at the development level, at the project management level, at the middle management level, and the top management level. But it's a little bit different at each level. It's just like I did a project in the 2005, where we actually did a project that combined the hardware and software into a medical instrument. And so it was bringing agility to engineering as opposed to software engineering. And that was a challenge too.

Mike Leber:
Right.

Jim Highsmith:
So. We're looking at agility in a number of different areas.

Mike Leber:
And you were mentioning mindset before, right? What you just, I mean, mindset in terms of how we look at things, how, where we come from. That's how I think about mindset, you know, how we build up our assumptions and then draw from them in order to have an easier life instead of every day to make new decisions. But when you mentioned these errors now, what do you think is missing potentially? You know, when organizations just try to run one transformation after the other, but maybe don't look at some of the essential things. What could these essential things be? Because I'm not sure about your experience, but results might be average out of all these transformations.

Jim Highsmith:
Right. And the results are going to be, you know, a spectrum of things, you know, curves. Some people are going to do it better. Some people are going to not

Mike Leber:
Hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
do it as well.

Mike Leber:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
And one of the things I got to do in the book is I tried to reflect on the 60 years and the kinds of people, the kinds of characteristics that really determined whether somebody was going to be agile or not. And There's a lot of stuff that's written down, for example, about business agility. And if you read through some of this stuff, it sounds like good management. So

Mike Leber:
Hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
my question was what's, what's agile or adaptive about this? And the other part of my background is that I've always been adventurous, both in taking on new jobs and also in outdoor stuff. So I've done mountain climbing and rock climbing. you know, skiing and a number of different things, bike racing. And so I got, when I started looking at characteristics of good adaptive agile managers, one of the characteristics that I think they have to have is they have to be adventurous.

Mike Leber:
Mm-hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
They have to be able to risk. They have to be able to work on limited data. They've got to be willing to take that risk in an organizational context. And if you don't have people who are adventurous at every level, at the developer level, at the project management level, at the middle management level, if you don't have a certain number of people in your organization, at each of those levels, at the top level, who are adventurous, who are willing to step out and do something different, your path to agility is going to be very limited.

Mike Leber:
Is that

Harald Wild:
So

Mike Leber:
what you did?

Harald Wild:
what do you think about methodology? Is it, I mean, is the core of Agile like being adaptive, being flexible, trying inspect and adapt? Is that what should be focused on more compared to the vast amount of methodologies that have developed over time, which are sometimes business models, sometimes serious approaches. Do you think a focus on the core of Agile would be a good idea nowadays?

Jim Highsmith:
I think it is. I don't have any trouble with methodologies because I've seen over the last 40 years, I've seen every methodology succeed, even the waterfall

Mike Leber:
Mm-hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
methodology. You know, I've built some really good systems using the waterfall methodology.

Mike Leber:
Mm-hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
So I've seen everyone succeed and I've seen everyone fail. I've seen agile methodologies succeed and I've seen agile methodologies fail. So I don't think it's the methodology itself. I think it's the mindset you bring to it. If you look at a methodology as a prescription. That's not going to work very well. If you look at it as a guideline that you can adapt and use as you move forward, I think that's an important piece. The problem with prescriptive methodologies is they try to put everything in. So are we going to need x? Yeah, we might need x, so we'll put it in. We're going to need y. Yes, it looks like y is a pretty good thing. We'll put it in. Pretty soon, they become so big and bloated, you don't know where to start. And you don't know where to take things out. I would much rather an organization start with a small set of practices, a small methodology, and then what I call a generative methodology. You generate the need for things and then you bring them in as you need them. So for example, you don't bring DevOps in until you need DevOps and then you generate the need for DevOps and you bring it in. But you don't start with these huge methodologies. and try to take away from them because what I found is, it doesn't work. It's very difficult to slim down a huge methodology because you look at each individual piece and it says, oh, that's reasonable, best reasonable, best reasonable. And as a scrum master or a project manager, you wanna be safe, right?

Mike Leber:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
You don't wanna make any mistakes. And so if I leave this in, Nobody can fault me. This is take a strange example, risk management. Let's say I take risk management out. Well, if somebody could fault me if some kind of risk impacts that project or product. But if I bring all this risk management stuff in, it may be page after page after page of stuff you could do to manage risk. Well, that might be fine if you're building the software for the web telescope. But if you're building a computer game, maybe it's not fine. And

Mike Leber:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
so one of the things that I brought the analogy of mountain climbing to my adaptive software development book was that in mountain climbing, you have levels so that you know that, for example, going out and climbing something in the Canadian, in the cascades like Mount Baker is hugely different than climbing Mount Everest.

Mike Leber:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
And so you have different, you know you need a certain set of skills and a certain set of abilities to do a particular mountain. And we don't seem to have that in projects or products. We think everybody can work on everything and that's not necessarily the truth.

Mike Leber:
Is that, I mean, it's an interesting consideration, didn't think about this before, a reference, a potential reference to something like CMMI, or would that again go way too far? Because we know CMMI again

Jim Highsmith:
Well,

Mike Leber:
is a little bit more mechanistic.

Jim Highsmith:
CMMI was big during the 90s. It was the era of big processes.

Mike Leber:
Right.

Jim Highsmith:
And the problem was that there were some good things about CMMI in terms of the learning

Mike Leber:
Hmm

Jim Highsmith:
it encouraged. But again, it was so large and it was intended for the military and aerospace

Mike Leber:
Hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
that there was so much in it that people got lost.

Mike Leber:
same

Jim Highsmith:
And I'll

Mike Leber:
problem.

Jim Highsmith:
give you an example of. why it didn't work so well. I was in India working with a company that was like CMM level four. So they were really mature, good organization from a CMM process perspective and they had a review, a technical review of their architecture and they had all the documents, they went through the process and a little while later the technology blew up on them. Because in that meeting to review the technology, they didn't have anybody who really had any experience with the technology.

Mike Leber:
Hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
So they had the process, but

Mike Leber:
Okay,

Jim Highsmith:
they didn't

Mike Leber:
mint.

Jim Highsmith:
have the skill.

Mike Leber:
Right.

Jim Highsmith:
And that's something you get because when you have those kinds of processes, management just begins to believe that anybody can do that process.

Mike Leber:
Yeah. So that again, coming back to your analogy with mountain or rock climbing, it's like you have to have it inside of yourself, right? You have to have experience. You probably learned the skill, but then you

Jim Highsmith:
That's right.

Mike Leber:
learn by experience by doing it. And while you're doing it, you're not reading a book, but you're doing it from intuition and skill is would

Jim Highsmith:
Right.

Mike Leber:
that be the, the sort of analogy that we transform into business and just say, hey, we need to get this intuition and skill together instead of running books.

Jim Highsmith:
I think that experience is a big part of it. And I think, for example, a lot of what was in my book came from experience

Mike Leber:
Right.

Jim Highsmith:
as well as thinking about what the kind of the concepts or theory behind it was. But a lot of it came from experience. So I would take that climbing experience, for example, and I would apply it to the next project that I worked on in terms of in mountaineering. You better be aware of the situation, be aware of the weather

Mike Leber:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
and the conditions to know whether you move forward or not. And sometimes backing off is the best idea because the conditions are wrong. In a project, so in climbing, you respond to the conditions, the reality at the time. In projects, it was, you follow the plan in the old days. And everybody expects the plan to be right. And so reality, you just kind of ignore reality and follow the plan. And so I think that's one of the differences that people have to understand.

Harald Wild:
So in a nutshell, it would

Mike Leber:
One

Harald Wild:
be

Mike Leber:
major

Harald Wild:
like you

Mike Leber:
change.

Harald Wild:
have to have a toolbox that is filled with high quality tools that you have to know theoretically, but most practically as a company that you have the toolbox and if you need one tool, then you can use it or then you should use it and fill your own space of needs that you have with the respective tools. that you have in your toolbox.

Jim Highsmith:
Well, I would say that you need a minimal toolbox and maximum talent.

Mike Leber:
Mmm.

Jim Highsmith:
So you need to have the talent to do it. And the right talent can use a minimal set of tools. If they have great tools, that's even better, but they don't even need great tools to produce a good output, if you've got the right kind of talent and skills on the project.

Mike Leber:
So that.

Jim Highsmith:
And I think that's what people are still not... cognizant of enough is having the skills and ability, although talent is becoming a much greater focus of senior management than it used to be.

Mike Leber:
And I think most, most companies meet talent at least once in their lifetime, right? When they hire people in the moment, they bring people on board, but then a couple of things happen, which, which tells talent to, you know, bad word now adapt and do what they're being told to.

Jim Highsmith:
Right.

Mike Leber:
So would that mean we need to pay more attention? And again, that you mentioned it from senior management leadership to not only hire talent, but give them space and even maybe get some rebellion on board to say, I'd rather want to say naysayers and yes-sayers and question what we've been doing so far and look after alternatives.

Jim Highsmith:
Yeah, an example I had is years ago, I was a manager of software development for an organization. And I had a woman in the organization and she was kind of a different, she was non-conformist, she was adventuresome, and she got cross ways with several people in the organization because of that. And she would come to me and she said, do I need to back off? And I said, no, you move forward. You're the catalyst that I need for change. So you keep doing what you wanna do and I'll back you up. And I think that's the kind of management support you've got to give to those people. It's not enough to have an adventurous person. You've got to give them the support from a management perspective. And that's why management needs to understand that particular perspective.

Mike Leber:
In your book, you mentioned that your initial idea to write all of this down was actually to give something to your grandchildren. And so I'm curious, I don't know your family background, but I'd be curious, number one, what your grandchildren, you know, said about this book. So what their response was and even more, how are they, you know, coming to you? talking about these things or understanding these things versus taking all of this for granted because it's a totally different generation. Just saying,

Jim Highsmith:
Hahaha

Mike Leber:
actually we don't understand this whole history, why it's so complicated.

Jim Highsmith:
Well, it's interesting. The most points I ever made with my grandkids, and they're both teenagers now, one's 17 and one's 15, and the best points I ever made with them one time is we were talking and my grandson was saying he had a YouTube channel, and I think he had something like 18 followers on the YouTube channel, and

Mike Leber:
Nice.

Jim Highsmith:
he was saying, he thought that was pretty good. And I told him I had 12,000 followers on Twitter, and it just blew his mind.

Mike Leber:
I'm going to

Jim Highsmith:
And

Mike Leber:
go to

Jim Highsmith:
I had

Mike Leber:
bed.

Jim Highsmith:
to show him. He didn't believe me.

Mike Leber:
Okay.

Jim Highsmith:
But I had taken a memoir writing course five or six years ago. And I always kind of had in the back of my mind that I wanted to write a memoir for my grandkids and my kids to some extent too. And so I got an idea about two years ago, I got started on this after COVID or during COVID and I didn't have some other things to do. And the first thing I wrote was a section about 50 pages long. on my outdoor adventures, my skiing, my hiking, my mountaineering,

Mike Leber:
Mm-hmm. Cool.

Jim Highsmith:
trips that I'd made.

Mike Leber:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
And I packaged that up and gave it to them to that as section one. And then I started working on it and they really enjoyed that. They liked, I had a, I had 50 pages of work and 54 pictures, old photos that I had

Mike Leber:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
found. And then I got started on the career. And I said to myself, I said, the last thing I need. is to do a resume type career. I work here, I did this, and so I started looking at the different eras and how I might be able to fit that in. And the more I thought about that, the more I thought, well, maybe other people would be interested in this. And so I shipped out a really rough manuscript to three or four different friends. And they said, hey, this sounds like a pretty good idea. And it's interesting, I shared it with a publisher with Pearson. with my editor there. And all I asked for was, did they think it was a good idea? And pretty soon I got back to the response, yes, they thought it was a really good idea and they would like to go ahead and publish the book. So I had a publishing contract pretty early on. And it's interesting how different books kind of transition.

Mike Leber:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
My first book I worked on for about five years from the first started working on it until it got published. This one door to door was like 15 months. Of

Mike Leber:
This

Jim Highsmith:
course,

Mike Leber:
is

Jim Highsmith:
I had

Mike Leber:
amazing.

Jim Highsmith:
full time to work on it too. I wasn't actually

Mike Leber:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
having to do anything else.

Mike Leber:
Yeah, but still, still amazing work. And I think as Martin Fowler writes in the foreword of your book, it's so important to understand history in order to understand how we got from, you know, two different stations, what brought us here, knowing a little bit more of context and your grandchildren like 15, 17, we already know there will be a lot involved with AI, right? Currently a little bit more of a buzz, but behind the scenes, it's, I think, a very, very serious business, which is growing.

Jim Highsmith:
And the one thing I'm really encouraging both of them, particularly my grandson, who is a big sports advocate, does play sports, and is also

Mike Leber:
Nice.

Jim Highsmith:
very good in the classroom. And he's tending towards the technology side.

Mike Leber:
Alright.

Jim Highsmith:
And so I'm encouraging him to write. And in fact, he's the editor of the school newspaper next year. So I'm really

Mike Leber:
What?

Jim Highsmith:
encouraging his communications

Harald Wild:
Well.

Jim Highsmith:
guild.

Mike Leber:
This is essential. So I mean, the world has changed. The world is changing dramatically and we don't know where it's going. I sometimes say if we look at Star Trek and all these

Jim Highsmith:
Hahaha

Mike Leber:
early series, they might give us a lot of impressions what's going to happen next in the next decades because people tend to copy, right? Somehow build after what they've seen in their youth. But. The world also has changed in terms of, you know, it's hard to get requirements from anyone to build a system and then, you know, into this process, because obviously we're, we need to find more out by learning about the people by observing and all of this. Now here you have executives which are confronted with, okay, I've got my old organization, I've got my old platforms. Here is the whole. here's this whole new thing and then they talk about different methods. If you ran into any of these executives, what would be your advice? what to look

Jim Highsmith:
Well,

Mike Leber:
after,

Jim Highsmith:
I would

Mike Leber:
what

Jim Highsmith:
just

Mike Leber:
maybe not to

Jim Highsmith:
talk

Mike Leber:
look after.

Jim Highsmith:
about some of the things that we've talked about. And the fact that they, you know, one of the things about the agile bibit to me, if you bring it back to its core, it's all about performance, building better software, building better products, building better outcomes. and people building a better environment for people to work in. So collaborations, autonomy, self-directed teams, self-organizing teams. And there's always got to be a balance of those two things. And that's what the Agile Movement is all about. So I start with executives with that basic framework. The world is changing. And we have less and less understanding of how it's going to change, more and more uncertainty. It's happening faster. And so you've got to balance your new strategies based on how do you get performance, the performance you need, and how do you work with your people to build a better working environment. And those two kinds of things have really got to go together. And the more I read from senior executives in terms of their books that I've read, they're really focused on that. book Good Power. And so there's a couple of other CEOs that I've read their books. And they're really focused on both of those things. If you really want to talk about an agile manager, read the book by Phil Knight, Shoot Dog. That company was on the edge of bankruptcy so many times over a couple of decades. It's amazing they made it through. And his management style is really an interesting management style. Some people would call it non-management, but I think it was a lot more than that.

Harald Wild:
Well, when it comes to incentive structures, especially in senior management and boards, where you have shareholders having their own interests, creating supervisory boards that create boards in companies, and then compared to the company itself or people working in the company trying to become more agile, what is your opinion on these incentive structures and how do they influence? the company when becoming more, when trying to become more agile.

Jim Highsmith:
Well, there's a trend in senior management or management that's going somewhat slowly, but it's still moving in that direction, is to go from stock shareholder business to a stakeholder business. In other words, there's been a lot of, over the last 10 or 20 years, a lot of emphasis on shareholders and that a company ought to be... directed and driven by shareholder profitability. And there's another movement that started that's more, why it's, that's more, has more involved. It says, no, there are various and sundry stakeholders. There's the stockholders, of course, then there are the employees and there are the customers. And those stakeholders are extremely important to the long-term future of the company. And so for example, if you remember Jeff Bezos at Amazon, he didn't worry about profits for a long time. He'd worked on getting the infrastructure in place and the people in place and to build out the kind of company he wanted. And he ignored shareholder earnings for many years, much to the chagrin of Wall Street for a number of those years. And so you can't always look at the short-term. stockholder or shareholder view of the world. And I think we're moving probably much too slowly to the stakeholder view. And that's at the top level. And I think you'd need that stakeholder view in order to be more agile at the board and senior executive level. So that's getting into some real changes in how you view capitalism, which is way far away from program development.

Mike Leber:
Yeah. And, and there is, I mean, there is this probably bigger context. I mean, we talk about climate change nowadays, right? Even with AI, there is already a lot of concerns about regulations and things. So I'm always thinking about this corporate social responsibility function, not just to say, Hey, we deliver a product profit, everything

Jim Highsmith:
Right.

Mike Leber:
in that direction counts, but seeing just a bigger picture, which obviously is complex, but at least to see more of the dots connected. and not only within my little scope. And that brings me to one of our final questions, because scope in terms of, if we look at regions, I think the US has been for long time the dominator in terms of IT and innovation in that direction. The West Coast is still one of the leads, but China has grown faster than anyone would have. probably hoped for or thought about. And these days, it even looks like taking more of a lead. I mean, if we in Europe, we feel like we're, if at all we're in the third place. How do you see that? Is there something companies organizations should, I mean, change in terms of thinking and acting and running their business, maybe more global and anything like that? How do you how do you see this? Chinese speed of innovation and what's happening in the rest of the world.

Jim Highsmith:
Well, one of the things that I did as I was writing the final chapter of the book, chapter nine, is I started off thinking, you know, maybe I'll try to predict some things

Mike Leber:
Hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
based on my history. And then I thought, no, I don't think I'll do that. And I thought, what I wanna do is I wanna present the history to help prepare for the future and not try to predict the future. And if you look at the trends like the AI, quantum technology trends as an ongoing part. of what's happened over the last 60 years, the question you really have to ask is, is there gonna be a catastrophic, discontinuous change, or is it gonna be an evolving trend like the rest of things? And I think it's gonna accelerate change and impact in ways that we don't really understand. I mean, we didn't understand what social media was gonna do in the early 2000s. I'm not sure we still understand what it's gonna do.

Harald Wild:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
But. But I think the same thing will happen with AI and quantum computing. It's gonna change things that way we really don't even understand yet. And the question is gonna be, are one of the catastrophic events like climate change, geopolitical change, gonna change things so drastically that all the kind of planning for the future is thrown out the door? And I think that's one of the things we face today that we haven't faced in a while. probably until back into World War II. And I think people don't remember that, but the whole world was in turmoil. And there were a lot of people wondering, would we ever get out of it? And I'm not sure we're headed for that kind of turmoil, but we might be. it'll be more than hopefully it'll be more of an intellectual term turmoil than a war kind of turmoil.

Mike Leber:
Yeah, that brings us probably back to what you said before about talent, right? And we had this in a previous podcast. Um, we probably could invest more into the education. Like you, you know, you mentioned your grandkids into the education of your, our younger generations, because the more skilled they are, not only, you know, running a task, but skilled from a kind of philosophical point of view, the better for our society, right?

Jim Highsmith:
Right. There was a study that's just been published by McKinsey

Mike Leber:
Mm-hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
that talks about the difference between companies that go on a performance base and really are looking at things like stockholder value, as opposed to companies who have both a performance and a people focus and that they actually do better and that the difference in education between those two groups is enormous. Performance only, their training budget or their training is about 19% and the, or I'm sorry, 19 days a year. And for the performance and person and people group, it's like 74 days of training a year. And so there's a huge difference in how they look at their people and how they support their people in their organization. And so I asked myself the question, if more of the leaders of the world were like the leaders in New Zealand, Jacinta, who's just stepped down as primary minister, if there

Mike Leber:
Mm.

Jim Highsmith:
were more leaders in the world who are more like her in terms of looking at both performance and people, would we be better off? And I think we would. And that's why I think the Agile community has 20 plus years of working and trying to make people more Agile. that we can contribute to the wider community.

Mike Leber:
Yeah. Is that something, I mean, unfortunately this has usually a long-term effect, right? In terms of changing leadership might be a longer, longer-term thing, but still we shouldn't forget about it. Do you see, I mean, America, US is very famous for a lot of, you know, business schools like Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and so on and so forth. Do you see changes there? in terms of how they approach students, how they approach their programs, how they educate young professional leaders.

Jim Highsmith:
I don't really have any insight to that

Mike Leber:
Hmm.

Jim Highsmith:
at this point. I haven't been involved in some of the universities for quite a while, so I really don't know.

Mike Leber:
Right. Okay. It's a, it remains a hope.

Jim Highsmith:
I would be pontificating without knowledge,

Mike Leber:
Yeah.

Jim Highsmith:
which I'm prone to do sometimes, but

Mike Leber:
Yeah,

Jim Highsmith:
not on this.

Mike Leber:
yeah, sure.

Jim Highsmith:
Ha!

Mike Leber:
So final one, I mean, we already talked about your grandchildren with a relation to your latest book and advice you might give an executive, maybe we can wrap it up into this direction. What advice would you give a young student, maybe of the age of your older grandkid,

Jim Highsmith:
Well, one

Mike Leber:
you know,

Jim Highsmith:
of the things that I'm telling them is that the change over their lifetime is going to be so great that they're not going to be able to put together a plan. If I tried to put together a plan when I was 20 years old, it would have gone out the window fairly quickly. But what I had and in the early years, it wasn't explicit. It was implicit, was a purpose. And as I moved through my career, that purpose became clearer and clearer. And part of it had to do with the whole agile performance and people aspect. Part of it had to do with digital transformation. Part of it had to do with communication and getting the message out to people. So I had a set of things that transcended the individual jobs and individual skills. but it was kind of a long-term purpose that evolved over time. So that's kind of one of the suggestions that I make in a book that you might want to think about. And it's something that I'm telling my grandkids, don't try to plan, but try to come up with a purpose.

Mike Leber:
It sounds like a very nice, ambitious and inviting.

Jim Highsmith:
Very ambitious.

Mike Leber:
set of ideas and I, all

Harald Wild:
Yeah. And the perfect,

Mike Leber:
right.

Harald Wild:
I mean, a perfect wrap up maybe, um, for this podcast episode. And when it, when it comes to myself, I'm into rockets, I'm into software development and I'm into agile. So I had three times the fun today and, uh,

Jim Highsmith:
Hahaha

Harald Wild:
I'm three times grateful for the insights you gave us and it was such an honor to meet you and, uh, yeah. Thank you so much for taking the time for. our podcast episode and giving everybody the insights into nearly six decades of knowledge. And yeah, thanks so much.

Jim Highsmith:
Well, thank you. I've really enjoyed it. And it's always nice to get good questions and every question's a little different and I can give a different response. So I talked about some things today that I haven't talked about in some of the other podcasts I've done, which has been really nice. And I realized that you have a different audience too. So it's been fun. I've enjoyed it.

Mike Leber:
Thanks, Jim, from my side too. And I think from everybody's side, thanks for your, for the whole work you did throughout your lifetime. So something valuable for everyone. And I think your latest book is just a recommendation to look into. We'll put it in the link of the episode description and hope everybody enjoys it and learns

Jim Highsmith:
Good.

Mike Leber:
as much as possible.

Jim Highsmith:
Thanks.

Mike Leber:
Just one question, just a final one. What's your next project?

Jim Highsmith:
Well, right now I'm working on several articles having to do with agility and management and leadership. And I'm also kind of kicking off a thing, a project. I'm not quite sure where to go with it yet to talk about the rejuvenation of Agile. So I've been talking to some people about how can we kind of rejuvenate the passion of Agile in the early years.

Mike Leber:
beautiful. So we will definitely follow your work, follow what's coming out, what you're going to publish and we're curious what's going to happen.

Jim Highsmith:
Great.

Mike Leber:
For today, thanks a lot for

Jim Highsmith:
Thanks

Mike Leber:
having

Jim Highsmith:
a lot.

Mike Leber:
been here. And yeah, all the best for the next steps for the next mountain

Jim Highsmith:
Great.

Mike Leber:
to climb.

Jim Highsmith:
Yeah.

Mike Leber:
Take care.

Harald Wild:
Take care.

Jim Highsmith:
You do.