Can AI Replace a Scrum Master? with Zach Stone
AI is everywhere now. You can’t have a conversation that involves the future of work without heading down the rabbit hole of how Chat GPT and tools like it are changing the workspace. For some, it is a very exciting time. For others, it is scary as hell because it is so hard to figure out how it will impact our work.
Zach Stone joined me to discuss the ways in which AI is impacting/will impact the job of the Scrum Master, and what it will take to keep yourself valuable to employers as we move futher into a world where AI impacts how we understand how we work. During the interview we focus on the following questions:
- What parts of the work we do on Scrum Teams will be augmented or replaced by AI?
- How do we prepare for that?
- After AI takes over parts of the job, what are we supposed to do and how will we keep adding value?
What follows is an AI generated transcript of a podcast where Zach and I had the conversation. If you’d like to check out the actual podcast you can find it here: https://www.projectmanagement.com/blog-post/75331/can-ai-replace-a-scrum-master--with-zach-stone
Transcript
Hey, this is Dave Prior. Welcome to the Reluctant Agilist. I am here today with Zach Stone, and we’re going to talk about some AI-related stuff and how it’s going to affect all of our jobs. So Zach, thank you for making time in your day.
Zach:
Dave, thank you for having me. It’s always a pleasure to get to chat with you.
Dave:
And so you have, I think, the distinction of… I always tell people that the interview we did last time was probably my most favorite interview I’ve ever done because of just how impactful that story was. So I’m going
Zach:
Thank
Dave:
to make
Zach:
you.
Dave:
sure to include a link and tell everyone you should go listen to that one after this one. But we’re not going to talk about Ukraine today. We’re going to talk about AI. So before we get into that, would you mind giving the folks here… a quick rundown on your origin story and when the spider bit you?
Zach:
Yeah, that’s a great question. In 1999, I got dragged to a facilitation program called Help Increase the Peace. And it was a training program for youth learning how to facilitate to work with people in crisis and conflict. We got to work with gang members, we work with people coming in and out of the prison system. And that really set me off down the path of being interested in behavioral science and how groups work together and how they deal with conflict together, how they succeed together. And I did that work, organizational dynamics, for a number of years. And then in 2015, I started doing work as a sort of Scrum Master consultant. I was more doing lean work at that time. And I started working with some software teams that were attached to my clients that I was doing org dev with. And I just was doing sort of process improvement stuff. And I had an engineer buddy who said, you know, you would be a great Scrum Master. And he had been in some of my facilitations. And so I started reading about it and I started applying the Scrum practices and principles, the Agile principles and values to my work. Uh, and I saw tremendous results and I got bit then, um, seeing that the real tremendous impact I was able to have using some of these frameworks and these values, and so I left my organization to go out and do the, the work full time as a, as a technology based Scrum master and Agile coach.
Dave:
All right, thank you. Before we get into our topic, I want to ask you a quick question. So the Scrum Alliance has a new facilitation certification. And
Zach:
Oh, I didn’t
Dave:
since
Zach:
know about that.
Dave:
you come from that background, could you just say a few words about how coming from that space informs your ability to be valuable for a team?
Zach:
Yeah, I’ve found that the easiest part of the work for me has been learning the framework. The hardest part, the thing that seems to be the most challenging for me and my fellow delivery managers, scrum masters, is the managing of the people, the dealing with the people and the complex interactions between conflicting stakeholders, between siloed departments, between team members who don’t get along. between tech leads who fight with the product owner and vice versa. And so that messy stuff is where the facilitation skills come into play. And when you learn about facilitation, you learn how to deeply connect with other humans in a group setting and to help them deeply connect with each other in more productive, healthy ways. And so that has been the core of my work. Well, since 1999, but since I got my competitive advantage. That understanding
Dave:
Wow.
Zach:
of facilitation and human behavior has put me in a place to be more successful than some of my peers, because again, that behavioral part of this is one of the most challenging and messy. And so, yes, I would encourage everyone who’s interested to get more education in the topic of group facilitation.
Dave:
Awesome. That was a great pitch. Thank you. Okay. So we’re going to talk about artificial intelligence and people on a Scrum team or people on any kind of team, I guess, really, but you’re coming from a Scrum and Agile background. So what’s the main way of explaining the question you’re pursuing?
Zach:
The question I’m pursuing is how soon will parts of our job be augmented and replaced? And what is a, I want to say smarter or more sustainable path for us as Scrum Masters, Agilist, Agile Nation to pursue as AI takes parts of our job from us and makes them easier to do? Where should
Dave:
Okay.
Zach:
we be focusing our energy? as technology meets Scrum Mastery.
Dave:
Okay, I think the way you said that at the end is really important because when people talk about this, they talk about what’s being taken away. It’s a language of loss. But the idea is that it’s going to make things easier, which should free us up to do better stuff or other stuff, right?
Zach:
Yeah, I mean, so IBM issued a statement this month, it was actually two weeks ago, saying that over 40% of their workforce is gonna need to learn new skills, and they were AI skills specifically. And this is a quote from them, from IBM, AI won’t replace people, but people who use AI will replace people who don’t. And I firmly believe that about
Dave:
Wow.
Zach:
Scrum Masters. It’s not necessarily gonna replace a Scrum Master, at least for the foreseeable future, but AI… Scrum masters and Agilists who can master the power of the AI tools will supplant those who do not invest their time to learn it. And
Dave:
Okay.
Zach:
I’m sorry, go ahead.
Dave:
No, you go ahead.
Zach:
So if your job is spent doing admin work, right? When I really got early into the Scrum stuff, I found that teams didn’t always know how to interact with the Scrum master.
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
And they felt that part of my job was booking the meetings, starting the sprint, and giving. like really basic tips on the metrics. And all that stuff is like normal things that I do and I think most of us do, but
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
there’s now an app for that. If you’ve looked at the Jira Insights tool, which is a really powerful new dashboard that I guess was added in the past year or so, it’s awesome. And they’re getting closer to sort of giving the insights and the tips that Scrum Masters might give at the start of a sprint or like at a retrospective. And it looks at the reporting. It looks, you know, does some Jira magic and says, you know, these are how many stories you pulled out of the sprint. This is how much of your commitment that you’re meeting that, you know, you should consider taking less stories than you took in the past sprint. And like, yeah, that is something that a scrum master might provide in terms of a service. And now Jira is providing that for them in an automated way. And so that is, should be both a little scary, but also wonderful. And that it frees us up to focus in other areas. And there are also a few Scrum Master chatbots that are in development. There’s even a machine learning tool that analyzes a team’s work. And with 89% accuracy, gives an estimate of the work time and effort of future stories. And then it pairs that story to the best person for the job.
Dave:
What
Zach:
And
Dave:
is
Zach:
so
Dave:
that?
Zach:
I can send you the research article on it.
Dave:
Okay.
Zach:
I was reading about it today again, this team that’s building this. And the question that I have is, For organizations that don’t truly understand the agile principles and why autonomy is valuable, why exactly would an organization support team autonomy when they can have accuracy, when they can have a tool that just tells people what work they should pick up and exactly how much time and effort it’s going to take them? Why would they listen to the team? All right.
Dave:
So that’s a really, I’m very conflicted about what you just said, because part of my brain field has for a long time felt like what I wish we had on every team was a data scientist. Like I want my own little mini Troy McGuinness or my own C3PO to tell me like, this is what all this information means. And this is what your lead time is and your cycle time is. And this is what’s going to happen if you put one more piece of work into the workflow and stuff like that. And I think that would help me working with the team to create insights and help us become more aware and take some of the busy work away. But once the machine starts telling me who’s going to write what code, I take great umbrage at that
Zach:
Right
Dave:
because that’s what I was trying to do when I was a project manager and I was not great at it and people really resented it. I worry that… They’re going to resent the AI the same way. You’re going to have like your own virtual Frederick Taylor there telling people how to do stuff.
Zach:
I think that’s the challenge, right? We have this, there’s some beautiful stuff coming from these tools that are going to free us and other people on the team up to do in some ways more meaningful and impactful work. But we have to be careful not to become overtaken by the machine.
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
And so, you know, it’s something that I’m consistently thinking about how metrics and reports are these extremely powerful tools. And I agree with you, I would love to have a data scientist. One PO on my team, one of my teams right now is always saying that he’s actually studying data science because he wants to be a better product owner. And I think, you know, for
Dave:
Wow.
Zach:
us as Scrum Masters, yeah, just producing these reports and like sharing the metrics out is not a path to sustainability because it’s about how we use those metrics to engender change. Cause any, you know, any AI data model, machine learning model that they’re developing for this purpose is, is probably going to get as accurate as many entry-level scrum masters at giving insights and giving some basic tips and suggestions about who should be doing what work, et cetera. The problem, if we focus and stay in that area and like hang firm to like, well, this is what I do. I like come up with those reports and I share those metrics. If you’re not doing the change work that accompanies those insights,
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
you’re gonna be replaceable. And so what I continue to tell my colleagues and I’m reminding myself is, we need to embrace the mess because that is something that AI is very bad at. It’s really good
Dave:
Okay.
Zach:
at predictable, repeatable tasks, but the
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
messiness of human beings, uh-uh. That is something
Dave:
Okay.
Zach:
that human beings are best at.
Dave:
All right. So I got a whole bunch on that. I want to ask you now. So you were talking about engendering change and I think that’s a really big, like the point you just ended on there is really significant because I can totally see how we will become like the metrics bitch for lack of a better word. Like we only
Zach:
Yeah
Dave:
do what the metrics tell us to do. And we just end up like those people in Wally who were on the deck chair, sliding up and down the spaceship with their
Zach:
What
Dave:
big
Zach:
a rough
Dave:
drinks.
Zach:
image.
Dave:
Yeah, because we don’t have to think, we don’t have to do anything anymore, but it just raises the engagement to a higher level. Now that we can see the metrics, now you have to actually find a way to social engineer change within the organization and get people to think about stuff at a level they’re probably not accustomed to thinking about.
Zach:
You want to know what my wake up call for this was?
Dave:
Terminator.
Zach:
I read an article about Capital One and
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
how they had replaced their Agilists with the PMO and augmented PMO. And
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
I started asking myself, what is
Dave:
The
Zach:
our differentiator?
Dave:
cyborg PMO.
Zach:
What is our differentiator? Not just the AI end of this. And I ended up there. But the question was, what is our differentiator between the AI and the PMO? PMO or a product owner who gets really good at the metrics and who can use the JIRA Insights tool and can use a Scrum Master Chatbot, what makes us different? And how do we stand out from our PM and PO counterparts? And if
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
all we’re doing is adding these metrics and reports and like enforcing basic adherence to the Scrum events, then yeah, eventually we could be replaced with the right tools. And so that moment of seeing that like huge organizational transition,
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
Where they replace their Agilist that freaks me out. If you totally transparently
Dave:
So I
Zach:
that’s
Dave:
want to
Zach:
that was that a trigger for me
Dave:
ask you about this because I haven’t read some of the stuff that you’ve read and I just was doing a podcast related to this two days ago. So the argument is that because we have greater insight into data and metrics then we can give this back to the PMO because they already know how to do all the management stuff. Is that a good summary?
Zach:
I mean, that is what I think some organizations are drawing a line to mentally and saying,
Dave:
Okay.
Zach:
well, it saves money if really the value that we’re getting is just like Scrum adherence and just
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
basic like Jira jockeying. Why can’t a PO do that stuff with a little bit of support from some tooling? And if you’re
Dave:
Okay.
Zach:
out there and you’re a Scrum master who gets into the mix, you’re dealing with stakeholder conflict, You’re dealing with team conflict. You’re helping with change management. You’re shepherding complex initiatives along. You’re dealing with the mess of emotions and you’re doing like working with reorgs and things like that. That is not particularly replaceable. But the Jira
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
jockey stuff, I mean, just look at what Jira has been able to do in a very short amount of time with some basic machine learning stuff. So I want other Scrum Masters to be thinking about where they bring the most value. And like remember the Chris Rock skit about Robitussin. You know, if you’re a person that you like agile is
Dave:
I can
Zach:
scrum.
Dave:
only ever remember the one about keeping your daughter off the pole.
Zach:
Oh God.
Dave:
That’s the only-
Zach:
Bill, this one he’s like, you know, do you have a broken arm? Pour some Robitussin on it. You got a
Dave:
Oh
Zach:
bullet
Dave:
yeah.
Zach:
wound, Robitussin. And I’ve met a bunch of scrum masters and agilists who are like, you know, you got a broken team, pour some scrum on it. You got fighting executive team members, pour some scrum on it. And like that is not gonna work.
Dave:
So…
Zach:
We need to break from that scrum master. just like everything is Scrum mentality and move towards being Agilist, which is like truly being adaptive in a complex space.
Dave:
All right. I’m going to go in a weird direction for a second
Zach:
Yeah, yeah, take
Dave:
and we’ll
Zach:
it.
Dave:
come back to AI. So, um, what you just said threaded something together, together for me that I’ve been super confused about. And I’m going to tie it back to a conversation I had at my first scrum gathering I went to in 2010, where I met Jim Cundiff, who at the time was the managing director of the scrum alliance. We were talking about scrum and I was coming from PMI. So I was there as the, as the died in a wool PMP. And I. I said, I can totally understand how I would explain the value of Agile to a traditional project manager. Why they need to learn it, how it’s going to help them. But I do not have any idea of how I would explain the value of traditional project management to an Agilist, since it’s something that they’re actively working to change. And he said, well, the Agile people don’t know how to go upstairs. And this was in 2010. So it was a long time ago. And I don’t think that necessarily holds true now, but I’m wondering if buried deeply in the psyche of business, there is still this lingering perception, maybe this is like that historical or learn trauma thing or whatever, that the agile people, they’re great with the team level, you know, they’re good doing their little agile thing, but they’re like a bunch of hippies and you can’t take them to the boardroom. And the PMO knows how to do that. They’ve been in that boardroom getting kicked around for a long time. So let’s take the agile benefits and give it back to the people that know how to interact with the C-level.
Zach:
Wow, I think that’s a powerful point. Look,
Dave:
That was a
Zach:
I,
Dave:
very diplomatic way of not agreeing.
Zach:
no, no. I think that there are Agilists that I have met who are people that come from a business transformation background, who come from like high level project management and they’re like, you know what? This stuff just wasn’t working for me. I worked with a Scrum Master for a long time. I saw really impactful stuff that
Dave:
Yeah,
Zach:
they did across
Dave:
there are
Zach:
the
Dave:
now.
Zach:
C-suite.
Dave:
There didn’t
Zach:
Right,
Dave:
used to be.
Zach:
right, so I mean, I think when he said that, I see the reality of that. Like I’ve talked to people who are high level in their role, but they’re agilist and they’re scrum folk. And I’m like, hey, we have these high level stakeholders that are having this conflict. They’re not communicating across the departments. We have a major silo problem. And their answer is like scaling, scrum. And
Dave:
Right,
Zach:
no,
Dave:
it’s
Zach:
like
Dave:
like
Zach:
that’s
Dave:
the
Zach:
not…
Dave:
death grip of waterfall is still squeezing the edges of the table and won’t let go.
Zach:
Exactly. And that is more about conflict transformation. That’s more about change management. That’s more about leadership coaching, perhaps, and like systems thinking. That’s not necessarily just like, we’re gonna throw one solution at everything. And I think that is where we run into this perception problem of just being like micro-focused on the team space because the Scrum guide really speaks to the team. We need to keep doing brand awareness of us as Agilist, of like, hey, we can play at that C-suite level. And we can do it more effectively in many ways because we bring these unique skills that have not been as welcome in the business space for a long time. Clearly, we know that a lot of traditional project management has not worked in the way that people would like in terms of getting results. And that’s where Agile came from, right? So like
Dave:
Absolutely.
Zach:
they need to acknowledge that there was a reason that Scrum and Agile came about. And it was because that stuff wasn’t working so well. And I think we’ve hit like an inflection point of like, hey, is Scrum and Agile principles as they are being applied not as they exist, but as they’re being applied, are they serving what they need to be? Or is there some new paradigm that’s gonna come up out of the bones of Scrum, like has happened with traditional project management that involves AI, that involves conflict transformation, that involves
Dave:
Great.
Zach:
facilitation, as you mentioned earlier. Like I think there’s a reason why we’re evolving our practice, but we as a group need to be evolving a little quicker or else people will look at AI and say, well, they’re good at the team, they’re good at these like insights and reports. But maybe an AI could do some of that stuff. Let’s just get
Dave:
Well,
Zach:
the PMO folks
Dave:
it’s
Zach:
in there.
Dave:
not unlike what happened in business when computers were introduced.
Zach:
Mmm.
Dave:
You know?
Zach:
Sing it.
Dave:
Um, so, but I’m going to go down a path for a second. I’m trying to think of things that could happen with AI better than happened in traditional project manager on the metric side. So if you applied flow metrics to a project management team, I mean, that would be fricking amazing. Like you don’t even need earned value anymore because you can see how all of it’s playing out. And. If you didn’t worry about re-baselining stuff and you just had it automatically show like what was happening based on the flow metrics and the team composition and things like that, and then you could look at, have the system look at utilization and tell you like, well, if I add a person based on the history of teams in this company, what’s it going to do? Right? You could kind of game stuff out and figure out the best path or what you can have or what you can’t have. And that would all be. Science doubt the same way that you buying stuff in a supermarket is nothing about free will and choice It’s just because they made you do what they wanted to make you do
Zach:
There are two things I think about here to this thing that this scenario you’re bringing up. So one You know for AI machine learning models is basically what we’re talking about here. We’re not talking about neural nets and like deeper Deeper tools that kind of come up with their own equations And variables the machine learning is where you’re dictating those variables to the machine and telling you what to look for and then it’s helping You make decisions We you still need for a significant period of time people that know what to look for in your system And like you need clean data. And most organizations, even data organizations have a lot of dirty data, right? Which is like, you know, it’s gonna be a new movie with AI Patrick Swayze, dirty data. And you know, like,
Dave:
And it’ll rip its throat out.
Zach:
right, God. And like, you know, they’re gonna need people for a long time who understand what the metrics mean and how they apply to a team to help translate into that into a model. So I don’t want people listening to be like, oh, he thinks we’re getting replaced tomorrow. No, we’ve
Dave:
No,
Zach:
got a while,
Dave:
not at all.
Zach:
we got a while yet. And also just beyond like the dirty data aspect of this of not having the data that we need, you’re gonna need someone to be able to manipulate those metrics and those scenarios that you’re talking about. Someone to feed
Dave:
to tell
Zach:
it,
Dave:
the story.
Zach:
right, to feed it those scenarios and then take whatever it’s given back and translate it. And you said it well as a story. And so that I think we can become not metrics jockeys and Jira magicians, but we can become sense makers. and we can become data manipulators and storytellers. And that is where the change making comes in. And I think that is a much more sustainable path for us. And you laid out that little scenario there where we can be like real time using metrics in a more informed way. And I have
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
so many teams that I’m supporting right now that sometimes I’m pulled away to different teams that need more help at any one time. And then I have to go back in and do like a deep dive into the data. I would love having a model that just is consistently doing that in the background for me. continuously analyzing in an automated way. And then when I come back to it, it gives me a readout of like, Hey, here are the things you told me to look for. This is what I’ve seen. Now it’s up to you to use it. And like that
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
is coming and that’s being, that’s being worked on and built. But like the most use that we’ll get out of that is if we as Agilist learn to harness those tools.
Dave:
Okay, so I have a bunch of different paths I want to go down, but I’m going to stick with the part of the human thing for a second. And this is meant to emphasize what you were just saying about the need for people. I know a bunch of people that have written books by pairing with AI. That’s how they refer to it. Or I guess that’s the way that it was referred to that made the most sense to me. It’s not that I’m having AI do the writing for me. I am pairing with it because I’m feeding it stuff and tuning it and honing it to get a result. The problem I have is that when I am given something to read by a colleague or a friend, I can tell within one paragraph if it was written by AI or not, and if it is written by AI. I don’t know what it is about the writing, but it’s so hypnotically boring. I literally can’t remember anything I read by the time I get to the end of any paragraph in it. I read a whole book, and the person I knew who wrote it, I didn’t even see their voice or hear their voice until the last paragraph of the book. AI can’t replace a person’s… humanity, their ability to tell a story, their ability to bring life to it. It’s just using buzzwords right now.
Zach:
Yeah, I mean, it’s copying and like while human beings do copy, I read this really cool article and I’m going to butcher some of the scientific terms. So I’m not going to try to use them. I’m just going to summarize it. It was about how jazz musicians improvise and what they’re able to do. And this is true for storytellers and creatives. They’re able to turn off the part of the brain that, that really governs analysis and judgment and sort of allow the creative part of the brain to free flow and have sort of free reign. And. You know, improvisation is not what AI is good at, but humans are wonderful at improvisation and adaptation. I mean, that’s how our species has survived and come to the place of technological growth where we’re creating AIs, right? That is adaptation. That is innovation. And again, as you sort of mentioned, that’s not something that AI is good at. And that part of that is just us as humans being able to turn parts of our brain off and bring that creativity to the forefront. And so we write things that that AI can only start to copy at this point. Maybe down the road we’ll get to a place where an AI can sort of simulate that creative process. And that honestly would be very sad for me because I don’t want human beings to lose
Dave:
Heheheheheheh
Zach:
that wonderful edge that we have. And so, you know, that is something that we’re
Dave:
We’re
Zach:
very far
Dave:
very
Zach:
away from.
Dave:
far away from that,
Zach:
So that is
Dave:
yeah.
Zach:
not something I think any of us need to be worried about for, you know, I don’t wanna give a timeframe, but let’s just say you cannot worry about that in the immediate term. But that is a message to lean into our creativity, our innovation, and our adaptation. If all we’re doing is like Scrum adherence, and like, well, the Scrum guide says, you need to do this in this scenario, I can do that now. So I’ll give you an example. I went into BARD, which is Google’s AI, and I fed it an interview question, a Scrum Master interview question. And the question is, the team constantly struggles at the beginning of every sprint because their product backlog is empty. and the product owner doesn’t have time to update it. They waste time getting the information from him. What do you do? The AI says, as a scrum master, here’s some things I would do to handle the following scenario. Number one, I would talk to the product owner about the issue. I would find out why they’re not able to update the product backlog in time. Are they too busy with other tasks? Do they not have the right information? Once you understand the root cause, you can work with them jointly to create a solution. Two, I would help the product owner to prioritize their tasks. Then it goes through to explain how it would do that in the backlog. I would three, facilitate regular backlog refinement sessions. Talks about how they would execute that. Number four, create a process for getting information from the product owner to the team, through email, through Slack, finding ways to get those regular updates. And five, I would coach the product owner on how to be more effective. And this is what I would say to them to coach them. And I’m like, wow, okay. If an AI at this point is regurgitating those answers, Do not be the scrum master who can only regurgitate answers. You need to be leaning into your creative and innovative part of your brain and getting away from the stock, the scrum guide says this, like that stuff is fine to lean on, but that should just be your foundation. That should not be what you’re bringing out of your toolkit all the time. Otherwise, again, the AI can give the same boring answer that you could regurgitate offline.
Dave:
Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t say anything about finesse or the personal interaction or what if that PO has a history of working in very domineering environments where they’re the one who’s expected to always deliver regardless of what’s going on and whether they had cereal for breakfast or oatmeal. I mean, there’s so many different factors that come into how a human being engages with another human being.
Zach:
Aha,
Dave:
Hey, I can’t track that.
Zach:
that’s the human stuff that you’re talking about.
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
That’s the messy stuff that an AI or a tool may not think to even be considering, right? Because it’s human variables that are changing all the time. And so by leaning into our humanity, we can better serve our teams and our clients. But again, that means breaking away from this like strict scrum adherence and really leaning into your understanding of human behavior. and conflict and people’s needs. And that is just something that machines will not be able to do for a while. And that’s your job security.
Dave:
So you can rely on the machine to be aware of process and process variation and aware of all the metrics and things like that and use it to collect and analyze data that will give you the information you need to make decisions about how you want to engage with the team or the company or the product or whatever.
Zach:
You nailed it.
Dave:
Okay. So what we really have to worry about is not AI, but it’s improvisational AI, if that ever becomes a thing.
Zach:
Yeah, I mean like, and like…
Dave:
I can actually say, okay, if Charles Bukowski won at the racetrack and then drank 18 wine coolers and was listening
Zach:
What
Dave:
to Tchaikovsky,
Zach:
would he write?
Dave:
what would he write?
Zach:
I mean,
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
that should be scary beyond like Agile and Scrum Master ship, you know? And I think that there’s gonna be some great things that’ll come out of that. Like everything we spoke about earlier about this sort of double-edged sword, there are great things that we will get. And there are some things that will come out of this that will be painful and will be challenging. And you know, I think this is a poignant thing for many of us to remember in the last century, you needed to memorize information. The people that were the scholars who were the change makers out there could memorize tons of information, quotes, understanding of like, you know, ancient languages and they could bring this stuff back out to influence and you know, and make change through innovation. But in this century, we need to know the tools needed to access that information. Our paradigm of the
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
past thousand years is evolving in the blink of an eye comparatively. And you know, why wouldn’t our roles be on track to evolve as well? Like, are we willing to evolve? And I think that’s gonna be the mark of a truly great agilist is our ability to serve the waves of uncertainty, right? And like complexity, because the paradigm is changing. It just is. And so the tools that will support us are changing and we can now put our focus elsewhere, just like we don’t have to memorize the things that our counterparts in the 1890s had to memorize. That stuff’s just available. And so this is gonna be about welcoming the change to really be able to make more impact elsewhere.
Dave:
Do you think that with what you were just saying, one thing kind of sparked for me is that in some ways it’s kind of scary because I have less places to hide now. Like if all
Zach:
Oh.
Dave:
the data is available and clearly shown and indisputable, like I was thinking, why did my team fail to sprint? The computer would be able to tell us, well, there was a flood or well, there was a server outage or well, based on… the analysis of what we’re getting out of the restrooms. It seems like one of your team members has a drug problem.
Zach:
Haha
Dave:
Because it could get all that stuff and put it together and tell you exactly where the performance issues are, which is scary. But even if it can tell me that, it doesn’t tell me how to fix them.
Zach:
Yeah, you know, this is a new learning for me too. I was asked by a director to identify metrics. What are metrics that I could use as an early warning system to let me know that a performer is in trouble and they’re struggling so that I could step in and coach with them. And I started doing like a dive on this. And at first I was kind of like, this could be used really badly. And so I really tried to educate and coach them and steer them on why you need to be careful about. only using like the data in the system to draw a picture of what’s happening with the performer, all that kind of good stuff. But as I dug deeper, I found out that IBM, I think, has actually replaced most or all of their HR staff with a machine learning tool that looks at the data of their performers and then in an early warning way, lets a manager
Dave:
It’s like
Zach:
know
Dave:
Minority Report.
Zach:
exactly, but for work, not murder,
Dave:
The
Zach:
hopefully.
Dave:
precox gave you a blackball.
Zach:
They give
Dave:
You’re
Zach:
your,
Dave:
fired.
Zach:
yeah. And so they like… they go to the manager and it sends them this message of, hey, this person is struggling, their performance is down by X or Y, or it’s up by X and Y, and then it encourages them to engage with this person to kind of coach and support them. So it’s not meant to be punitive, but obviously that system can be abused. But I was reading about
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
that, and I went back to my director and I was like, well, you could just use what IBM is using and get rid of all the HR people. Or we could use, like, look at some of these other metrics and, like, make a personalized decision based on your interactions with your team. So it’s like, roughly, you know, there’s a lot of ways that we can go right now. And I think as these tools keep developing,
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
we’re gonna have to, all of us in the work world, are gonna have to make some decisions about how human we want to be in our interactions versus, like, how much do we want the machine to take over?
Dave:
Wow. So there’s, I’m gonna just, I’m mentioning this right now. I’m gonna put another link at the bottom of the show notes to Snehal’s thing. So he’s got a group that’s getting together to talk about how to, how the agile community can use AI in a responsible and positive way, which is what we’re basically what we’re talking about now. Like how do you have it tell you like, something’s weird over there, go look at it and not like fire that person tomorrow at 2pm. We don’t want the machine telling us the fate of everyone based on its… I mean, it’s sort of like prescribing velocity in certain ways, right? If you look at the history of everything that’s happened in the company and you say, because of everything that’s ever happened at this place with everyone we’ve ever hired, that person is going to go off the rails tomorrow morning at 11.15. You got to take care of that right now before it’s even happened.
Zach:
Yeah, you’re touching on this piece again of like,
Dave:
I’m scaring myself.
Zach:
if all that we do in our role is like prescribing velocity, prescribing events, prescribing what the scrum guide says, we become very replaceable. And so what I would encourage Agilist to be doing at this time, and you can take the advice or leave it, but this is my suggestion to you, anyone that’s listening, start to like to learn a little bit about machine learning models and tools that focuses on team metrics and performance. There are stuff that can automate these very repeatable tasks and get some of that off your plate early. So you can focus in other places too. Automation, if you use Jira, great. There’s probably other automation suites and other tools like Rally and stuff like that. But I use Jira automation constantly to automate as much of my repeatable tasks as I can. So like when the stories in an Epic are all done, I have the Epic close itself. I have the sprints starting and stopping on their own for some of my teams based on the time. I’ve got like 40 different automations running for this one team to sort of manage the changes in the backlog and things like that. And it frees me up to focus on the third thing that I would recommend to Agilis is to focus on behavior and change. And like you and I have talked about tools for gauging willingness to change, like the
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
change framework from Francesca and DiClemente. We talked about motivational interviewing. Start to… go get that certification and facilitation. You heard Dave talk about it earlier. And I’m not being paid to recommend that by the way, but I think that
Dave:
Hehehe
Zach:
whether you go to that or not, there are so many good books and classes and things out there on behavior and change. That is gonna be our selling point. If you wanna get into the machine learning stuff, there’s a great course called AI for Everybody. It’s pretty short and it’s on, I wanna say Coursera. Take that, I got it on sale for like 15 bucks. Really great course kind of explains machine learning and in neural networks and deep learning and like what its capabilities are and the ethics behind it Really good thing for you to be learning as an Agilist and then finally complexity and crisis management And we don’t need to get too deep into that but the people that are Learning about systems thinking and how to think more broadly and get away from that team level, right? And like learning how to play at the C suite learning how to play at an organizational level you are going to be much more successful and This kind of brings us back to that Ukraine talk where that was an exercise in complexity and uncertainty. And my crisis
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
management background really enabled me to do better than I would have if I had just been like, well, the scrum guide says the scrum. I doesn’t say anything about global, like war. They don’t say anything about invasion and like, what do you do when bombing is happening on your standup? So
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
you like, we need to get really good. Um, and I’ll say it once more, embracing the mess.
Dave:
Yeah. Cool. Thank you. I have one final question for you on this topic. Because you seem to be very positive about it. You’re looking at it from a positive perspective. You’re finding ways to we can add value, navigate the changes that are coming. What about it scares you? What about the advent of AI in our workspace scares you?
Zach:
So much. I think part of why I’m doing this and part of why I’m sharing this message is because it does scare me. And I
Dave:
Okay.
Zach:
want other Agilists to be working with me to figure out what our future looks like. I am worried that we get replaced because I know the value that so many Agilists bring to their organization and to their teams. I know the impact that people being replaced by machinery had during the Industrial Revolution. It brought some great things. but it also brought some major pain for people who had access to jobs that no longer have it. I think that a lot of groups are underestimating the impact that it will have on people’s lives, both positive and negative. So I think it’ll create new jobs, but for people that are not able to skill up, it’s not gonna create a new job for you most likely. And so that worries me. And then, you know, the best organizations that I’ve worked at, they deeply understand the human side of work. and they build it into their culture. And as more machines take over or augment our work, and the humans are doing less and less of the day to day, that human touch, which can be messy and problematic, is removed from the equation. And we get something that can become cold and detached, and doesn’t take into account someone who has a sick spouse who… has dropped their performance because, you know, they’ve been a great performer, but they’ve dropped because they’re taking care of someone they love. And so those are the things that we need humans for. And that is what scares me, losing that. And I think that we need to be architects of this change. And we only do that by getting educated about what’s coming and to sort of help shepherd this change along because we get to have our hand in it. And if not, we just become victims of this change. We, this is something that happens to us instead of something we do with.
Dave:
That’s awesome. You see, so the thing that you said in there that like really lit me up, basically the data is not going to tell the machine how to do the right thing. If somebody’s got a sick wife, the right thing might be to let them, you know, give them some time, whatever, but, but the machine doesn’t have the ability to make those kinds of judgments. And that’s an important thing that we need people for. And yeah, it might make this system a little less efficient from a data standpoint, but it’s more you mean. It honors people, because we’re not machines.
Zach:
We’re not machines. And again, I wanna say for people that are listening, I don’t know when this is gonna happen. There are some things, the chat bots, the Scrum Master chat bots that are already on their way to market. And so those are some things that will change quickly. Companies adopting like IBM Watson, as IBM did to like manage their HR, I think we’re a far ways out from
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
that. Again, I think most companies have dirty data, use the term. And so it’s gonna take them
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
a while, but that just means that we have time to get in and shape this. We have time to be… driving this conversation and not let it be a conversation that’s happening around us. So I ask everyone to be empowered, to dig in, to learn about this stuff, to challenge what’s coming in your organizations, to advocate for the human side of this, as Dave was pointing out. We need that or else a good portion of the agile values and principles are gone or they start to become less impactful. And I think that stuff is what drives successful business, that transparency that… that honesty, that courage, those are things that we cannot lose and that AI can’t replicate. And so it’s going to rely on humans to really bring that. And so that’s one more area where we can really step up and be the champions of that courageous and humane and transparent work.
Dave:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Thank you. I mean, I feel like I keep talking
Zach:
Well…
Dave:
about it for days, but I really appreciate you making
Zach:
Yeah, sure.
Dave:
time for it. I’m just thinking, so one last thing, because this is happening in my head right now. After that Bukowski thing, I started thinking, like, well, okay, what if Taylor Swift just got dumped by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the only thing she had available to her was a harpsichord? What would happen? Right? So, I mean, eventually you might be able to do things like that, but why would you ever want to do that? And like for me, when I start coming up with these things in my head and going, like letting myself follow the path, I get to the point where, yeah, we might be able to do that someday, but what is the benefit of that? Like, and why would we? And what I worry is when the World Wide Web started, it was really cool. And then all of a sudden it was just like junked up with so much. I mean, not that it’s not now, but. useless dumb crap. Um, and I think that could easily happen with AI too. Lots of tools we don’t need doing stuff that isn’t helping anyone.
Zach:
I agree and also, part of being human is dumb crap. Right? Like
Dave:
That’s true.
Zach:
what is the benefit of art in some cases? And like,
Dave:
Yeah.
Zach:
you know, would an AI look at some of the things that humans have created and say, this is not useful, but they are things that make us human and they’re beautifully useless and silly. but it is part of the human condition to sometimes be useless and silly and just sort of revel in our ridiculousness. And I think that’s part of creativity. And I’m not saying that, again, that AI is gonna take all that away, but I think that in this age of technology being held up on a pedestal where AI is the future, our humanity is the future. And these tools are gonna help us hopefully replace stuff that takes away from our humanity so that we can lean into the things that matter or sometimes don’t matter at all because that is what makes us beautiful.
Dave:
Yeah. All right. That was great, man. Thank you. What if people want to get in touch with you? What’s the best way for them to do
Zach:
I think
Dave:
that?
Zach:
LinkedIn these days is the easiest way for them to get in touch with me. Um, yeah, I had a, I have a website up, no crisis team that I put together for the global scrum gathering talk I did on the Ukraine stuff, they could get through there, but LinkedIn is just a great way to quickly send me a message, uh, you know, give me some new ideas, ask me some questions, um, challenge me, you know, share some new, new content. If you come across. changes in the industry around AI or behavioral science, I’d love to check it out. I’m always trying to learn new things. So please don’t hesitate to reach out and share something with me so I can learn and get a bit smarter.
Dave:
This was awesome, man. Thank you very much for making time for
Zach:
Yeah,
Dave:
this.
Zach:
thank you for having me on. You are always encouraging
Dave:
Hehehe
Zach:
me to just share some ideas and I really appreciate you creating
Dave:
Now
Zach:
such
Dave:
this
Zach:
a
Dave:
is great.
Zach:
great platform.
