The Marathon of the Management
Jacopo Romei interviews Gaetano Mazzanti
Looking for the Italian version of the interview? Find it here: Presente e futuro del Management: la metafora della maratona.
What happens when you arrange a chat between Jacopo Romei (Strategic consultant) and Gaetano Mazzanti (Agile Coach at agile42)?
An unexpected mix of music, marathons, risk, change, fragility, lean thinking, portfolio management, company culture…
Two of the greatest minds within the Italian and international Agile landscape get together for this exchange, with some true gems and surprising stories, as well as a realistic and to-the-point analysis on the state of the art of the Managerial culture.
Enjoy!
Jacopo: Hello, Gaetano! It’s a pleasure being able to do this interview with you. We’ve known each other for ages, but we never had a chance for a real one-to-one. I feel like I’ve known you since forever. Actually… where did we meet? Do you remember?
Gaetano: Hey, Jacopo. That’s true, ages! :) I don’t remember where we first met either. I think it’s a good sign.
Jacopo: Yes, that must be a good sign indeed. I must say in all these years I’ve learned so much about you. Other than your work as an Agile Coach — which we’ll talk about soon — I know you’re a great pianist and a passionate long-distance runner!
Gaetano: I learned piano when I was a kid, and, when I reached the 8th (out of 10) year of Conservatory, I had to choose: music or Astronomy, and I went for University. I never looked back, but I’ve always been playing. I play (almost) every genre: jazz, fusion, rock, and I even get the chance to jump on stage with my old bands. And, by the way, I’m not a great pianist! (smiles, ed.).
Jacopo: And have you always been passionate about running?
Gaetano: I started running back in 2012. It began as a challenge with my partner: let’s see if we could run a half-marathon within two months. We won the challenge, and then I run 18 marathons since, including the 6 World Majors.
Jacopo: Unbelievable. And what’s the meaning of these two activities for you?
Gaetano: In a musical band, you learn how to collaborate, to leave space to others, and to understand when it’s your moment. By playing in a band, you learn a lot of things about how the world goes. Nothing like music, jazz in particular, allows mixing the logical and rational part of me with the crazy and creative one.
I’ll tell you something very few people know: it was my passion for music, especially electronic music, that, together with my fixation with computers, became my first source of income when I was a teenager. I’ve written the programs for the synths produced by Yamaha Music Italia, which were coded on Mac and Amiga. Good old times!
Jacopo: Wow! I can see some pretty nerd roots coming out here. And what type of satisfaction does running give you?
Gaetano: Running means many things. There’s a challenge with yourself. The push to never stop improving your performance or, as years go by, to fight the effects of aging. Then you have the training sessions, which are very tough if you want to run a marathon, mentally more than physically. Your head keeps saying “stop it, that’s it”, and your determination only will allow you to continue. You also consider the joy of hitting your target or the will to give it another try if you failed. These are very intense feelings. I won’t stop (unless I hurt myself).
Jacopo: Your head keeps saying “stop it, that’s it”. Abruptly, this makes me think about some of my old “corporate” clients. Have you ever felt the same when working with some very dysfunctional company?
Gaetano: Absolutely! :) When you start a change process (or transformation or anything you wanna call it), this is like a marathon both for the coach and for those the coach is working with. This similarity offers some interesting insights: it’s not like you buy a book about running, and the next day you run 42 km. You must run 10 km, then a half marathon, and so on. You will get there one step at a time, make mistakes, walk your own path, fail, and learn. There are no shortcuts. It’s not like a degree or a driving license, something you can buy if you want (leaving any moral judgment aside).
Jacopo: Did you mean “certification”? :-D
Gaetano: It’s very fashionable nowadays to “buy” a scaling framework. You just follow the recipe and there you go, your company will become agile. That’s not how it works. It simply cannot work that way.
Jacopo: Please carry on, I like what I’m hearing.
Gaetano: A very common scenario is “let’s arm ourselves and you go to war”: the management just want to “transform their teams and make them agile”, “accelerate the teams”, whilst them, the actual managers, well they keep acting in the same old way as if nothing has changed, except perhaps attending some useless events and rituals prescribed by the framework they adopted. Sometimes they do it in good faith, they literally can’t get out of their mental habits. Of course, this approach is bound to fail too.
In fact, lately, our job has involved more and more helping people from the medium-upper levels of the organizations.
Jacopo: Same here, I can relate.
Gaetano: If you don’t help them, and if you don’t work with them constantly, they simply can’t make it.
Having said that, even when running a marathon, sometimes, it’s better to stop than to get hurt!
Jacopo: This metaphor makes sense!
Gaetano: Looking for a ready-to-go solution and assuming this solution will also work in your specific case is quite dangerous, just because that very solution was born in another context. Maybe it was designed and prepared beforehand and on purpose!
Jacopo: “Take these pills, they worked for me!”
Gaetano: The boss of a company I used to work for — a listed company — used to say this sentence every time there was something new to learn and master: but can’t we just buy it? He even used to ask it for things such as… learning English. (We both laugh, ed.).
Jacopo: It’s happening again: a lot of people now want to become agil… ehm, sorry, EFFECTIVE by buying a badge, a piece of paper. True. Considering what we just said, how do you evaluate the future of management in the software world? And not only in software, of course.
Gaetano: I’m not too optimistic about this. It’s been a while since this whole thing emerged.
On one hand, you have big management schools, with their big fees to get an MBA, and on the other hand, you have a more bottom-up approach. They both operate in very “toxic” contexts and they both keep teaching the same things over and over, the same ideas, the same ways to do things. We’re losing the battle. We need a huge crisis… will COVID help us? (This interview was conducted in the first half of 2020, ed.)
Jacopo: Who knows? We shall see!
Gaetano: I see a huge resistance at all levels. Only small companies are doing different things, not only in Italy. There’s so much bullshit about types of leadership, even agile leadership, and so many workshops on sale… and then they go back to their office and they start going: “yes, I’d like to do it, but I cannot commit to that, not here… ” I don’t know. These are very dark times.
Jacopo: Come on, it’s not that bad! There’s the whole Avanscoperta community ready to throw new light on this scenario. LEGIONS of revolutionaries armed to the teeth! Ahah!
Let’s talk about the workshop you’re doing with Avanscoperta, titled Modern Portfolio Management.
In the workshop description, you say “the equation Agile Team = Business Agility is wrong. I agree with you that’s the reason why I’ve been dealing with contracts for the past 10 years. What’s the reason behind the above quote?
Gaetano: Let’s go back to the disconnection between management and those looking after a project. You can do cool stuff with the teams, but then all the decision-making processes, how to allocate teams, why, and with which criteria, all these elements make the whole thing useless. and the worst thing is, this never happens for business reasons, rather for political reasons, internal fights, bonuses…
Those who actually do the job, poor them, eventually they’re stuck between contrasts, dependencies, sudden stops to the projects, “let’s start again” and so they’re just destroyed by the whole situation. All the feedback mechanisms (which could keep the projects steady at least) are compromised. Portfolio Management can be a good solution to many of these problems.
Jacopo: What’s the added value of your workshop if this is seen from the perspective of the management, generally speaking?
Gaetano: Awareness to start with. This whole thing is about money! Embracing the Portfolio Management approaches means making more money, full stop. Making choices that bring more financial efficiency in the long term. Starting a new initiative costs money and you’ll get that money back only if and when you close up that initiative. We’re very good at starting new things but often these initiatives stop or slow down significantly and every time this happens we lose money: all the conversations, the estimates (!), the planning, the uncompleted work it’s all money that is lost.
Jacopo: Hey, are you talking in lean thinking terms?
Gaetano: Here’s what lean is all about: make things lighter and understand how to direct our choices to take different paths, such as the triage lanes, to manage our initiatives more smartly, by focusing on the ones with higher return hedging the risks we take. Past mechanisms create a lot of overwork: we start a lot of things and we close very few of them.
Jacopo: Uh, wasn’t it true that backlogs can host an infinite number of user stories? (I smile sardonically, e.d.).
Gaetano: Sometimes it’s also a product architecture problem, but we often spend a lot of time, too much, to deal with dependencies, and this shouldn’t happen. The same goes for estimates: is it always worth to make estimates? Often, no. Let’s take an example: you estimate “with precision” how long it takes you to develop something but then when considering the whole end to end flow the development lead time is irrelevant!
Jacopo: Ah! That’s my nightmare. My number 1 enemy, my nemesis. I used to work for a company where developers were often blamed for being too slow. Then you went to check out the kanban board and you could see a huge quantity of developed items “in the queue” which were not released because they were not needed… Do you think this is just an Italian problem or do you see it happening abroad too?
Gaetano: No, I’ve seen it abroad too and even with clients whose quotes, pictures and presentations we usually bring with us as examples. We believe Italians are the best when it comes to “how can you say no to a request?”. The idea that saying “no” can be smarter financially is considered blasphemy. I’ve dealt with some managers who reacted even violently to this. Once I had a call with a CEO and it ended up with him telling me “no, you can’t do this, you can’t say these things”.
Jacopo: I can relate to this, insults included! And why would join your workshop be a solution to this very problem?
Gaetano: Maybe not a “solution”, but it can surely provide some “hooks” and techniques that can enable some healthy discussions and a convincing way of thinking. What shall we kick off straight away? How to balance the workload? If there are any highly-specialized workers, how do we decide where, how, and when to allocate them? There will practical and operational parts, and even some new bits such as the triage table, useful to make the lead time/shelf life relationship explicit, and the payoff on other things too. We’re gonna explain these activities during the workshop: they’re very easy to understand at all levels and extremely effective. We’re also gonna talk about a useful approach to manage dependencies (or to avoid doing that!) which can indeed be very useful.
Jacopo: I literally can’t wait.
Gaetano: We’re also gonna cover when to kick off a project with various degrees of risk. This will be done taking into account other things besides the release date, based on forecasting the impact of this activity on the overall economy of the company, and we’ll assess when it’s useful to make estimates and when it’s not, all of this also taking advantage of the Cynefin Framework.
Jacopo: A must-attend workshop. I can’t wait. Thanks, Gaetano! Do you have a final message for our readers?
Gaetano: The only thing that matters is understanding what kind of decisions you have to make, how, with whom and when. “I wish it was that easy”, I hear you! (He laughs, e.d.). And then keeping the focus on finishing things and not on starting them, we can’t afford to throw money away. I think that’s enough from me!
Learn with Gaetano Mazzanti
Gaetano is the author of the Modern Portfolio Management Workshop.
