I have recently been interviewed Who-Is-Agile-style by Sergey Kotlov, the leader of the Agile St. Petersburg community. This post is the English translation of the inteview’s Russian original.

I am thankful to Sergey for this opportunity and being a great copy editor.

I met Alexei virtually when we translated Olav Maassen and Chris Matts’ Commitment book. As a result of our collaboration, one of the most important Agile books of the last several years will be available in Russian. All that remains to do is to print it. If you’d like to help us with that, write to us (or leave a comment to this post).

I was quite surprised when I found that Alexei is from St. Petersburg originally, even though he has lived in Canada for a long time. I couldn’t miss an opportunity to interview him, considering that he has recently been accepted into the ranks of Lean Kanban University (LKU), an international professional organization dedicated to Kanban. If I’m not mistaken, he is the first Kanban Coaching Professional (KCP) from the former Soviet Union.

What is something people usually don’t know about you but has influenced you in who you are?

First of all it’s my school where I and my classmates got a positive charge to last a lifetime: to keep learning, discovering new abilities and trying to be the best at what we do. I suspect I and the kids I went to school with were not alone at that. I believe many Russians who read stuff like Who Is Agile? went to a similar school or experienced something similar in university.

I also studied music for quite some time and that taught me to be attentive to detail in my work and also to change my repertoire often. Nowadays when I give consultations on IT process improvement, my material and methods are updated significantly over a short period of time.

If you would not have been in IT, what would have become of you?

The same, because I was not in it. I was interested in developing new products and technologies at the time. IT was about using what was already available.

People often call IT anything that has to do with computer technologies, but the distinction was very clear for a long time. People who worked on requirements, design and coding usually didn’t have access to the servers executing their code. People who “were in IT” were the ones who had access to the data centres where those servers were located. They used completely different knowledge and skills to develop this IT infrastructure. On the other hand, we wouldn’t let them near “our” source code. Then the two worlds began getting closer – we now call it DevOps.

Having made the journey through Agile to Lean, I got a chance to give consultations to IT specialists fighting fires in their data centres (just like in The Phoenix Project) and help them improve their processes with Toyota Kata and A3. We’ve come full circle to (Lean) IT. So, what if — I would have gotten the same thing.

What is your biggest challenge and why is it a good thing for you?

Putting my thoughts in writing. There is no chance to react to my audience’s reaction and correct what I’m going to say next. My written monologue will most likely not lead to the same level of understanding as a live dialogue. I have to choose my words carefully and that’s difficult.

Why is this a good thing for me? Daily practice.

What drives you?

“The stewardship of the living rather than the management of the machine”, the words from the Stoos Communique (see also: the group of 21), which resembles the Agile Manifesto and the Declaration of Interdependence, but it says more explicitly that processes of intellectual, creative work as well as ways to improve them ought to become more humane. This is in everybody’s interest: customers, company owners and, of course, workers who come to do their job day in and day out.

You can hear even from progressive Agilists: “a transformation plan”, “to build a process”, “to implement a new methodology”, etc.* – catch yourself and others when you hear it! This is the “management of the machine” language: a machine can be taken apart, put back together, installed, moved from one shop floor to another, changed over. But human organizations, where product development, IT projects and other knowledge-work activities take place, are not machines, but ecosystems that need to evolve organically.

(*-I picked three phrases from original Russian Agile sources as examples; their direct translations may not be the best examples of the mechanistic process change jargon in English – A.Z.)

What is your biggest achievement?

I don’t think it makes sense to list any moments of success or choose one of them. Whatever they might be, they will be surpassed by my children.

What is the last book you have read?

From Russia to Love, a biography of Viktoria Mullova. When I studied music, our teachers held her up as an example (she won the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition). I don’t recall them doing it any longer though after she defected from the Soviet Union to the West during a concert tour. The book is about how people learn, pursue mastery and, even after accomplishing a lot, still find new goals and paths towards perfection.

I read a lot on my professional interests, both books and blogs, as well as books that can lead me to useful ideas obliquely.

What question do you think I should also ask and what is the answer?

The question would be about the literature and a list of useful sources on Kanban. Of course, we’re not talking about organizing a visual board in your office, which is easy to do, but about understanding Kanban deeper. What do experts know and where do they find the ideas they present to us?

I created a list to answer this question. It is not a complete list by any stretch, but is a good foundation. I tried to include the books containing ideas already internalized by coaches (especially those recognized by Lean Kanban University) who use them effectively to guide evolution of processes and organizations. I am sure there are those in Russia who are interested in this stuff; they can write to me and I’d be happy to discuss these ideas and their practical applications.

What do you think is missing in the St. Petersburg Agile community and how to change it?

We are missing an internationally-recognized expert, author and leader, who would also be an excellent organizer of conferences and communities. Someone like Arne Roock (LinkedIn, blog) from Hamburg. Possibly, he or she will step up eventually.

Who should be the next person to answer these questions?

I’d like to name three people. Denis Khitrov knows business and innovation, because he’s been doing that for years. This is exactly where our methods, Agile and whatnot, ought to make impact. His latest venture MedM, at the intersection of medicine and mobile technologies, has just brought home to St. Petersburg the main prize from Skolkovo, beating 800 other startups for it. Also, talk to two Nikolais – Shevelev and Pultsin.

“An illiterate person is a blind person” (a Russian poster circa 1918)

Likbez (ликбез) is a neologism that entered the Russian language in the 1920s, after the revolution. Formed similarly to many new words of the day by abbreviating long phrases, it meant the “elimination of illiteracy” (ликвидация безграмотности). At the turn of the 20th century, for which the data are indisputable, the literacy rate in the Russian Empire did not exceed 25%. Also not disputed is that it was near 100% by the mid-century in the post-war Soviet Union.

It can and should be noted that the Soviet literacy program was not voluntary, millions of people were coerced to take part in it, and that the new Soviet state coerced many people into many other things, exacting a huge human toll. The tsar’s government also had some designs on increasing literacy in the early 20th century and the lower classes of the Russian society had developed some coping mechanisms to compensate for the Romanov dynasty’s failure to meet their basic education needs. It can be argued that such programs and mechanisms would have closed part of the literacy gap by mid-20th century. But then another question has to be thrown to this pile, whether the fall of the Romanovs in 1917 was not a consequence of how they ran the country for three centuries. All of these things cross into the political territory, which is not the subject matter of this blog.

The word likbez meant both the nationwide literacy program and the physical place in a town or village where people would go to after work to learn to read and write. Nowadays it also means a remedy to obvious ignorance of the basics of some subject matter.

Likbez is that rare word I needed

Such ignorance was in front of me yesterday when a colleague, who arrived prepared with some PowerPoint slides, outlined a six-step “continuous improvement” method. The Step Six was “Implement Solutions.”

This person did come from the part of the company that has been slower to learn and more difficult to engage than the rest. What I and other coaches are going to have to do about this is a private and confidential matter, so I’m not going to go into it in this post. Also for obvious reasons, I cannot post the spectacularly bad diagram of this six-step process – so, a textual description only.

I can google and buy a reprint of a New England Journal of Medicine article on treating some illness, and show you the PowerPoint slides I made from my read of it. If you happened to fall ill, would you like me to be your doctor? My treatment plan comes from an authoritative source! You would probably say no. If there was a real doctor in the room, they would probably notice that I don’t get something very basic about medicine. It will come out despite my preparation and best intentions and it will happen in ways I don’t understand. They will call me out on that.

This post is for those who may face such situations at work — they are not uncommon in the software and IT fields — so that they can recognize and do something about them. This is not about how to pursue continuous improvement, but how to stop producing BS.

Let’s go there

If you could analyze, design and implement continuous improvement solutions, you wouldn’t need continuous improvement! Think about it again.

There are many ways to pursue continuous improvement and it almost doesn’t matter if you use PDCA cycles or PDSA or OODA or POOGI or Build-Measure-Learn or YMCA or LMAO. Here are some of the basic elements that exist in all of them.

Continuous improvement relies on the scientific method. The main sign that the scientific method is in use is not large amounts of data and complicated formulas. It is the presence of models, hypotheses and experimentation. We create models of our system, formulate a hypothesis, and design an experiment that can validate or invalidate it. Experiments can succeed or fail, that’s how they create information that leads to knowledge. If an experiment always succeeds, it produces no information.

Any continuous improvement method at the very minimum includes steps to validate that something we did was actually an improvement. It has to be conducted after we have implemented it and designed before we start the implementation. There is no validity of experiments without predictions. We also need to cope with any possible outcomes of the experiment that can alter the state of our system (what if it succeeds? what if it fails?) These are, respectively the C (Check, or S-Study) parts of the PDCA/PDSA cycle (the fitness test) and the A (Act) part of the same cycle — to illustrate this point using one method as an example.

The earlier steps of a continuous improvement process subordinate to the later steps. How we go about an early step depends on what we want to learn at the later step. The learning steps are a bit later in the process, because there is nothing to test for fitness early on.

For example, in the Build-Measure-Learn loop (the main adaptation mechanism of the Lean Startup method), Measure subordinates to Learn — we don’t measure more than what we need to measure in order to learn — and Build subordinates to Measure — we don’t build more than what we need to build in order to measure. The order of the Five Focusing Steps in Eli Goldratt’s Process of OnGoing Improvement is also not coincidental.

Metacognition. A fancy word for learning to learn, this is classic Deming, part of the System of Profound Knowledge. “Going meta”, context-specific conversation about how knowledge is created and managed and about the boundaries of experimentation are essential. Are you hearing “this is too meta for me?” You’re in the make-believe land.

You Wouldn’t Need Continuous Improvement, If…

…if you could analyze, design and implement continuous improvement solutions. There would be no need to empirically accumulate the knowledge that separates the current condition from the desired, improved state. A one-step improvement process would suffice!

Step 1: Book your tee time

Proof by contradiction? Or we need a math likbez, too?

Now that I brought up the subject of music with my previous post, I want to express my skepticism of the popular theory there is a universal “magic” number of 10,000 hours of practice that one has to complete in order to achieve top levels of performance in pretty much any profession. You can probably guess at this point that what I know about music is somehow contradictory to this theory.

The theory of 10,000-hours of practice was introduced in a best-selling book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. This book is one of the worst non-fiction books I’ve ever read, as it is not well-researched and written in a sensationalist manner. Following a recent Asiana plane crash in San Francisco, a Korean blogger wrote a very thorough fact-based critique of Gladwell’s Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes, which is one of the chapters in his Outliers book. (That chapter seemed suspect to me when I read the book as Gladwell had problems with Russian geography and also failed to recount one of the key episodes of the Cold War with any accuracy.) The chapter on music practice sounded dissonant to my experience with it. If someone knowledgeable in statistics could redo the analysis of hockey players’ birthdays, the takedown of Outliers would be complete.

I don’t mean to bash this book. It is true that Gladwell stimulated many smart people to think about their work in new ways. However, when we consider introducing something new into our professional practice, we want to have some evidence-based discipline to fall back on, and best-selling non-fiction books are not where you’d find that. Unfortunately, many Gladwell readers didn’t realize that.

Recent Update

The update on his 10,000-hour theory in Gladwell’s recent New Yorker article is a mixed bag. One one hand, he continues down the same pseudo-scientific path, citing a study of composers, who, “in almost all cases” “did not create their greatest work until they had been composing for at least ten years” (except three that took nine or eight). What is exactly that “greatest work” that Paganini composed in exactly the tenth (not ninth or eleventh) year of his experience with composition? How was it ascertained that all the works that followed were uniformly better than what he composed in the first nine years? How was it determined with such amazing precision when exactly he started with composition? Besides, if there is a data set of numbers ten and up, nine doesn’t make an outlier.

On the other hand, Gladwell is onto something when he says, give me an example of an NBA point guard who has not spent 10,000 hours on the court to get to the NBA. Calculate backwards, of course! If someone started playing basketball in Grade 1 at age 6 and joined the NBA after college, aged 22, that’s 16 years of practice, 625 hours per year or 1 hour and 43 minutes per day. A kid who wants to play basketball and be good at it can get this amount of practice by playing basketball after school. Those who don’t probably don’t make it to the NBA.

However, calculating backwards can also be used to disprove the 10,000-hour theory, as we will soon see.

So, What Do I Know?

As I wrote in my previous post, I spent several years inside the Soviet classical music education system. Many of the teachers in my school were conservatory graduates, each has trained several pupils in their career who went on to become professional musicians, and I knew some people who were enrolled in the Leningrad conservatory at the time.

This, by practicing an hour and a half per day? I don’t think so.

The numbers for musical practice Gladwell cites in his book are laughable. The “high” numbers from which he derives the 10,000-hour rule would actually correspond to those “recreational” musicians, who used the study of music to broaden their education, who would not go on to become professional musicians, but would stay in the game long enough to achieve good amateur levels. The pros practiced significantly more than that. Typical hours of practice among the conservatory students were about 6 per day, 7 days a week (this is actually better off for the muscle memory than 8 hours, 5 days a week). This translates into about 2,200 hours per year, more than a full-time job, because they didn’t stop for a few weeks to take a vacation. So, a typical conservatory graduate logged 10,000-12,000 hours during the five years of conservatory alone. The entrance to the conservatory itself required a very significant level of mastery very few achieved and the typical path was through the 10-year prep school (between ages 7 and 17), where one would ramp up to the conservatory level, starting with perhaps half as much. That’s another 14,000-17,000 hours. And the kids who were selected to enter the conservatory prep school of course began taking music lessons several years earlier. All these hours added up – conservatively – to 25,000-30,000 for a 22-year-old conservatory graduate, which was only an entry level into the musical performance profession. Very few of those would become concert pianists and violinists or celebrated performers whose recordings of classical compositions you could by in a store. (Most would play in an orchestra or switch to teaching music at some level.) Their number of practice hours would continue to grow at a rate of at least 10,000 every five years, certainly exceeding 60,000 by the time they reached peaks of their performing careers.

Calculating Backwards Again

These numbers can be easily checked by calculating backwards. Ten thousand divided by 17-18 years for a recent conservatory graduate works out to about 1 hour and 35 minutes per day, which is not going to get you anywhere on the professional path. Actually the recently published biography of Viktoria Mullova (who won Weniawski, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky competitions in the early 1980s and then went on to a very long and successful soloist career) mentions that she put more practice time before leaving home for school in the morning. So, 10,000 is not even near the ballpark.

Deliberate Practice Is Still Key; We Just Need Smarter Ways to Think About It

The first couple of points are trivial. First, we have to accept there is no single, universal number. Some disciplines simply require much more time than others. Second, different people learn at different paces. Some learners need more time and some will need less, relative to the “average” number for their discipline.

Third and more importantly, the pace of learning is not constant. People’s paces of learning to learn vary, too, further increasing the variation of total learning times. The pace can also be accelerated deliberately by learning to learn. (A trick my music teachers taught me: memorize the score as early as possible; then you can repeatedly practice difficult parts while your eyes look at your hands and the instrument instead of staring at the sheet music.) Mullova’s biography notes how her first music teacher (whom she started working with at age four) observed not only her playing, but also her learning, and how he insisted that her father rearrange his work schedule to be present at every lesson. That was another technique used by Soviet music teachers aimed at accelerating the learning between lessons. Techniques of learning to learn certainly vary by discipline.

Accelerate Learning and Create the Time Advantage

Fourth and still more importantly, many fields have individuals driven to excel and who can spend a few thousand hours a year and get fast at learning (by choosing a field where they can do it naturally, by learning to learn, or both). These people don’t just reach their destination ahead of the crowd and then rest on their laurels. They can dedicate decades of their lives to their passions, so they can use the time advantage to redefine the standards of competence and excellence in their fields. This multiplies the time it takes others to get there and can place it out of their reach. Classical music is an example of the exploited time advantage. The modern, technically difficult repertoire was created by generations of composers and performers who spent their whole lives pushing their artistic and technical limits. Anyone who wants to repeat the performances of the previous generation of musicians faces a huge task.

Examples of using deliberate practice for competitive advantage by creating time with accelerated learning can probably be found in many other fields.