The Art of Slicing Work

00:00:00: Anton Skornyakov: Starting. 2

00:00:03: Johannes Schartau: Hi, and welcome to episode number 3 of Transform Together, the Holistic Podcast Meetup. 3

00:00:10: Johannes Schartau: My name is Johannes Schartau, and today I will be talking to Anton Skornyakov. 4

00:00:15: Johannes Schartau: Hey. Anton is a business coach, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Agile.coach. 5

00:00:22: Johannes Schartau: He has played a key role in spreading liberating structures across Europe, and he's the author of The Art of Slicing Work, a book packed with stories, lessons, and principles drawn from his experience coaching nearly 100 organizations and thousands of people. 6

00:00:40: Johannes Schartau: If you want your organization to respond faster and deliver value sooner, slicing work into smaller, meaningful packages is essential. But how do you actually do that in practice? In this episode of the Transform Together podcast, I sit down with Anton to explore exactly this question. 7

00:00:57: Johannes Schartau: We'll dig into why slicing work is often so challenging. 8

00:01:01: Johannes Schartau: What pitfalls to avoid, and which techniques really help teams move quickly. 9

00:01:06: Johannes Schartau: And in the interactive part, Anton will guide participants through hands-on exercises so they can try some of these techniques for themselves. 10

00:01:14: Johannes Schartau: Anton, I am thrilled that you could make it. Welcome to the podcast. 11

00:01:19: Anton Skornyakov: Thank you, thank you so much, thank you for having me. 12

00:01:21: Johannes Schartau: Okay, we want to get into this? 13

00:01:23: Johannes Schartau: Ready? Great. Yeah. Your book is called The Art of Slicing Work. What are we talking about? 14

00:01:31: Anton Skornyakov: Right, so depending on who you are, who you are, who is listening to, there's two ways I'd like to explain it, coming from my experience talking about it now. 15

00:01:41: Anton Skornyakov: So, for most people in the agile bubble, so if you're familiar with Agile methodologies and Scrum, slicing is more than just splitting user stories, because that's what most people associate with this word. 16

00:01:54: Anton Skornyakov: Slicing is, is much, much broader. It's about how to break up a larger endeavor, or a project, or a product initiative. 17

00:02:04: Anton Skornyakov: into… increments, into what we call increments in the agile world, so that we can… 18

00:02:11: Anton Skornyakov: Within a short amount of time, of weeks, at most a month, 19

00:02:16: Anton Skornyakov: Deliver something and learn from it. 20

00:02:19: Anton Skornyakov: And, 21

00:02:21: Anton Skornyakov: Obviously, if you are an experienced Agile practitioner, you are… you should be quite, experienced with this. 22

00:02:29: Anton Skornyakov: And this is actually that, to most people from the agile bubble, comes very intuitively. 23

00:02:34: Anton Skornyakov: However, when I speak about this, The skill with people from… 24

00:02:40: Anton Skornyakov: the, you know, outside of our bubble. What people typically think of 25

00:02:49: Anton Skornyakov: And what people actually know of is having… when they approach a risky thing in their project, is to have something like a pilot project. 26

00:02:58: Anton Skornyakov: So if you have a project, and you know there are some risks in there, so you do a pilot with which you basically test all the risks, but then after the pilot is done, you have the traditional project. And if you are familiar with this kind of approach, then to use slicing would be something like 27

00:03:14: Anton Skornyakov: Instead of having one pilot project, delivering your whole project with little pilots. 28

00:03:20: Anton Skornyakov: 2 weeks. 29

00:03:21: Anton Skornyakov: And basically building it up. 30

00:03:23: Anton Skornyakov: And, from my point of view. 31

00:03:27: Anton Skornyakov: this is… the new part of what I wanted to add with this book is basically the perspective that we do not have to talk that much about roles and meetings and responsibilities when we want an organization to be, become more adaptive. 32

00:03:45: Anton Skornyakov: what we want to talk about first is actually the results that we are going to be delivering. And this topic, from me, from my point of view, is so much underrepres… is deeply underrepresented. 33

00:03:57: Anton Skornyakov: Yeah, in our community. 34

00:03:59: Johannes Schartau: I completely agree. And I'm always fascinated by this, that this kind of… this is one of the topics that seems to kind of just fall off people's radars, or they have never even thought about this. And so, I would be super interested, because when I raise this with clients, what I often hear is something like. 35

00:04:18: Johannes Schartau: you know, we've never done this in the past, or we are a really big organization, so we have big projects, and that's just the nature of this, so, 36

00:04:28: Johannes Schartau: Or even, like, it's more efficient to pack a lot of things into fewer releases, and then, like, the efficiency optimization factor comes into play, so what's your response to that? 37

00:04:42: Anton Skornyakov: So there was a couple of them. So there were several systemic thinking parts why this actually happens to larger companies, and I would maybe… I'm not sure we have the time to take both of them, because maybe we want to look at also an example, but, 38

00:04:57: Anton Skornyakov: So, one of the things that typically happens in a large organization is you have a lot of stakeholders, internal stakeholders and external stakeholders, whenever you drive a project. And so, the larger the project is, the more there are different topics that you want to agree… you want to have an agreement upon with all the stakeholders, right? 39

00:05:16: Anton Skornyakov: So, and if you know anything about, kind of, how networks work, if you add one more stakeholder into a question with 10 already existing stakeholders, the amount of communication that is actually growing… is quadrupling, so it's going with… 40

00:05:34: Anton Skornyakov: Not linearly, but. 41

00:05:37: Johannes Schartau: It's exploding. It's exploding. 42

00:05:38: Anton Skornyakov: Exactly. So what happens, basically, is people realize, okay, well, there is a lot of 43

00:05:43: Anton Skornyakov: Topics that we need to agree upon. 44

00:05:46: Anton Skornyakov: But if the project is unpredictable in its nature, no matter how much you talk, and you invest a lot of time in talking, because talking, the more people are there, the more you need to talk. 45

00:05:58: Anton Skornyakov: But you're still going to be surprised by something while the project is moving on. Oh, yeah. And so, the project is going to be derailed by this surprise, and the more you've done talking in the beginning, the harder it will get to change anything while you are on your way, because 46

00:06:16: Anton Skornyakov: you know, you're following a way that was already agreed upon by so much stakeholder negotiation and conversations. So… 47

00:06:25: Anton Skornyakov: once the project is basically done, and you do lessons learned, what you basically learn from this is, well, we haven't done enough talking, right? Because 48

00:06:33: Anton Skornyakov: the nature of complexity is that afterwards, it always seems obvious that there was one question that you did not fix. So you think by investing more time up front. 49

00:06:43: Anton Skornyakov: Talking more, you can reduce this amount of risk. And so this is the dynamics that actually creates this in large organizations, that people with more and more experience actually tend to invest more and more time in planning, while this reduces their ability to be adaptable. 50

00:07:02: Anton Skornyakov: So, so that… the larger the organization, the larger the project, the more natural it is. 51

00:07:06: Anton Skornyakov: And the other thing that you ask is, like, so how does it make sense? So maybe that's a little bit more complicated, but it's about the economics of feedback. So whenever we have some decision that we make, right. 52

00:07:19: Anton Skornyakov: And when we build a product, when we build a service, we make a lot of decisions. Like, continuously, we make decisions about what we think our customers will want, or what we think a process change in our organization will work. 53

00:07:30: Anton Skornyakov: And everyone would try it out, there is transaction costs. To try something out, to show something to your customer, there is a lot of costs involved in that. 54

00:07:39: Anton Skornyakov: And the more you can show your customer at once. 55

00:07:42: Anton Skornyakov: The cheaper it is to check every individual thing that you created, right? 56

00:07:47: Anton Skornyakov: So it's… so if you just think about that, it makes total sense to just check… 57

00:07:52: Anton Skornyakov: very rarely have huge batches, but what you obviously forget with this is the holding costs. So every decision that you have not checked is basically 58

00:08:04: Anton Skornyakov: another assumption that you are base… that you base your further building of making new decisions on. So the risk there is also, or the holding cost, if you look at this economically, is basically also growing exponentially. This time's not quarterly, but actually exponentially. So… 59

00:08:22: Anton Skornyakov: And if you look at this, basically, you will realize there is a very small batch that you want to go for, but that's, like, you know, that would be much easier to explain if we had something to draw upon. But if you just Google Don Reynolds and holding costs versus transaction cost, you will definitely see the right picture in Google. 60

00:08:42: Johannes Schartau: Nice. For people just listening, I have a big grin on my face, because it's one of my favorite topics, and I'm always… 61

00:08:51: Johannes Schartau: I love this moment when you show this to people, and there's this… in the beginning, it's like, yeah, I know about this, but… and then there's this click moment, where it's just like, oh, oh yeah, I'm starting to get this. So let's assume, you've sold me, I'm interested, it makes sense to me. 62

00:09:10: Johannes Schartau: How do I get this started? So we… we maybe, like, we come from… from a very traditional, project-oriented background, we… we do these big batches. What are some ways that, I could get some benefit out of this? 63

00:09:24: Anton Skornyakov: Yeah. So the simplest way to start to do it is something called pre-mortem. 64

00:09:28: Anton Skornyakov: So before… before you start your project, think about the different ways it can fail. 65

00:09:34: Anton Skornyakov: It's a very painful exercise, but it doesn't have to take that long, it's just 15 minutes, and you basically put people together who maybe have already done something like that before, so have experienced things fail. 66

00:09:46: Anton Skornyakov: Or you basically put into a room as many perspectives as possible, and you ask those people for, like, 15 minutes. So imagine this thing that we are starting to do here for the next two years. It goes wrong. What could go wrong? 67

00:09:59: Anton Skornyakov: And then you basically collect a lot of things. And, 68

00:10:03: Anton Skornyakov: all of the things that people can think of. Customers don't like it, this technology doesn't work. If we show this to these people, they don't agree with it. The partner that we need in order for this to work will simply not sign the contract with us, because for them, it's not advantageous to… 69

00:10:22: Anton Skornyakov: go along with this. And, 70

00:10:26: Anton Skornyakov: Once you've written all these things down, you can ask yourself, so what could be the smallest amount of thing that we can actually build and actually try out in order to show that this risk 71

00:10:38: Anton Skornyakov: Isn't there, or if this risk is there, to actually get this information as early as possible. 72

00:10:43: Anton Skornyakov: And, when you do this, it's very, you know, it's very solution-focused, it's very result-focused, and you don't have to have any discussions about agility in this moment, right? So you're very solution-focused, like, you want to reduce risk, right? That's what it is about. 73

00:10:57: Anton Skornyakov: And, but what you end up with is basically different slices. The things that you're gonna end up with are already slices. 74

00:11:06: Anton Skornyakov: because there are results that deliver value, at least they reduce risk. And what typically happens in organizations is that the first slice that you will come up with is going to be too big. So if you're going to ask yourself, well, when I'm going to be able to deliver this. 75

00:11:20: Anton Skornyakov: you still gotta get an answer, like, half a year at least, like, we need to do this. So then, you need to ask yourself, well, what are we here doing, kind of. 76

00:11:29: Anton Skornyakov: the typical strategy of an organization is to be too big, like, so there are some strategies to make it smaller. So you can, instead of doing something for everyone, you can say, well, what could be 10 people, or what could be… what could be two companies that we already work with that we can try this out with? 77

00:11:45: Anton Skornyakov: for… so this is kind of reduction of a target audience. Or you can think of a reduction of the actual impact. So instead of saying they actually buy something from us, you can say, well, how can we actually make sure… so, for example, how can we make them sign a letter of intent with us, or at least commit to investing… 78

00:12:07: Anton Skornyakov: two of their, employees to actually work on us with this. Even though they may not buy us, but this is already quite a big investment, so this will be a lower… 79

00:12:16: Anton Skornyakov: impact. 80

00:12:18: Anton Skornyakov: There are, like, there are more patterns, like the ones that I've just explained, that will help you reduce the slice. And once you start doing this, you will have a myriad of different… 81

00:12:32: Anton Skornyakov: possible results. And then the question is going to be, you know, what do we start with? Which one is the most risky one? And then you… 82

00:12:40: Anton Skornyakov: From there. 83

00:12:42: Anton Skornyakov: There is the typical product on a question of how do we prioritize this is going to be the one that you decide. 84

00:12:48: Johannes Schartau: Nice. 85

00:12:49: Johannes Schartau: Gets me all excited. Do you have… do you have an example of how this completely changed 86

00:12:55: Johannes Schartau: Yeah. The game for a team, or any big aha moment in the past, where maybe a company or a team, they were used to just thinking these big batches, and then there was something that they broke off, or, like, a slice that they made, and they were just like, oh, this is different. 87

00:13:13: Anton Skornyakov: I'd like to tell two, one of them connected with software, one of them not connected with software. 88

00:13:18: Johannes Schartau: You can, you can tell 5 if you want. Yeah, correct. 89

00:13:21: Johannes Schartau: Because. 90

00:13:21: Anton Skornyakov: This whole book is about actually giving people examples, because what I find most effective is actually not this whole talking, because once you understand it, you can see all the world, but you need to get a lot of examples, you need to see this, and that's… yeah. So one example was one organization that, 91

00:13:37: Anton Skornyakov: is basically driving people from A to B in Germany, and in the whole Europe. 92

00:13:43: Anton Skornyakov: And, they are doing this, having buses. 93

00:13:47: Anton Skornyakov: And they had the idea that they want to strengthen their brand awareness. And the idea was to actually have all the drivers of those buses wear a t-shirt with their big brand on it. 94

00:14:00: Anton Skornyakov: Right? So there was this idea, and I worked with this group, and they said, well, what do we have to do? Well, we need to find a place to buy 100,000 of t-shirts, because this is the amount of drivers, and then we have to think about how do we distribute all those t-shirts to the drivers, how do we make sure that they're clean, how do we… you know… and I was like, okay, okay, okay, let's assume it doesn't work. 95

00:14:23: Anton Skornyakov: Like, what if we… what if this is a hypothesis that doesn't work? So, and, you know, we did something like a pre-mortem with them, and yadda yadda yadda. What they ended up doing was basically actually having just one organization, because they do not have the drivers themselves, so they have a lot of companies that work with them. 96

00:14:40: Anton Skornyakov: that drive for them. And so, one of the things that they had to find out is, basically. 97

00:14:45: Anton Skornyakov: is this… is drivers wearing t-shirts actually going to increase brand awareness, right? So that's something you can test with just 10 bus drivers? 98

00:14:55: Anton Skornyakov: Yeah, for a month. 99

00:14:57: Johannes Schartau: Imagine, there is a possibility that this could not work. 100

00:15:01: Anton Skornyakov: Yeah, imagine how many. 101

00:15:03: Johannes Schartau: I can see it. 102

00:15:03: Anton Skornyakov: How many t-shirts? But… and then there is also things that you… and this is the most important part, because 103

00:15:10: Anton Skornyakov: you know, we often talk about complexity and things being surprising. This kind of thing is maybe to the two of us, it's not surprising, because it's kind of… this is the standard hypothesis, that what we think is going to work, right? But there is also something surprising that can come up here, because they… once you do that, you have to negotiate with all those bus-driving companies. 104

00:15:30: Anton Skornyakov: To change the contracts that you have with them, because they have to be contractually obligated. 105

00:15:35: Anton Skornyakov: And now, it becomes… the tricky thing can be not just the driver is actually wearing the t-shirts, but you making sure that this actually becomes part of the contract. And how do you put it in the contract? And is the contract strong enough so the bus drivers actually wear the t-shirts? So there is so many things that can pop up there that are completely unpredictable at the beginning. 106

00:15:55: Anton Skornyakov: That you really don't want to buy the 100,000 t-shirts in the beginning. It's really not the first thing to do, if you think about it. 107

00:16:02: Anton Skornyakov: And, so, so, yeah, for them, it was a bigger heart moment, actually. They kind of, 108

00:16:06: Anton Skornyakov: changed how the project went. Another, another thing, 109

00:16:11: Anton Skornyakov: that's a completely different company. It also has something to do with buses. But it's actually a digital company, so this is an online company where people can find a way from A to B to how to get there, using different buses, or maybe even trains, and sometimes even flights. 110

00:16:27: Anton Skornyakov: And these guys, very successful, but they've, built an engine to… for their search, 111

00:16:37: Anton Skornyakov: in the very beginning, like, at the very first half a year of their startup, and if you have… if you've done anything with search of, like, search algorithms of how to get from A to B, you will know this is a mathematically not solved question. So this question is mathematically not completely solved. It's one of the best route. 112

00:16:54: Johannes Schartau: It's one of those topics where it's just, I just punch in an address and it finds it for me, and in the background, it's a nightmare. 113

00:17:00: Anton Skornyakov: Yeah, and it's even a scientific question. So there is… so this company, they were already quite successful, or they are still quite successful commercially, but then they wanted to kind of create a new search engine. So they hired a lot of people with PhDs, like, really clever people. 114

00:17:17: Anton Skornyakov: And these people worked for a year, and when I joined the company, I basically told them that there is this typical pattern in a software place, there is a pattern of walking skeletons, so that you start with a Hello World application. You do not start with building the most complicated part, you start where the… 115

00:17:34: Anton Skornyakov: the surface, where your application surfaces, and actually touches and is actually somehow visible. Yeah. So… 116

00:17:42: Anton Skornyakov: And then you go deeper from there, you mock basically all the architecture. And so for them, it meant they already had some kind of scientifically quite sophisticated search engine, but it was never kind of… it was never connected with the actual search. 117

00:18:01: Johannes Schartau: That people actually did outside. 118

00:18:03: Anton Skornyakov: And so I said, so why don't we… like, the actual way for us to do it not to create any sophisticated search, but actually to create some kind of search that actually connects to the search outside, and maybe, for example, ensure that the search result number 1500 first 119

00:18:19: Anton Skornyakov: is the one that comes from our algorithm. And in the beginning, it can be really dumb, but no client will ever go. 120

00:18:25: Anton Skornyakov: to the 1,501st search result, right? So, so why don't we do that? Why don't we just do that? 121

00:18:35: Anton Skornyakov: And they ended up not being able to connect their machine, their thing, to the actual search result for half a year. 122

00:18:43: Anton Skornyakov: And in the end, because… and you think, why? What is the problem? Well, the problem is that the actual search that people are using is also moving on, right? Because all of the features that the platform is actually developing, they show up. 123

00:18:57: Anton Skornyakov: They show up in the real search. So if you develop this algorithm and connect it to the outer world, you have to kind of keep… you have to keep track with them. You have to… 124

00:19:07: Anton Skornyakov: So, in simply solving this first part completely changed how they went on with their project. 125

00:19:14: Anton Skornyakov: But ensured that actually results were possible, and that… 126

00:19:19: Anton Skornyakov: you know, basically it showed a lot of risks that, especially for scientists, were not possible. So this whole slicing, maybe what you can get out of this is, this whole slicing is about really, really becoming pragmatic. 127

00:19:31: Anton Skornyakov: it is why I like it so much, because it connects a lot to people 128

00:19:37: Anton Skornyakov: Who actually run a business, because they very often want really pragmatic results, and it completely connects to all the agility 129

00:19:45: Anton Skornyakov: Which is very often something, you know, we hear a lot from companies who actually fire all people who do anything with Agile, because they fail to connect all of the things that we bring to the results. So that's why, kind of, we start with that. 130

00:19:59: Johannes Schartau: Yeah. 131

00:19:59: Johannes Schartau: And it's so interesting that lots of the clients that I work with, what they say is, you know, one of our biggest problems is that we 132

00:20:08: Johannes Schartau: we deliver, and it doesn't manifest the value that we thought it would. And what you just described is that those are two such typical examples of what we often see, that we have so many assumptions. 133

00:20:20: Johannes Schartau: And then we build a big thing, instead of maybe just slicing a bit smaller and looking at what is something that we can test. And, I mean, there's the question of the whole agile delivery part, for example, that's also very valuable, but… 134

00:20:34: Johannes Schartau: the entire work of even taking the thing and slicing it down. It's fascinating that a lot of, you know, people don't even do that. 135

00:20:44: Anton Skornyakov: It's there. 136

00:20:46: Johannes Schartau: Would you say there's a way of taking it too far? I'm always interested in the boundaries of any approach. Can I slice too small? 137

00:20:54: Anton Skornyakov: I mean, sure, yeah, I mean, there is… if you can… if you can deliver something within an hour. 138

00:21:01: Anton Skornyakov: That's too small, because I think the transaction cost of having a client close by to check something within an hour is just too high. So, yeah, I think the chunks of what you want to end up with are something that 139

00:21:16: Anton Skornyakov: a team, or, you know, depends on the business, obviously, that you're running, but that you can… that is something that you can get feedback 140

00:21:24: Anton Skornyakov: fast enough. If you're a freelancer, and you are trying out a new business model. 141

00:21:29: Anton Skornyakov: every day, maybe a one-day results could be small, small enough for you, but for most businesses that I, you know, that I work with, we're talking about a team working for a week or two. 142

00:21:42: Anton Skornyakov: And that's… that's already a tremendous 143

00:21:46: Anton Skornyakov: like, unbelievable, that for most organizations that we're working with. 144

00:21:53: Anton Skornyakov: To deliver something that delivers any kind of meaningful feedback within 2 weeks is just unimaginable. 145

00:22:01: Johannes Schartau: Right. It's like, how can we do that? 146

00:22:05: Johannes Schartau: Nice. 147

00:22:07: Johannes Schartau: Now, I can imagine people often don't do this because it's difficult, and even if you have maybe a couple of patterns, it becomes easier, but what are some of the difficulties that you see with clients when they start slicing their work? What is… 148

00:22:25: Johannes Schartau: You know, what trips them up, or… 149

00:22:27: Anton Skornyakov: You know, what kind of… 150

00:22:28: Johannes Schartau: Pitfalls do you see there? 151

00:22:31: Anton Skornyakov: Yeah. 152

00:22:32: Anton Skornyakov: So, one thing, before that, just because the way you set up the question kind of brought my brain into this thing. 153

00:22:40: Anton Skornyakov: it is always hard to argue for this kind of approach, and it makes sense that it's hard to argue. I would love for our listeners to actually be emphasizing with everyone who does not buy into this, because imagine you go to any kind of an expert, imagine you go to a hairdresser, and 154

00:22:58: Anton Skornyakov: And you expect them to, you know, you tell them what you want to do with your hair, and they tell you the price, right? If they tell you, I don't know, well, let me have a go at it for half an hour, and then we'll… 155

00:23:10: Anton Skornyakov: reduce the risks, and then have another go for half an hour. You will run away, right, from this hairdresser. So there is a normal expectation that if you're dealing with someone who is an expert, and you think that what is in front of you is something that just requires expertise. 156

00:23:25: Anton Skornyakov: It's totally natural to not accept the fact that you want to go step by step, and you don't know how far you get after a couple of months. It's totally natural. 157

00:23:35: Anton Skornyakov: Let's… 158

00:23:36: Johannes Schartau: Let's explore what your intention is with this haircut first. Yeah. Do you just want to look good, or is there a specific effect that you're aiming for? And now let's talk about all the way this could not work. All the ways that this could… let's do a pre-mortem on your haircut, yeah, okay. 159

00:23:56: Anton Skornyakov: Yeah, that's… that's not gonna end well. 160

00:23:59: Anton Skornyakov: Yeah, I think I'm looking for someone else. Exactly. Yeah, so if you are embarking on it. 161

00:24:07: Anton Skornyakov: On this journey. The question was, what is, what are the typical pitfalls? So… 162

00:24:16: Anton Skornyakov: I would say, you know, the major pitfall of clients that I work with is basically they don't have… they don't yet have an infrastructure that actually is set up for this. So. 163

00:24:29: Anton Skornyakov: large organizations or state organizations, they don't have already kind of a running system for that. So, when they end up understanding, oh, so for this slice to be created, we need these 5 people from very different departments to work with each other. 164

00:24:46: Anton Skornyakov: That's something we can't do. 165

00:24:49: Anton Skornyakov: And, kind of, so if you expect the, the, 166

00:24:56: Anton Skornyakov: the… gosh, constraints to already be there. If you expect the rules to already be there in place before you start, it's not gonna work. And so, to connect this with this hairdresser thing, if you have not yet had the experience. 167

00:25:15: Anton Skornyakov: of wasting money and wasting time, and being frustrated by trying the other approach, you will not try this one, I think. 168

00:25:24: Anton Skornyakov: I think if you have not yet… if you think it's like cutting your hair, you… no one can… there is no magic trick I can do to explain to you this is not a haircut. 169

00:25:35: Johannes Schartau: Yep. 170

00:25:38: Anton Skornyakov: And being afraid of all of those… so the pitfalls basically are, once you realize, oh, this is what we want to do, to kind of… 171

00:25:47: Anton Skornyakov: to be stopped by the rules not being there in place. You have to have certain kind of boldness, and certain experience of, hey, this is not gonna work in a different way, let's just move on, let's just do it, and we will create the rules. After our project, we will be able to learn, and we will create kind of a road for the next guys to follow, because we will already have 172

00:26:09: Anton Skornyakov: You know, gone through this jungle and had cut down some of the 173

00:26:13: Anton Skornyakov: Grass in front of us. 174

00:26:17: Johannes Schartau: So, let's… let's assume… 175

00:26:19: Johannes Schartau: the organizations you've worked with, they have solved this. They're great at this. They mastered the art of slicing work. What are they going to run into next? 176

00:26:33: Anton Skornyakov: What am I going to run into next? 177

00:26:34: Johannes Schartau: you know, what are they going to run into? So what kind of problem are they facing now? Because I can see… I think that's one of the major problems. So if you, if you… if you were to ask me, I think this is at least in the top 5, maybe top 3 of… 178

00:26:49: Johannes Schartau: of the challenges that organizations have, but there's more. What do you expect? So, now we can slice it. 179

00:26:57: Anton Skornyakov: So 180

00:26:58: Johannes Schartau: We've got the right people together, we have the ability, what is the next problem that we run into? 181

00:27:03: Anton Skornyakov: I think this kind of programization, if they really kind of… if they have mastered it. 182

00:27:08: Anton Skornyakov: What they will have the difficulty with is balancing dealing with actually non-surprising work. That's what I see. So some organizations that especially started off being very innovative, very trying out everywhere, they actually, at some point, realize, shit, there is things that we do all… like, 10 times we've already done this. 183

00:27:30: Anton Skornyakov: And every time, we are acting as if this is something new. 184

00:27:34: Anton Skornyakov: And we are not good at this, getting ourselves checklists, of following some procedures, and the difficulty is actually 185

00:27:43: Anton Skornyakov: To be able to have people also who understand that there is 186

00:27:47: Anton Skornyakov: completely adequately different modes of how we work in the same organization. So that's what I find. This is kind of the next step. So if we'd done that, the next step is actually to learn that sometimes traditional management actually makes total sense, especially if we do something 10 times over now. 187

00:28:05: Johannes Schartau: Yeah, now we have the flexibility, now let's look for where we need stability, and let's 188

00:28:10: Johannes Schartau: You're good at both, right? Yeah. Just one, yeah. 189

00:28:14: Johannes Schartau: Do you have any… any questions that you feel like people should ask more often when it comes to slicing work? 190

00:28:23: Anton Skornyakov: What is unknown? 191

00:28:25: Anton Skornyakov: I think. 192

00:28:26: Anton Skornyakov: So whenever you're doing something that is even remotely innovative. 193

00:28:32: Anton Skornyakov: So you can do innovation that is innovative technologically, that is innovative, that you… but you offer the same product to a different kind of people, but there is also… if you do not just repeat something that you've done before. 194

00:28:44: Anton Skornyakov: it is… there is always something new, and whatever is new, there is some unknown part, and so… this is also another question of, you know, what could go wrong is, what is new? Like, what is something new? What haven't we… what is about this project is something that we've never done before. Even if it is 195

00:29:02: Anton Skornyakov: We've built an app before that does exactly the same thing, but for a different company. 196

00:29:08: Johannes Schartau: Yeah. 197

00:29:09: Anton Skornyakov: We do it for a different company, so what is… what are the things that could be different, just about… about the people that we're working with? 198

00:29:16: Anton Skornyakov: So what is the… what is the unknown is very often a very useful question. 199

00:29:21: Johannes Schartau: Love that question. I find that it's… 200

00:29:24: Johannes Schartau: it's a dangerous question sometimes in organizations, because, you know, I'm paying you to be the expert and to know everything, and now admitting you don't know it. And for me, often in organizations, that's a big switch to just accepting, yeah. 201

00:29:40: Johannes Schartau: There's a lot of stuff that we don't know. Let's look into this, let's handle this. 202

00:29:44: Anton Skornyakov: But I think that's a big step. 203

00:29:47: Anton Skornyakov: Yeah, and again, it comes back to, again, you won't do this with a client who thinks that everything just works out. You need to have a client who has already at least failed, or a friend of them has failed, or that they have heard that whatever they are going to do is going to fail if they just act as if it was completely predictable. 204

00:30:06: Johannes Schartau: So, now let's assume I've started slicing my work. 205

00:30:09: Johannes Schartau: And it's, for whatever reason, it's a bit frustrating, or it's more work than I thought. Do you have any kind of encouragement for people? Maybe people listening are already in the process of doing this, or they stopped or paused, or whatever you want to call it. 206

00:30:27: Johannes Schartau: And what would you tell them to rekindle the fire? 207

00:30:32: Anton Skornyakov: That's a good question, 208

00:30:37: Anton Skornyakov: So, where my… this is… I haven't answered this question, it's a good one. So what my… where my brain goes to first is, it's fine. So if you… if you… if you feel… if you feel that you're tired with it. 209

00:30:50: Johannes Schartau: It's very often a very good… it's a feedback in itself. 210

00:30:54: Anton Skornyakov: And you may not yet know what it is that tires you, but that's actually an absolutely legitimate signal of your system, of your body, of your… So, first of all, I wouldn't want to just, you know, give you a motivational speech that just, BAM! Go do it anyway. So, I would say something is legitimate about it. 211

00:31:14: Anton Skornyakov: And I would invite to basically observe and to also kind of take your time to relax, and… 212

00:31:23: Anton Skornyakov: What helps me with this kind of things is always… is just simply looking at the alternative. 213

00:31:29: Anton Skornyakov: So, if you just relax and let things go as if they were planned, you will notice. You will notice all those… it's like one of the things that you… once you see it, you cannot unsee it. So once you start thinking about your project in a way 214

00:31:44: Anton Skornyakov: of building it step by step, with a deliverable by a deliverable, you cannot unsee it, and so once you… if you stop doing this, and your project is, again, going more and more planning, you will notice all those steps where uncertainty is covered by fake 215

00:32:01: Anton Skornyakov: Fake acting as if people are certain. 216

00:32:05: Anton Skornyakov: And that will give you the drive, from my point of view, I think. 217

00:32:08: Anton Skornyakov: And maybe your own resistance will also tell you something that's valuable. 218

00:32:17: Johannes Schartau: Yeah, just this acceptance of that it is difficult. What I find is usually that you have these deep questions in any kind of organization, and you will not find an easy answer to that, and that's precisely what is going to make the difference, because if it were easy, then everybody was just making money. 219

00:32:36: Johannes Schartau: off of this, and so, just reaching this point where maybe it's a bit frustrating, that is okay, and maybe just take a break and then tackle it again, that's… I think that's great advice. 220

00:32:47: Anton Skornyakov: That's a very good one, yeah, yeah. 221

00:32:48: Johannes Schartau: So, you, you've done it, okay? So you've eradicated this problem of slicing your work from the planet, everybody's doing it, it's being taught in elementary school. I have two boys in elementary school, and they've learned this, and we're looking back at… 222

00:33:08: Johannes Schartau: the great Anton Skarnikov, you know, decades ago, who pointed this out. So what is… what is next for you? Is there… is there something that fascinates you at the moment that… that you're working on? 223

00:33:20: Anton Skornyakov: So I find… so what fascinates me personally is actually the whole area of… 224

00:33:25: Anton Skornyakov: Now, the personal dimension, or the assumption dimension that changes with it. So what we… 225

00:33:33: Anton Skornyakov: In the whole Agile world, we obviously always balance the kind of… the actual result thing, and this is… the book, Slicing, is about actual… delivering actual results, but then once we focus on delivering actual results, we realize, well, it's about working with other people. It's about getting feedback and accepting feedback, and all the inner workings that happen with there, and what I… 226

00:33:55: Anton Skornyakov: by no means I want to say that this is not important, I just say it's secondary. We need to start with the results first, but it's by no means unimportant. It's very important, and what I'm most interested in is, if we all sliced perfectly, what I would be most interested in is what's going on in ourselves, and how do we… how can we make it… make it much, much easier for us to accept feedback, not just on a personal level, but also on an 227

00:34:20: Anton Skornyakov: Team level, organizational level, product level. 228

00:34:22: Anton Skornyakov: I think… 229

00:34:24: Anton Skornyakov: So this is the second part that is, that I'm very interested in, and by looking at it in myself, I think I find a lot of, 230

00:34:35: Anton Skornyakov: Knowledge and, and, very useful, 231

00:34:40: Anton Skornyakov: techniques coming out of, actually, psychotherapy right now, very new. 232

00:34:46: Anton Skornyakov: a lot of very new things that originated with somatic experiencing, but now moving into, neuro-affective relationship model, little NARM. Like, those things are… they are effective on a very different level, on a very, like, like, from a, like, from the point of view of being effective. 233

00:35:03: Anton Skornyakov: And, I feel that once we've done that part, if we can kind of leverage those things that psychotherapists have already found out, and apply them to our expertise, that will be amazing. 234

00:35:17: Johannes Schartau: Alright, so you just won another spot on this podcast. Do you have time tomorrow at noon, maybe? Because this sounds absolutely fascinating. 235

00:35:25: Anton Skornyakov: Okay, I'm not… I haven't yet written a book about it, but thank you. 236

00:35:30: Johannes Schartau: No, but maybe we can just have a casual conversation about this. 237

00:35:33: Anton Skornyakov: Yeah. 238

00:35:34: Johannes Schartau: Yeah, that's something that I also find super interesting. 239

00:35:37: Johannes Schartau: Alright, thank you so much for your time. I just want to take this moment just to… 240

00:35:42: Johannes Schartau: just recommend your book again. I really have to say, because I re-read it for this podcast, and I just… because I'm also an author, and I read all the time. I read dozens of books every year, and I was just so… I just noticed again how 241

00:35:58: Johannes Schartau: to the point it is, and how refined it is, and it's just also just a pleasure reading. So, anybody who's listening, I highly recommend 242

00:36:07: Johannes Schartau: the book, The Art of Slicing Work, because it's great, it provides a lot of value, but it's also just really pleasant. 243

00:36:15: Johannes Schartau: Alright, so, I hope this session has given you some concrete ideas for your own transformation challenges. At Holisticon, we put into practice what we discuss in Transform Together. We provide companies with holistic support throughout the digital transformation process, from strategy and technology to organizational change. 244

00:36:33: Johannes Schartau: We make our customers more resilient, establish a future-proof, agile culture, create new business models, and inspire people with better services and products. If you are facing similar challenges or wondering how you can implement the ideas from this session in your organization, please feel free to contact us, or maybe Anton first, but then at some point us. 245

00:36:51: Johannes Schartau: You can find all the information you need at holisticon.de. And do not miss our next Transform Together session on October 22nd at 4pm. That's Central European summertime still. I think that's the last day. 246

00:37:05: Johannes Schartau: Our guest will be OKR expert Chancellor Zergens. She has developed a fascinating approach to OKRs called the OKR Solar System, and we'll do a deep dive into this topic, complete with an interactive part that is going to make using OKRs much easier. 247

00:37:20: Johannes Schartau: See you then.