Tammy Gretz and Wendy Jacobs discuss their talk "From Self Obsession to Self Selection: A Scaled Org's Journey to Value Reorganization" at Agile2018.   Transcript Tammy Gretz Wendy Jacobs ‑ Agile2018   Bob Payne:  "The Agile toolkit." [music] Bob:  Hi. I'm your host, Bob Payne. I'm here with Tammy Gretz of [inaudible 0:25] ... [laughter] Bob:  ...and Wendy Jacobs. We've chatted a bit before this, but this is the first time you guys are doing a podcast, I think. Wendy Jacobs:  A live podcast, yes. Bob:  A live podcast. Wendy:  Correct. Bob:  This is recorded. [laughter] Bob:  You still have had to come. Wendy:  This is the first live or recorded podcast for me. There you go. [laughter] Bob:  You are doing a talk and it's related to team self‑selection, From Self‑Obsession to Self‑Selection. What's that all about? How do you two work together? What's your back story? What's the talk? Wendy:  I work at AEP, American Electric Power ‑‑ this is Wendy ‑‑ and Tammy and I work together there. She is a Scrum master on one of the teams working through our Agile partner, Cardinal Solutions. We started working together when she joined the team that we actually talk about. Tammy Gretz:  I was coming from it from a prospective of, it was a new team and I was there to teach them Scrum. They had never done it before. Bob:  Is this new to the whole organization or just to this team? Wendy:  We are in a multi‑year Agile transformation. The self‑selection and scaling, which is another aspect of the talk that we're doing, is new to the organization. This was the experiment. Bob:  How long have you been running Agile teams before you hit scaling and self‑selection? Tammy:  Before I came to AEP, I had been working about two or three years in an Agile environment. The AEP transformation, I believe, has been between seven and nine years. Bob:  Usually teams don't get to self‑selection until they've been doing it for a while. Wendy:  The group of teams that we're talking about, one of them was new when Tammy came in, newly into Scrum. The other two had been Scrum teams for a couple of years. Bob:  What was the self‑obsession portion of the program? Tammy:  [laughs] My team specifically was new to Scrum. The intention wasn't to go to scaling or do this whole self‑selection when I first started. It was teach this team Scrum and figure out how to get them working with the other two teams. We quickly realized that there were a lot of moving parts that need to have some kind of an organization or some framework to work with. Wendy:  The self‑obsession aspect is just human. We're worried about ourselves. When we're talking about having to all come together and do self‑selection event that involves trying to figure out how to deliver the most value to the company, you have to shed that self‑obsession, that selfishness and become selfless, because you have to see, where can I help most? This was a journey to take the individuals into teaming, into the ability to do self‑selection. That's where the... Bob:  Also, there's team identity, which you blow up with self‑selection. What is the event that caused you to say, "Hey, we need to kind of shake the snow globe here?" [laughs] Wendy:  We took a scaling class with a very experiment‑tolerant manager, we like to call her Andrea. Bob:  Because that's her name. [laughter] Wendy:  Protecting the innocent, whatever. Anyway, there was a kernel of it in there. One of the gentlemen on my team, he had a white paper on self‑selection for teams. We had begun talking about it. He sent her the white paper. We like to call him Greg. He sent her the white paper to just wet the whistle. Get the juices flowing about what does it really mean to do that, and she loved it. She loved the empowerment to the teams to be able... Bob:  It wasn't by Amber King was it? Wendy:  I don't recall. We can check. [laughter] Bob:  That would be interesting. She's a good friend of ours and she did a white paper on self‑selection at Cap One. It's pos