Tag: lean

Explaining the “unreasonable effectiveness” of Agile

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Anyone who has worked in an environment where Agile is working well will agree: when it’s great, it’s really great. However, this post is not about what separates the great from the mediocre or worse (for that I would recommend my 2019 book Right to Left), but about Agile’s impact on the organisation more broadly.

Agile’s benefits are usually touted in terms of things like these:

  • Delivery speed (“twice the work in half the time”)
  • Rate of learning, enabled by incremental and iterative delivery coupled with regular reflection
  • Ability to adapt (“responding to change over following a plan”)
  • Customer satisfaction, enabled by the above

Don’t worry, I’m not about to say that there’s anything wrong with any of these. Notice however how all but the last one are about what’s happening in the team or value stream, and as is so often the case with things Agile-related, none of them have anything at all to say about the wider organisation.

This has long bothered me, but for once I am going to be positive about that poorly understood relationship. What if Agile’s “unreasonable success” (when it happens) could be traced to organisational effects attributable to the Agile manifesto’s emphasis on “individuals and interactions”?

Starting with the team:

  • Improvements to communication and decision-making capacity at team level encourage self-organisation and other emergent behaviours (this relationship has been observed for decades)

Then the overlooked but very significant second-order benefit:

  • The decision-making burden on the surrounding organisation is thereby reduced, increasing both its available decision-making capacity and the possibility of emergent outcomes at larger scales

More succinctly: Agile increases its surrounding organisation’s decision-making capacity. What it does with that is of course down to the organisation itself, but it’s interesting that if its communication capacity is correspondingly good (or correspondingly improved), emergent outcomes are made very much more likely. Nice, and without any mention of process, not the easiest of things to scale!

A couple of parallels:

  • Channeling Modig & Åhlström’s This is Lean, we might describe Agile as “a strategy for improving an organisation’s decision-making capacity”
  • Skelton & Pais’s Team Topologies talks of “reducing cognitive load”. It’s written more with team-level benefits in mind I think, but it’s an excellent starting point

To the first of those (and perhaps the second), it wouldn’t be completely wrong to describe Lean or Lean-Agile in those terms either. But that ship has sailed, and flow remains an important concept even if waste and its elimination lack something in attractiveness if not generativity.

Happily for me, I am free (within reason) to describe the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation in whatever way I like. Already, this idea of “improving an organisation’s decision-making capacity” is one of its key concerns.

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At every scope and scale, developing strategy together, pursuing strategy together, outcomes before solutions, working backwards (“right to left”) from key moments of impact and learning.

Developing & pursuing strategy in the language of outcomes
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From “What did you do yesterday?” to something better

Posted on by Mike Burrows

Go for it! If the main purpose of your standup is to make sure that everyone is keeping themselves properly busy, then the questions “What did you do yesterday?” and “What will you do today?” are without doubt the basis of a great meeting format.

But be careful what you wish for. If your goals involve 1) the team meeting needs, and 2) learning from the process, those questions can hurt a lot more than they help. Honestly, I’m not a fan at all.

You could try these instead. Understand the pattern, and with practice, it runs itself:

  1. What are we learning from what we recently completed? And is it staying completed? Whose needs did we meet, and how do we know we met them?
  2. What can we get over the line?
  3. What is and isn’t making the expected progress? Are we clear about whose needs we’re meeting, what needs, how we’ll know, and what’s our approach?
  4. Do we have the capacity to look at what’s next, or is that enough until we next meet?

You probably won’t get to that overnight, so some things to try:

  • Instead of reviewing activities (what you did, what you’re doing, etc), try to focus the things that you as a team are trying to produce, in the context of the goals you’re pursuing
  • All else being equal (in bigger meetings, this pattern can work within other interesting ways to structure the work), try reviewing your work most-complete work first, not forgetting to start with celebrating and enquiring into work recently completed
  • Make a point of noticing how the conversations change as you work backwards, and develop your repertoire accordingly – by this stage you’ll likely be noticing not only a performance difference but a language change and changes to people’s expectations and behaviour, and you can build on that until they become habits
  • In all of the above, try keep in your mind and everyone else’s what you’re working backwards from: “someone’s need met” and “all the available learning fully accounted for” (my definitions of done and really done)

I’ve used this “right to left” technique in a range of settings, often supercharging something that really wasn’t working before – standup meetings, risk & issue review meetings, service delivery review meetings to name just three. Right to left is named after Kanban’s board review pattern (you start on the right-hand side of the board with work at or nearest completion) but it’s not hard to apply in other settings.

And it’s more than just a productivity hack. In my third book Right to Left (2019, audiobook 2020), I take that philosophy of working backwards from impact and learning and use it as a lens on the whole Lean-Agile landscape (and more). Further to it not being just a Kanban thing, the book shows how right to left fits very well with the best of Scrum. Contrast that with an all too prevalent left to right kind of Scrum that does the reputations of Scrum and Agile no favours at all, and that scales up in the worst possible way. Fortunately it’s fixable.

This post started out as a LinkedIn post, then a second:

  1. Go for it! (linkedin.com)
  2. Building on that last one… (linkedin.com)

And now a third:

    Like, comment, share!

    You can also take any questions you may have to one of the upcoming webinars – the first three (December 8th, January 12th, February 2nd) all finish with an AMA (Ask Mike Anything) session. Series link: The questions that drive us (eventbrite.co.uk).

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    We help leaders and engaged team members at every level to gain fluency in the language of outcomes – developing and pursuing strategies together, innovating, learning, and adapting as the organisation renews and transforms itself from the inside.

    The 1967 Manifesto for The Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    It may still too early to judge the 1990’s for its net contribution to organisational understanding. If much of what was published on the specific topic of change management had never been written, it might have been for the better! It’s not all bad though: I have recently enjoyed two books from that period, Karl Weick’s Sensemaking in Organizations (1995) and the 1994 first edition of Henry Mintzberg’s Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. (Regarding the latter one, if you can tell me whether I should also read the 2000 second edition, do let me know.)

    Reading Mintzberg, what stood out for me wasn’t so much his concept of emergent strategy (arguably not much more than a fancy name for what really happens to our best-laid plans) but these five things:

    1. The limits of rationalism and control, and the apparent disregard shown for them not just by the mid 20th-century strategic planners but by their champions in academia
    2. The idea, attributed to Edelman, of experts being those who avoid (or merely bemoan) the pitfalls but fail to notice the grand fallacy (see point 1 above, and I suspect I may never hear the words ‘expert’ and ‘pitfall’ in quite the same way again!)
    3. Primed by my prior reading of that Weick book on sensemaking, the idea of strategy as the means by which we make sense and meaning of our decisions; strategies don’t just help us to act in the present and project ourselves into the future, their role in helping us reinterpret how we got here is important too
    4. And before we get too comfortable with strategy as story, strategy as theory – something to be tested, lightly held
    5. Brian Loasby’s 1967 Manifesto for the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation

    I’m having a bit of fun with that last one of course. I’ve no reason to think that Loasby (now Emeritus Professor in Economics at Stirling University) had anything manifesto-like in mind, and the Deliberately Adaptive Organisation didn’t exist back then. Not even its sources: the Viable System Model (Beer) was not yet fully formed; the Deliberately Developmental Organisation (Kegan & Lahey) was decades off; Agendashift’s main architect (yours truly) was just two years old.

    But check this out:

    if, instead of asking how they can more accurately foresee future events and thus make better decisions further ahead, firms were to ask first what they can do to avoid the need to decide so far ahead, they might be led to discover important ways of improving their performance.

    Brian Loasby, 1967, via Mintzberg

    Let me recast that in the “this over that” style of a notable document familiar to many readers, the Agile Manifesto. Adding some flourishes of my own:

    In the pursuit of business performance, we are finding it useful to see plans and strategies more as theories to be tested quickly than as predictions and commitments for the longer term. Through this change of perspective, we are learning to value anticipating and meeting needs over setting and meeting deadlines, open options over past decisions, and rate of learning over closeness of control. Not that deadlines, decisions, and control have no value, rather that when valued against needs, flexibility, and adaptability, it is the latter group that drives our development forward.

    I am not seriously advocating a new manifesto – for me, that ship sailed long ago – but Loasby was definitely onto something all those years ago. Rewriting history, there is already something Lean-like about his heuristic, and for anyone trying it, I’ve little doubt that Lean’s explicit attention to people and to flow would soon be required in any determined application of it. Invite the customer inside that way of thinking and you get something quite Agile-like. And compared to Agile as first framed, much more obviously relatable to business agility too. Interesting!

    What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

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    If you are not already engaging on strategy, the time to get serious is now

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    2021 promises to be a big year for Agendashift and I want to share a train of thought that crystallised over the closing weeks of 2020 as I finished the 2nd edition*.

    Most Agile process is built around the autonomous team. The uncomfortable truth though is that many if not most of those teams get little meaningful opportunity to participate in strategy. Surely it is a funny kind of autonomy when strategy is something that happens to you!

    The flip side of the same coin: business agility depends on rapid adaptation, but it’s a funny kind of adaptive strategy when it doesn’t know how to listen and learn.

    Tackle those two problems together and you get loads more benefit for free. With authentic participation in strategy you get engagement. And with that, ways of working and broader aspects of culture become natural and integrated ingredients in the way forward, neither compartmentalised off (sterile when separated from mission), nor imposed (almost certainly self-defeating).

    This is of course where Agendashift comes in. Not only do we know how to facilitate those conversations, we give you the tools to keep doing it yourself. And it’s not just the workshops; how to make the process of continuous transformation self-sustaining is a key focus of ours, to the extent that much of the past 18 months has been spent digging deep foundations in systems, organisation, and personal development.

    As I write, the four nations of the UK each enter new levels of lockdown, a situation sure to be echoed in different ways around the world. Yes, there’s some light at the end of the tunnel this time, but there can be no doubt that the world of work has changed forever. If you’re a leader and your strategy process does not already invite meaningful engagement, the time to get serious is now. And we can help, whether that’s directly, working with your internal coaching team, or through one of our partners. Get in touch or check out our partner directory right away.

    If you’re a practitioner in (Lean-)Agile, strategy, &/or organisation development – one of those is enough if you buy into our mission of building wholehearted organisations – you can be that help. From the start, Agendashift has been accessible and affordable. And there’s no time like the present: join the partner programme now and your discount on the February Deep Dive will cover your first year’s membership.

    autonomy

    *The 2nd edition gets delivered to the publishers tomorrow for publication this quarter

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    The workshops continue to evolve at quite a pace and watch out for some new developments this year. In the calendar so far:

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    For the Deep Dive especially, if you think that you might become an Agendashift partner, partner discounts make it well worthwhile to get on board before you sign up to the workshop.

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    Agendashift roundup, October 2019

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    In this edition: Berlin; Working at the intersection / a monster post on SAFe; Right to Left; Changeban, Featureban, and 15-minute FOTO; Upcoming workshops – Berlin, Oslo, Malmö, and online; Top posts

    Berlin

    I have a free day in Berlin today, arriving a day early to avoid travelling on what threatened to be Brexit day before a private workshop tomorrow. That workshop is actually the first of three November engagements in Berlin, with a 2-day Advanced Agendashift workshop and (through happy coincidence) the Open Leadership Symposium:

    I keep saying it and I will say it again:

    • The Berlin workshop consistently delivers – not just a full house and a great experience, but a reliable source of great feedback and new ideas. Thank you Leanovate not just for hosting but for participating
    • The inaugural Open Leadership Symposium in Boston last May was a key coming together of multiple communities and it launched a new one. I have high expectations of the Berlin event, which takes place on the 19th with a selection of masterclasses on the 18th & 20th. If you’re thinking of coming to the main event, ping me for a chunky discount code (big enough to make a real difference, so don’t miss out!).

    Working at the intersection / a monster post on SAFe

    This was just a quick picture posted to LinkedIn and Twitter, but it has struck a chord with many people and it has already established itself as a way to introduce both myself and the communities I participate in. You’ll see some of the language reflected on the Agendashift site, the partner programme page most especially.

    Who/where we are on one slide: People working at the intersection of Lean-Agile, Strategy, and Organisation Development – bringing balance & perspective, focus on needs & outcomes, helping each other up their game in new areas

    working at the intersection

    That picture is a good scene-setter to a post that within 36 hours was my most-read post of the year:

    Also doing well is a Kanban-related post:

    And I can only apologise for this related tweet 😉:

    Right to Left

    Thank you Paul and Justyna! Two podcasts for the price of one, a book review and an interview:

    After a long delay, Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile is at last available in EPUB format. That means you can download it as an ebook from more online booksellers, including Apple Books, Google Play Books, and Kobo – just search “Right to Left Mike Burrows”.

    There were two more 5 star reviews on Amazon UK this month (thank you!), making eight so far. We’re still waiting for the first one on Amazon US though, so who will be first?

    Changeban, Featureban, and 15-minute FOTO

    Some news about three of our Creative Commons-licensed resources.

    Changeban 1.3 is now the recommended version (it was in beta until properly tested). I’ll be making the equivalent changes to Featureban before making a separate announcement. Also, their respective Slack channels have merged into one, #featureban-changeban.

    The updated 15-minute FOTO cue card is definitely an improvement and it too is out of beta. A new ‘Lite’ (gentle introduction) version of the game has been through a number of iterations and we’ll announce it soon. It’s available to try if you know where to look! Slack channel #cleanlanguage, and it’s enabling some new #workshops (we’ll announce those properly soon too).

    Upcoming workshops – Berlin, Oslo, Malmö, and online

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    A question among the good luck emails

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    There’s a contact button on the landing page for Right to Left, and through it I got this question which I have permission to reproduce:

    Keep up the good work, and btw how do you use the Kanban Method these days, after your current progression?

    My reply (verbatim):

    In Right to Left you’ll see Kanban as just one of a set of complementary patterns in the Lean-Agile space (none of them more important than the others), and a more general approach to organisation development and the leadership that goes with that.

    In my own work, Kanban is still in the mix but I’m very definitely needs & outcomes first, not solutions/framework first. STATIK tries to do a bit of that* but it does rather presuppose the answer! I prefer Reverse STATIK anyway, and my very occasional Kanban training uses that. The principles and practices are abstracted in the values, and they live on through the Agendashift delivery assessment (a conversation-starter, not a checklist of practices).

    *To be fair, it does this quite valiantly and self-consistently compared with peer frameworks, but my comment stands.

    And a PS, sent moments later:

    One thing to add: this is not to diminish anyone’s work on Kanban (my own included) or any other framework. Testing boundaries is learning. But it’s also healthy to draw back a bit and broaden one’s horizons from time to time. And integration is also learning.

    Some links to help with decoding the above (I knew my correspondent to be familiar with most of them):

    Autumn workshops
    – Stockholm, Athens, London, Istanbul, Berlin, and online

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    A Grand Unification Theory for Lean-Agile?

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    The job of chapter 3 of the forthcoming book Right to Left: The digital leader’s guide to Lean and Agile is to introduce a number of important Agile, Lean-Agile, and associated frameworks. I have taken care to describe them not as alternative solutions that must be chosen between, but as patterns to be combined in interesting ways. That’s not a new idea, but what does seem remarkable is how helpful a right-to-left perspective is in explaining how they work together and complement each other. When I say right-to-left, we’re talking not just collaborative, continuous, pull-based, and so on (concepts conventionally associated with Lean-Agile) but something very explicitly outcome-oriented.

    Almost verbatim from the manuscript:

    1. Scrum (and Scrum-based scaling frameworks, if that’s your bag): continuously iterating on and self-organising around goals (short term outcomes) in the pursuit of longer term outcomes – product vision, the team’s mission, broader organisational objectives, and so on
    2. Kanban, making progress on outcomes visible, concentrating effort on the ones that matter most, fostering a focus on completion
    3. XP and DevOps, right across development and production, providing the infrastructure of process, practice, and technology necessary to accelerate feedback on the delivery of outcomes
    4. Service Design Thinking (along with user research, user experience and so on), continuously discovering which outcomes are important
    5. Lean Startup, pursuing business viability through continuous deliberate experimentation, managing for impact (outcomes again), finding and continuously refining a business model that enables customer outcomes to be sustained

    Here it really is outcomes that holds everything together, not (as you might expect) flow, collaboration, or some other shared value or technical principle. This way, we avoid saying “if you dig deep enough, they’re the same” (which I hear from time to time and strongly reject, believing that it does each framework’s creators and communities a huge disservice).

    Neither are we saying “don’t use frameworks”, if (and it’s quite a big if) this means that you must always start from first principles. A sensible way to start is again outcome-oriented and has a measured and pragmatic attitude towards frameworks (quoting this time from chapter 4, Viable scaling):

    • Identify needs – looking at what kind of organisation you’re trying to be and at what you’re trying to achieve  – and the obstacles that currently prevent those needs from being met
    • Agree on outcomes, not just goals plucked out of the air, but the kind of outcomes that might be achieved when these obstacles are removed, overcome, or bypassed
    • On a just-in-time basis, prioritise outcomes and generate a range of options to realise them, using your favourite frameworks as sources of ideas (not excluding other sources, but valuing coherence nevertheless)
    • In manageably small chunks of change and through a combination of direct action and experimentation (choosing between those approaches on a case-by-case basis according to the level of uncertainty and risk involved), begin to treat change as real work: tracking it, validating its impact, and reflecting on it just as we would for product work

    In a nutshell, I’ve described Agendashift, which is of course a right-to-left approach to change and transformation. Other engagement models exist – see OpenSpace Agility (OSA) for another excellent, well-documented, and highly complementary example. Whichever approach you choose, take care to choose one that models Lean and Agile values, lest the dissonance proves too great and you fatally undermine your work, a very real risk. To sow disengagement would be a truly bad outcome!

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    We are champions and enablers of outcome-oriented change and continuous transformation. Building from agreement on outcomes, Agendashift facilitates rapid, experiment-based emergence of process, practice, and organisation. Instead of Lean and Agile by imposition – contradictory and ultimately self-defeating – we help you keep your business vision and transformation strategy aligned with and energised by a culture of meaningful participation. More…

     

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    A True North for Lean-Agile?

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    You may have noticed that the blurb for our workshops and for the new book always starts with this:

    Imagine… everyone able to work consistently at their best:
     • Individuals, teams, between teams, across the organisation
     • Right conversations, right people, best possible moment
     • Needs anticipated, met at just the right time

    It’s taken from one of our Discovery exercises (chapter 1), an early opportunity for participants to explore different ways of working not from the perspective of prescribed practices, but in terms of what it is like – how it feels, what’s different, and so on.

    Some of the groups I’ve facilitated have found the exercise so cathartic that they ask repeatedly for more time. It’s not hard to see why:

    • If you feel that you’re rarely given the opportunity to work at your best, your team doesn’t work well, or you’re painfully aware that teams aren’t working work well together, it can come as a relief to be given the chance to imagine a different reality
    • Whether you’re a front line worker or a manager, conversations happening at the wrong time (or not at all) can be very frustrating
    • For most of us, knowing that we’re meeting needs is crucial to finding meaning in our work

    The current text of the book doesn’t identify these words as a True North statement (a compass direction rather than a destination), but it probably should. A True North for Agendashift certainly, and I’d like to put it forward as a True North for Lean-Agile also. It’s consistent with the Lean pillars of respect for people and just in time. Consistent with the Agile manifesto, it elevates individuals and interactions, combining those with a sense of timeliness (I joke that Agile seems to imply lots of meetings, the beginning – one hopes– of true collaboration).

    In its favour as a worthy True North:

    • It is easy to understand, worth striving for, and will remain always just out of reach. Transformation must be continuous, not a one-off project
    • It works at every scale – from individual to organisation, and at scales in between
    • In its last bullet, it conveys much-needed senses of proactive discovery (needs don’t get consistently anticipated by accident) and purpose (needs being met)

    Also, it’s not specifically about software, or even about product development. That’s a departure from the Agile manifesto, but I have no doubt that this is in its favour too.

    So… Does it work for you?

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    Screenshot 2017-05-22 13.42.56

    What if we put agreement on outcomes ahead of solutions?

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    Lean-Agile Strategy Days, London

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    June 8th is a special day: not just because the UK general election is (somewhat inconsiderately) being held on that day, but because I’m pairing up with Karl Scotland for a 2-day public workshop in London, Lean-Agile Strategy Days.

    I like to think of it as “pure & applied” strategy deployment. On day 1, we’ll be experimenting with Lean approaches for engaging people in the development and implementation of strategy. On day 2, we’ll use Agendashift as a model for continuous Lean-Agile transformation, a serious question of organisational strategy if ever there was one.

    This workshop is a first, and I’m proud to be doing it with Karl. We describe the workshop as an opportunity for collaboration, and this isn’t just hype. As a key collaborator in the development of Agendashift, Karl did much to push Agendashift upstream, suggesting (and bravely testing) ways to develop the Discovery tools, also to better integrate the Cynefin-related material. He has a gift for nudging me in productive directions, and I would be surprised if something new and exciting didn’t come out of this event.

    You can be part of it! Book your place here.

    Read Karl’s post: Lean-Agile Strategy Days: An X-Matrix and Agendashift Fusion

    PS Did I mention I have a book coming out? May 11th!

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    Why Agile needs some 21st century Lean thinking

    Posted on by Mike Burrows

    At least as far as the textbooks go, 21st century Lean is quite a different beast to its 20th century forebear. The best of the more modern Lean literature is now explicit in its recognition that you can’t just take the Lean tools out of one context, drop them into another, and expect the same results. Just because it works for Toyota, doesn’t mean it will work for you. Just because it works in a car factory… I hardly need to complete that sentence!

    Not unmodified, that’s for sure. The kind of Kanban I described in Kanban from the Inside that works so well for people engaged in creative knowledge work is almost unrecognisable from the canonical kanban systems of the automotive factory. Many of the underlying principles are the same – for example visual management, controls on work-in-progress, the quest for flow – but their physical or electronic realisations are very different. In one, cards move left to right (downstream) on a kanban board to reflect the progress of work; in the other, cards are sent upstream when some downstream activity wishes to signal a need for some just-in-time replenishment.

    But that’s just technical detail. The best of the 21st century Lean authors have been humble enough to make an even more important admission: even within the manufacturing domain you can’t (as the 20th century writers tried to suggest) transplant the tools whilst ignoring the management systems that guide, support, and sustain them, and still expect good results. An important case in point is continuous improvement (or kaizen, if you prefer). Don’t get me wrong: continuous improvement will always be a good idea. Unfortunately though, it is rarely sustained for long through goodwill alone. Asking your workforce for continuous improvement as a low-commitment way to achieve real transformation will almost certainly result in disappointment, even harm.

    We in the Agile community know all this of course – how often do we see retrospectives fall into a state of neglect once the easy changes have been made? Unfortunately, we make it harder for ourselves, and by design! As an end-of-century reaction to 20th century top-down and plan-driven management styles wholly unsuited to the challenges of rapid product development in uncertain environments, Agile rightly sought to wrest control back to the teams doing the work. The unfortunate side-effect: blindness to the power of the kind of internal structures that create regular opportunities for mutual reflection, support, and accountability well beyond the team. How is the Agile team supposed to help the organisation become more Agile when it is determined to live inside its own protected bubble? This is how inspect-and-adapt (Agile’s continuous improvement) runs out of steam. Even at team level it’s hard enough to sustain; expecting it to drive broader change without support is, well, optimistic.

    I’m not looking to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I’m not suggesting any backsliding on Agile values. I’m not making the case for 20th century top-down management (in fact quite the opposite). I’m asking that we look beyond the delivery-centric processes and tool (most especially beyond the determinedly team-centric ones) and start to think about what that cross-boundary support and accountability could look like.

    In particular:

    • What will drive Agile teams and their host organisations to help each other to serve their customers’ and each other’s needs more effectively?
    • Where are the joint forums for reflection?
    • What mechanisms will provide support and ensure follow-through, even when the necessary changes become more challenging on both sides?
    • Where are the opportunities for people to engage seriously in the development and pursuit of organisational goals?
    • What skills will be  needed to make these things happen?

    Outside the Agile mainstream, Kanban and Lean Startup have opinions (if not explicit guidance) on many of these questions. Helping people pay attention to concerns such as these is one Agendashift’s main motivations. Much of Agile however still seems to ignore them, sometimes recognising the need for end-to-end thinking but still wary of “at every level” thinking.

    The good news is that these concerns are largely orthogonal to delivery. Agile delivery frameworks probably don’t need to be any bigger than they are today (let’s hope so). Some awareness of organisational context and its journey will be necessary though, and it may mean leaving aside the rhetoric of past battles. Welcome to the 21st century!

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