Co-Pilot with Jessica Crowley - See It to Believe It: Making Work Visible with Relative Sizing and Yesterday's Weather

In this Co-pilot episode of Agile Driven Impact, hosts Diane and Erich are joined by Dr. Jessica Crowley, Co-Founder of Agileon and Registered Scrum Trainer, to explore why making work visible isn't just a best practice — it's the prerequisite for everything else.

Jessica brings firsthand experience from large-scale transformations, including a rail industry client who discovered they had five times more open projects than their actual capacity. The problem wasn't effort. The work was simply invisible.

Whether you're running a grant-funded program or leading an enterprise transformation, this episode gives you a practical starting point.

Evolving your work, accelerating your impact

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hey, we are so excited for today's co-pilot episode.

SPEAKER_02 0:05

Yeah. We just finished recording with Jessica Crowley. And I thought it was I learned so much. I thought I wasn't gonna learn anything because I was like, I know what she does. And I learned a ton. I thought it was gonna be like stuff I already know. But she had really great ways to really think about visibility and how you get started with a system that gives you better visibility and transparency. And I think it was really just a fun conversation about all that.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Well, and I'm with you. Every time we talk to Jessica, I learn lots and have lots of different ideas. And so some of the examples feel like oh, right? But you're like, no, that's such a beautiful way to say it. And then to hear in smaller teams and more complex teams, and it's just it's her conversation. Well, anyway, you're gonna have to listen because what it shows is that uh today's content is for teams of all shapes and sizes and all complex problems.

SPEAKER_02 0:54

Yes. So sorts of issues. Yeah, have a listen. Team one, the team of many. You can learn something here in full organization. So enjoy.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

Hey everybody, welcome back for another episode of Agile Driven Impact. We've got another co-pilot episode for you today. We are super excited to have the awesome Dr. Jessica Crowley, who is uh both a colleague and a longtime friend. Uh, but you know what, more professionally and important than that is that she is the a co-founder of uh Jillian, a specialized professional services firm that designs and implements operating models, helping organizations navigate change, optimize performance, and deliver value at scale. And I can say firsthand uh that Jessica holds a whole bunch of different certifications. I've seen her in action, delivering trainings, receiving trainings, receiving her doctoral dissertation approval. Whoop, whoop. Uh so there's all sorts of frameworks and leading management approaches that uh yeah, we're really excited that she's here to share with you today. So, Jessica, welcome.

SPEAKER_02 2:03

And welcome.

SPEAKER_01 2:04

Thank you guys. I feel very welcome. And I'm excited about the topics we've got today. Well, yeah, when we thought about talking about making work visible and who might be a great guest for that, front and center. Yes. So to kick things off, as I just alluded to, like we had the privilege of watching you defend your doctoral dissertation. And that was one of the coolest like collision of professional and personal worlds. But more than that, to get you talk about uh to listen to like the overcoming of challenges, the transformations that were going on, and to know more about your work behind you, like you're taking on big things, government stuff, transportation, manufacturing. Um, these are like complex, hard to transform environments. And you seem to keep returning for more. You want to just explain a little bit about like the why on that one?

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Uh I think it's I think it's two things. I think it's personality and then what brings me joy. I think my personality is that I like to be in an environment where it's not repetitive. And so complex environments have so much going on. There's a lot, a lot of different dynamics, both with like people, processes, tools. There's never a dull moment. And the second part about what brings me joy is there's always a breakthrough in each one of these transformations. Sometimes there's more than one. And I'm addicted to when you get to that point and you have a breakthrough and you help people understand something that was overwhelming or uh get to a more positive place than they were before, it makes you feel really good. You're making a difference in the way that people do work. And we spend so much of our time at work, so it can make me uh feel like I'm having a positive impact on people.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

That's awesome. What brings you joy? I love that. That's great. They're talking about for home organizing. That's what they talk about for work now, too. I love that that's right where you went to it. And so you know it's a lot about making work visible. So let's figure out what that looks like.

SPEAKER_02 4:00

Yeah, I think uh, you know, when we've talked and and around different things, you've you've described situations where organizations have even five times more work than their actual capacity, um, and leadership just doesn't even know it. Uh what does it feel like inside a team organization where the work isn't visible? And what are the symptoms people notice before they understand it?

SPEAKER_00 4:24

I I've observed that it comes across as a people problem, which is interesting. Uh, you'll hear people talking over coffee or uh maybe even venting on the phone to friends or family, and they start describing how it feels. And they'll say things like, I'm constantly busy, but everything's late, uh, or my team is hopping from thing to thing, and the stakeholders keep escalating to my boss or my boss's boss because they've lost confidence that we're gonna deliver, or uh, I'm up all night, or I'm on the I'm working on the weekends, and leadership doesn't trust us, so they keep adding more meetings to try to see what's happening. So the lack of visibility it presents in a very personal way and a very people-centric way, but in reality, it's actually more of a system problem.

SPEAKER_02 5:17

Cool. Yeah, I actually like that because the water cooler conversations, things like that is often a spot where you can start to even sense it and feel it. And what's funny, right, is leaders sometimes they hear all this stuff too, but sometimes they don't know what to do about it. So maybe what does making work visible actually mean in practice for a team that's maybe never done it before? Are we talking about, you know, a big project management system or tools, or can it start a lot simpler than that?

SPEAKER_00 5:47

You know, my answer has changed a lot over the years. And it's interesting because the two of you uh having had that personal relationship with me as well as professional relationship, you've seen that growth as I've gone through the doctoral research, and I've learned a lot. I would have answered about three or four years ago more about the typical agileist, like sticky notes on the wall, or uh, you know, using a whiteboard or a central tool. Uh, but I've actually learned a lot more about how we already make tons of work visible. If we think about it, if we just step back and think of us three in our current organizations, there is information saturation in this day and age. You have got Teams channels, Slack or Google Chat, depending on which tech stack you've got, where people are constantly communicating about their work. You've got mirror boards and possibly even tech like Jira and uh you know, Azure DevOps, where you're tracking work. Um, you could have a lot of information going on verbally or written down. And the issue is that it's not accessible as an organization. So whether your organization's two or three people or you know, 50,000 people, you have to have a way to centralize that. And the more I ran into a small company that had 113 tools and they were using the tools for different reasons and to pass information about their work. So even if you're not like far down your early days of a company and only a couple of people deep, you probably spend a lot of energy using whatever tech stack you have trying to talk about your work, but it's not centralized. And so the easiest thing that you could start doing to make work visible is actually to take a look, just take a blank piece of paper out and start thinking about how you're making work visible today. Are you using a chat channel to talk about work? Are you using things like whiteboards or some type of technology to hold data about your work? Draw it all out so you can see it in one place, and then start thinking about two things. Interconnectedness. How do we connect and have a full picture of our work? And then interactions, how do we interact with it? So that drawing I've done, it could be really complex if you have 113 tools, or it could be really simple if you just have a couple things you're using. Um, but chances are they're probably aren't connected. So you don't have a single picture you can go to to talk about all your work in one place. And that's the goal of making work visible. It's getting it all in one place so that you can have a shared understanding and shared conversation. Does that make sense?

SPEAKER_02 8:27

Yeah, I think so. If we explore that a little more, let's say it's a company and they're using, let's say, let's say they they map this out and they find that most of their communication about the work is, let's say, flying around in emails and uh PowerPoint presentations, for example. Um what would you suggest is their next step in terms of making that work more visible?

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Uh email is a classic uh example of this. Email is receiver-based. So it's based on who you put into the email chain. So it's exclusive a lot of times. It excludes certain groups and certain people, and so it's not accessible. So, what you want to start to use in this day and age, we have a lot of different options for integrators, um, but you want to start to be able to connect those emails with some type of visible shared, centralized place where all work goes. So if it comes in at an email, you might not be able to control that. But what you can control is converting it from an email into something in a shared space, whether that's through some automation or it's a manual entry of I'm gonna copy what this person's asking me to do and put it in a place where everyone has access to it.

unknown 9:37

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 9:38

Well, and I think then that brings us to part of the earlier conversation when people have this over, their their capacity is being overdrawn, they're feeling pressured. You said it presents a lot as like a people problem. And so it sounds like a lot of people might react by that, react to that doing heroic efforts, which we don't like talking about heroic efforts. We know they happen, we want we don't want them to happen. And so when people are like, okay, they follow your advice, they make it visible. How can people, when they make work visible in some understanding interconnected way, the way you've just described, which makes a lot of sense, then people are like, okay, but how much can I get done in a number of days or a number of hours, right? So if they achieve that basic level of shared understanding of visibility, I think the common question that then crops right up is cool, can I get those five things done in a week or three days or two hours, right? So people start to consume that visualization of their work and try to put it to time. So we can't like do you want to talk about can we talk about estimating for a minute? Can we talk about relative size? Like how do people, once it's visible, figure out can we really get this done or not? Like, right? I think that's that root cause that presents as the people problem.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

Yes, I think one of the fundamental ways we are first taught how to estimate is in time. Uh, how long will something take us? And we're usually asked to answer that, like you said, in like hours or days. Um that's an interesting one because I have also learned in my research that time is a much better output than an input. So if I, for example, um put time on the left side of a formula and I say time equals something, we can all fill that in with what makes something take more or less time. Um so, Diane, in grant writing, what are a few things that would take make it take more or less time for you to get a grant done?

SPEAKER_01 11:31

Yeah. Uh so less time if we've written about it before, more time if there's a whole bunch of collaborative partners. How's that?

SPEAKER_00 11:38

Yes, that's good. And there's probably there's probably you know ingredients there in like how much pre-work you have to do and different documents that need to be attached to the grant application and different elements like that would make things take more or less time. If if every time you did a grant, those variables were exactly the same, I would be okay with you estimating in hours because you could track and be pretty confident that every time you do a grant, it equals two hours or two days or two weeks or probably two months. I don't know, Diane. But if I asked you, are all grants the same size?

SPEAKER_01 12:22

No. No, no, no, no. I mean, that in my whole industry, no.

SPEAKER_00 12:25

Yeah, absolutely not. So we work in service industries, and service industries are by nature very variable. So we should never come into a question like, how long is it going to take us to do something, by actually answering with time, unless it's an output. So what we want to do is understand the variables that make something take more or less time. And we want to be able to put together some common groups of work. There's probably some grants you have that are similar, that are really hard and similar. And there's certain things that make it more similar. I think you mentioned one of the things that make it harder, a harder grant. You could probably take all your grants and sort them into some buckets. Here are the you know, small, easy grants that I could do, here are the hard, complex grants I could do, and then somewhere in the middle, a variant of both. And what we call that, those things is affinity size. Comparing things against each other is something that we are naturally very good at. We can take my uh watch and my phone, and we could say that you know the watch is much larger. So if we know what those variables are and we can sort things from small to large, we can start to track them through the process to tell how many days it takes for something like that to get. And then you can be way more confident that when you say a grant is going to take two weeks, it's because you tracked 10 grants that were similar in size through that process and it took two weeks. It's an output, not an input.

SPEAKER_02 14:03

Yeah, I like that perspective on it, actually, because um oftentimes people just get told they have to do this different way of estimating when they use agile. But I actually really love the way that you're saying you know, time is based on these variables, right? And the variables could, depending on your industry, the variables could be different, right? It could be other things that are variables, you know, if you're in a manufacturing space like I am, it might be, you know, how difficult is it to get these parts? How you know how complex are the components of this thing? All of that could be part of it, and then those are variables that then say the project or the thing that therefore would take this amount of time. And actually, I think one of the other variables, which is also often very interesting, is time is more than just the estimate of the work, it's also the variables of like how many people you can put on it. Right? How skilled are those people that you're putting on it, right? If you put someone on it who's worked on this type of stuff forever, they're gonna be potentially faster than someone who's relatively new to it. So it takes into account those things to use that, which I think is very helpful.

SPEAKER_01 15:07

Yeah, and given the way that you're talking about uh helping folks to understand what is output versus input for time and the idea of affinity estimation, I've heard you get to humble brag about some of the transformations you've been a part of, and one that really stood out to me is one that uh I I'm pretty sure it's rail industry related. Um and I think that it was something like you helped a team cut their estimation time, like the amount of time they were spending thinking even about the the idea of relative size, something like some ridiculous amount of improvement for them. I I'm getting all the details wrong, which is why I'm just gonna pass it to you and say, I'd love to hear about one of those like really complex transformation moments where this seems like a tiny detail, but it's a huge driver and change for teams, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:54

Oh, absolutely. If I go step back to the root cause that was happening there, it's not unlike anywhere else where there were there were people in management positions that they were the ones who were being asked how when how long how long is it going to take? When will something be done? How many hours? And the way this process was set up was when a request came from a client for a potential sale, they would need to put together an estimate. Well, there are many different groups, and there is a manager for each one. And so each manager would individually receive a request to put together an estimate. And they all had different methods for doing it, but they were never given feedback on whether their estimates were right or wrong to begin with. So they kept estimating the exact same way they always had, based on the assumption that the estimates they were giving was correct. Um, and so this problem had gone on for almost a decade of people estimating on these forms in that way. Um I was privileged enough to be allowed to go off and experiment and run a study. And I did a three-month study. I went and pulled 15 years worth of these sheets and I did it, built a database of what actually happened versus what was planned to happen. All of those hours estimates were wildly off from what you planned versus what actually happened. What was fascinating is some of the managers were off by a large percentage, like 30 to 40% off. Well, what that did to the people is their team would get these overly uh optimistic deadlines, deliver something in two months that in reality they're not going to be able to hit. So the first part of addressing the problem was to bring estimation to the people doing the work. So instead of going to a manager and saying, how many hours do you think this is going to take, going to the people and applying that concept of relative sizing and building the reference library. If you take the time to track how long it takes to do something at a team level and you build a rich data set, then you can start to really answer that in a quick amount of time. If something comes in, you're looking at your t-shirt sizes and you're saying, okay, this is similar to something we did that's a small, that means it's going to take X number of days. We ended up getting this process to a place where we had a single spreadsheet that was being used by the company that was plugging in each team's currency, I'll call it that, um, and was providing leadership with a better way to estimate that we tracked for a couple months and found that it was plus or minus 10% accurate, which is great. That's awesome because it saved time. It was a faster method to estimate. It it brought the people who are doing the work into the conversation and it allowed the sales team to be more responsive and quickly turn around these proposals.

SPEAKER_01 18:58

Oh my gosh, I bet that resulted in some uh reduction in heroic efforts and maybe some increase in team morale if I was predicting what might happen as a result. That's a pretty awesome story. They're still using the spreadsheet today. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 19:12

You know, engineers love their spreadsheets.

SPEAKER_01 19:15

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 19:15

Absolutely spreadsheets too. That's kind of hey, we have something in common. That's good. That's good. We found something in common.

SPEAKER_01 19:23

Oh, that's hilarious.

SPEAKER_02 19:24

Um, so so when we plan though, with this these relative estimates, right? At some point we get to the capacity that we have to do work. Uh if we're using agile patterns like yesterday's weather or something like that, it gives us a good predictor of what they finished in their last few time periods, they should be able to finish about the same in their current time period uh sprint or otherwise. Um a lot of times that sounds almost too simple. Why do so many teams ignore their data and end up optimistically committing to more than they've done in the past?

SPEAKER_01 20:00

This is the million-dollar question. I just want to do a real clear like We're not paying our million dollars. Oh, no, okay. But I'm like this, yes, okay. I'm right here. I'm ready. Check this in the mail.

SPEAKER_00 20:08

Okay. So again, three or four years ago, I would have answered differently. I would have talked about optimism bias and how they they believe they can do more than they can. But in my research, it was not actually optimism. That is a contributing factor to some teams, but more often than not, it's actually organizational pressure. So when teams ignore their historical data and pull in more work than they should, often it's because somebody else is making these commitments that put pressure on that team and it creates artificial planning. So planning that doesn't take into account capacity. Uh, and and to give a not just a team example, uh, I could give you a an organization example of a company of about 60 people that took the time in in January to think about their backlog of work that they had, like, you know, quarter-sized pieces of work. And they came up with a list of 73 things that they wanted to get done in the first quarter, but they didn't know what their history was. So they took the time and it took days to put all 73 in a specific order and to start to work on it. And just a wild guess. How many of those do you think they got done in the first quarter?

SPEAKER_01 21:34

Okay, I'm gonna go price this right style, and I'm gonna say one.

SPEAKER_02 21:36

Wait, you can't you're gonna go one before I even did? Oh no, I guess I didn't. I guess I didn't watch the show. That's a bad move because I'm gonna go two.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

Okay, they're gonna be they're gonna be listening to this, so and they know who they are, and I love them. But the the first quarter they finished 12.

SPEAKER_01 21:50

12. Okay, that's amazing, though. Well, 12.

SPEAKER_00 21:52

And that's it. That is that's amazing, right? Yeah, I mean it's and I told them that they were amazing, right? And then The second quarter, they did 19. Now, the way that you would prioritize would be completely different if I told you that only 12 of the 73 were going to get done. Because you would, what would you spend all your energy doing in that time?

SPEAKER_01 22:14

Right.

SPEAKER_00 22:15

It would, it would, it would be more ruthless and you would put the things at at the top. So even organizations suffer from optimism bias. Even at the because organizations are made of people and people are optimistic, even companies in annual planning or quarterly planning cycles are overly optimistic. The only thing that is the antidote to that is capacity, because it draws a line and it forces leaders to understand that there's a difference between intent and reality. The reality is the company can only do X. The intent may be 73 goals. So it is true that you can have teams or companies ignore their own historical data and plan more optimistically than history says they should. And it can be because of pressure, or it could also be because of bias that they think they can do more than they did before. I've seen both. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:17

My wheels are they're turning.

SPEAKER_02 23:19

Oh, it's really it's really good. I think you know, what you're saying is optimism and pressure scale, essentially.

SPEAKER_00 23:27

Absolutely. Yeah. Um when you go to your next annual planning session, Eric, you'll just sit there and listen to people as they try to like make this elaborate and extensive plan that you know when rubber hits the road, oh yeah, it's not taking into account capacity. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:41

Definitely familiar with that feel.

SPEAKER_01 23:43

Um like is there a t-shirt in that or a bumper sticker like optimism and pressure scale?

SPEAKER_02 23:48

So what would you what so when they did this, they did this 73 projects prioritized list and they finished 12? Um, so how would you recommend most teams or organizations deal with uh will with this if they in the past haven't tracked their completed work or every cycle looks different? So the work's unpredictable. How would you recommend that they decide what to actually start working on versus to put on hold and wait based on their unknown capacity?

SPEAKER_00 24:21

Well, you'll you have to start with what's value, what what is valuable to you? So if you don't know how much you can do, then you're like the company I described that had the 73 things. They didn't know how much that they could do. So they did the best they could to think about what mattered to them. And at the time, what mattered to them was does it deliver value to our customers and our company? Um, is it something that is really important or urgent that we have commitments to externally? So something with a commitment would go higher on the list than something that's internal and could wait. Um, you know, and every company we go into has a different set of ways that they they describe value. It could be community impact, um, you know, it could be stakeholder partnership related, the number of people in a community, um, all it could be different factors. Deciding what matters to you can help you get it in a priority order. Um, and to do that, you have to have it visible, prioritized by how you define value. And then once you get it into that order, now you can track it through your your processes to determine in a period of time how much you can finish.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Right.

SPEAKER_00 25:36

You can't fast track that. And actually, you can't guess that. So, you know, if you try to guess how many items you you can finish, it'll be just like when I asked you guys to guess. One, two, fifty. What do you base that off of, right? There's there's nothing to at that point.

SPEAKER_02 25:56

Yeah, it's gut feel or something, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:58

It's a gut feel or guess. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 26:01

Great.

SPEAKER_00 26:02

Second question was um about if there's a level, a high level of uncertainty.

SPEAKER_02 26:08

Yeah, or unpredictability, like like maybe you know they they've so variable. One one time, one time period they're getting 20 things done, the next time period they're only getting five things done. What what what would a team or organization like that want to do? Or should they do?

SPEAKER_00 26:26

The law of averages is very useful in that case. So, like allowing more time to pass, getting more work cycles allows you to have a better sense of of what that would be. Um, so if you did like they had 12 in quarter one and 19 in quarter two, we don't know what quarter three will be, but the more data points you get, the more the law of averages is going to help you to have a sense of of what the overall trend is.

SPEAKER_02 26:52

Right.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

Um, so that you have that working for you. The other thing about unpredictableness, unpredictableness usually it can imply that your work cycle takes longer than the than the actual act of finishing your work takes longer than the cycle that it's in. So for example, if I have a piece of work that I want to finish in three months, but that kind of work usually takes me six months, what I'll start to get is a bow wave. And you can see that in the data. You'll get spikes in the data where you finish a lot, and then you'll get these kind of dry points. That's because you have to actually address your work cycle. All the steps in the work need to be, you have to figure out how to compress it into the actual cycle you want to have that work process support. So that's again going back to it, looks like a people problem, like the team is unpredictable and they're not producing things at a steady rate, but really it's that the system and the processes that the people are using don't support them in finishing their work in a timely manner.

SPEAKER_02 28:00

Yeah, no, it totally makes sense. So slicing the work down to smaller increments if need be. Great advice.

SPEAKER_01 28:22

And what's interesting, I wish we had like four episodes for this conversation because it's there's so many, they seem like small things, but they're huge things. Oh, wait, I just made a relative size indirect joke. You're welcome. So, but I like pick up three practices that we've been talking about visibility, relative sizing, and like the yesterday's weather, the data past practice. And so they're related and important for teams, but as folks are listening to this, we're gonna go towards our call to action here in a minute. But this is a lot for teams to digest. They might be like, oh my gosh, all these things. I need to change all these things in my work. Is there one area of these three practices that feels like the most important place that you would vote for folks to start? And then we'll move to our call to action, maybe based on that.

SPEAKER_00 29:08

Yeah, I think given the the three factors that we've we've talked about here, visibility is the is the building block of the other two. So it makes sense to say that we should start with with visibility and making things visible. I also think that visibility is the first step to making it not a people problem. And to turn off some of the emotion and some of the uh factors that bring things like stress and burnout. Um, visibility is a nice uh a nice way to shift people from thinking it's something to blame on somebody else or specific to per a person or a group or something like that, but more to the actual process. And visibility allows you to do that. That's why I would recommend starting there more than anywhere else.

SPEAKER_02 30:00

That's great.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

I love can you come up with a connectionable uh that's what I'm wondering?

SPEAKER_02 30:05

Is is what so our listeners are various different changemakers, agileists, people who are just learning agile, people have been using it. If you take that, let's say the average persona here that might not have gotten their work where they needed to be, what would you what's the simplest first step that they could take this week, tomorrow, uh, you know, now that could get them started?

SPEAKER_00 30:32

I think it's it's to acknowledge that already every single person I've ever met spends energy talking about their work and trying to make it visible. Where are you spending that energy? Get the blank piece of paper out, write down the different channels you're using and why you're using it, and then think about how do I get that to be more centralized for you as an individual, for your team, for your company. Um, having that drawing empowers you to see the system underneath this and to understand that maybe the reason why you are feeling burnt out and feeling all this pressure is because things are invisible. And doing that is going to help you see how to make it visible in a centralized way. Um, if you're working by yourself, you don't have to worry about that as much as as soon as you start working with someone else. Um, how do the the two, three, four, or more of you start to work together and have a shared, visible place where all your work is at?

SPEAKER_02 31:32

I love that. Love that. It's something that you could easily do tomorrow, right? Yeah. Take all the stuff, even while you're working, just start writing down all the things that you're getting information from. Excellent advice.

SPEAKER_01 31:41

I know I want to get out like smelly markers and like a big fancy piece of paper. Maybe we want you remember the kind from like when you were in elementary school that no, they smelled like fruits and different don't smell it. You're not supposed to smell it. It just happened to be get to the 80s. All right. Well, anyway. But it the point is it seems like it could be kind of like a fun, but also a super actual visible stuff.

SPEAKER_02 32:02

Yeah, I'm gonna do it tomorrow, actually.

SPEAKER_01 32:03

I haven't done this, so I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna like challenge people that we want to see them like see their drawings, like share their drawings to us, post them on social, send them to us or email.

SPEAKER_02 32:11

Yeah, send us some send us your drawings with your smelling markers.

SPEAKER_01 32:15

Yeah, but like maybe you and I will even do like our own.

SPEAKER_02 32:18

I don't know. All right, where uh well Jessica, where where can listeners find you, learn more about the work you do, and connect to with you to keep the conversation going?

SPEAKER_00 32:29

Yes, they can always go on our website, which is Agilon, A-G-I-L-E-O-N.com, or you can email me at Jessica at Agilon. I am also on LinkedIn, Jessica Crowley.

SPEAKER_02 32:42

Awesome, thank you. And thanks to our season two sponsor, Agiline Nonprofits. You can download their free templates and guides and learn more about their trainings they offer at Agilin Nonprofits.com. Great.

SPEAKER_01 32:55

And uh until next time, keep driving that impact.

SPEAKER_02 32:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 32:58

Yeah. Thanks for being here, Jessica.

SPEAKER_02 33:00

Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 33:06

I that was great. I know, but I'm like, what about smelly markers? Come on.

SPEAKER_02 33:12

Smelly markers? I never heard them called that.

SPEAKER_00 33:13

Oh you know that black one that said permanent marker on it.

SPEAKER_02 33:17

Was that the one you like smelling, or what's the deal there? That's what that's no, no, there's a thing of the smell of sharpies, but I do remember these ones, right? I do.

SPEAKER_00 33:26

Yeah, Crayola, Crayola scented markers. I was there with you. I understood. I understood.

SPEAKER_01 33:31

Like it's part it makes people think about brainstorming and like more artsy things than just like black and markers. Okay, I didn't mean to. Obviously, that's not healthy. How about scratch and sniff stickers?

SPEAKER_02 33:41

Oh, we can like from those other bus to no no no, I liked those. Those had a purpose.

SPEAKER_01 33:45

I actually liked like the you know how remember the stars that were the different colors? The gold, red, blue, green. I liked those more than the scratch and sniff stickers.

SPEAKER_02 33:58

What was your favorite color star to get? It was definitely gold.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

It was definitely gold. Like listen, this isn't all about me.

SPEAKER_02 34:06

Jessica, what color star was your favorite?

SPEAKER_00 34:09

Uh probably gold. I thought the same Enneagram as Diane.

SPEAKER_02 34:17

I need the blue stars. Enthusiastic about the all the different color stars.

SPEAKER_01 34:23

Well, I'm super hopeful that like maybe people will actually draw their stuff out and like send us pictures of them. I'm I'm seriously doing it.

SPEAKER_02 34:29

If the first person who does that gets a gold star. No, it can't be you. So email your friends, tell them they need to send it in.

SPEAKER_01 34:38

And then we'll send them a gold star.

SPEAKER_02 34:39

Then we'll send them a gold star, and then you can ask them. Okay, there, we'll do that. Send us your pictures with your smelling markers.

SPEAKER_00 34:48

I guess you're gonna get some interesting mail, that's all I can say.

SPEAKER_02 34:54

Jessica, this was great. I really actually I I I believe it or not, I learned a lot, so which is good. That makes me happy.

SPEAKER_01 35:01

I learned a lot like and I also tell me again the phrase that we're gonna put on a bumper sticker. Yeah, it was about the optimism. It's optimism and pressure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 35:15

Yeah, they do, apparently. She said it. She said they she was she implied that they scaled. And all I did was put it into a quote because I like doing stuff like that.

SPEAKER_01 35:23

I know, but I feel like that might be like the podcast, like that's gonna be one of the call-out text blocks that's gonna come from it.

SPEAKER_02 35:28

Like the optimism that kills you or is it the pressure that kills you, Jessica? Which one is it?

SPEAKER_00 35:34

Uh it can't be it can't be both. I think it's both.

SPEAKER_02 35:39

The hope that kills you.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

Oh the yes. Yeah, the hope that you can keep up with the pressure is the is the problem.

SPEAKER_01 35:47

Yikes. Well, Jessica, thanks again for being with us. This was really a whole bunch of fun. It was such an honor to have you with us on the podcast.

SPEAKER_02 35:54

Yeah, thank you, Doctor.

SPEAKER_00 35:55

Thank you.