Founder@ Interview
With Kubair Shirazee
“Never forget that a business needs a strong and united team in order to not just survive, but thrive. Be a leader who creates and nurtures an environment where transparency is valued, appreciated and encouraged, for transparency enables inspection, which in turn enables us to adapt. And Adaptation is where survival and growth are at.” – Kubair Shirazee
Today we feature Kubair Shirazee, the founder at Agilitea. We hear their story in their own words, their successes, their challenges and their insights.
Let’s start by getting to know you. Can you please tell us a little bit about you and what you do?
I have always had a passion for exploring, experimenting and learning, and this is reflected in everything I do. By the age of 23 I had graduated from City University in London and already launched and sold my first startup — UKGunindex.com — an outdoor sport online portal.
I then founded Ikonami Ltd — a healthcare-focused company that brought a number of successful digital products to market in the UK. Ikonami played a significant part in the implementation of NHS’s Agenda for Change, by introducing Lean and Agile principles, values and frameworks to the Department of Health and the NHS. My business success continued, but in 2010 a personal tragedy led to reassessment of my life.
My brother Abid was murdered by extremists in Pakistan, and this tragedy re-awakened in me a commitment to social justice and a strong desire to understand the motives behind such an act. I set about researching the motives and causes of extremism and terrorism through primary and secondary research including interviews with people holding fundamentalist ideology.
It was this experience which prompted me to co-found a not-for-profit project – Peace Through Prosperity – with my wife Sahar. But more of that later…
A great introduction and start to this interview. Can you please tell us, how did you start, from what age, and what made you decide to change direction and start?
By the age of 23 I had already launched and sold my first startup and I then went on to build several more businesses. I had hits, near misses, and learned expensive lessons! But after my brother’s murder, following much reflection and sense making, delivering scalable, digital products and services that delight customers seemed like putting out a fire in a frying pan whilst the house burned down.
From my first startup onwards, I have been building, nurturing and coaching teams, I was still an undergrad when I hired undergrad engineers and designers to work on my product with me, none of us had undergone a ‘graduate training program’, none of us knew ‘how to work’ in the conventional sense. We did know the work and knew it needed doing whilst we also juggled our studies. We had to figure it out ourselves, and we did. We had no ‘word’ for it, it was just how we worked, we were self organising, self managing, a small strongly motivated group of individuals with a shared purpose.
Later on it turns out it was Agile. I was a founder who exited from all concerns, created a space where I could research, gather data and with that gain clarity, understanding of extreme ideologies, their true believers and their behaviours, all in a super complex system (society). And not from an academic perspective, but a human, personal perspective. What I gained from that transparency was the ability to inspect a lot.
During that journey, another thing happened… people I’d been engaging with for my research, building a meaningful relationship with, even though on principles we stood poles apart, some of those individuals had re-calibrated their worldview significantly over months. Back then, I was aware that my superpower is my ability to facilitate individuals, teams, and communities to disrupt the status quo, nurture wanted and needed behaviours, and, with that, respond to complexity and change. And I wondered whether how we transform individuals, teams, leaders and enterprises, as change agents, if those values, principles and practices could be applied to affect transformation in society.
The curiosity was, and remains, How might we better enable marginalised individuals to self organise towards a better future? When the system around them is an impediment. It is not very different from How I facilitate and coach individuals, leaders and teams to self-organise and drive their agile transformation journey whilst the system around them is an impediment! The point of that realisation was the ‘fighting fire in a frying pan whilst the house burns down’ moment.
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Shortly after Sahar and I founded an innovation lab for low cost, immediate impact social transformation programs that once validated are open sourced for others to use in alleviating poverty and improving livelihood security. With an approach rooted in systems thinking, we take what we know and continue to learn about transforming complex systems (i.e. large enterprises) and cross pollinate it to transforming super complex systems (i.e. society).
That is, I am a co-founder of. Everything else is a means to that end. I became a founder in this space because there is a need for people like us, privileged people to focus on this space. I choose to go down a rabbit hole, I chose to inspect, and inspection without adaptation is pointless.
So here we are. In 2014, I went to work for someone for the first time. I joined Acquia, commercial face of the Drupal community, a strong vibrant open source community I had been a part of for a long time. In 2018, our innovation lab was growing strong and it needed more investment, which meant more money! That’s when I founded Agilitea, at that time a vehicle for me to contract, and now a small (by design) team of change makers who facilitate small and large enterprises evolve their ways of working at scale and in teams.
It’s simple, from Agilitea we earn and learn, and in Peace Through Prosperity we invest and learn.
Thank you for that insight. So can you tell us…What does your business do and where is your company based?
We are based in London but we are a global facility. We partner with people, leaders and enterprises at every stage of their agile journey, we train, coach, mentor and consult leaders and teams in equal measure.
At Agilitea we describe ourselves as player-coaches, we are hands-on in our approach to enabling and facilitating our partners in their agile journey. Recent happy customers include Novartis Pharmaceutical, Bayer Consumer Health, Sandoz, Al Jazeera, Vodafone, and FFW to name but a few!
To put it simply – we enable, facilitate and support businesses to learn, embrace and evolve their ways of working so that they are more self-organised, more self-managing and more responsive to change and complexity. We run training courses, design workshops, we coach, facilitate and support businesses build their internal Agile capabilities. In a nutshell that’s what AgiliTea does.
What’s the story behind your success? What led to your aha moment? how did you get to where you are now?
I am grateful to the universe for there have been several such aha! Moments, the most significant one though was in 2010, whilst still making sense of the tragedy that befell our family, I returned to work as a co-director of Ikonami, a thriving software business used by the Department of Health as part of their Agenda for Change framework. But although the demands of the business were the same, I was now a different person, or rather a reawakened version of myself. I was grieving but was expected to attend sales meetings, and abide by someone else’s idea of how I should act.
So, with one of my co-directors, I took the decision to sell the business, together with members who were not catering for agile ways of being in our own business. It was one of the bravest business decisions I have made, to sell a successful and growing company and start from scratch, but it is one I have never regretted. Sometimes the hardest, and what seem the most crazy, decisions, can be the best of your life.
Don’t ever be afraid to follow your instinct!
Thank you for sharing that. What’s been your life’s biggest lesson so far?
When I founded Peace Through Prosperity in Pakistan I recruited from the leading academic institutions. I sought out highly educated and dynamic candidates, the real ‘cream of the crop’ to join our team and bring our programmes to life.
My four winning candidates went through three months of training and were all high-flyers, but when it came to entering the communities we wanted to work in, they were too afraid. What they could do on paper they were not willing to do in reality. I needed people not just to deliver our programmes but to develop an understanding of what life was like for those we were helping, and build relationships with those communities as coaches, mentors and consultants.
When they realised where they would be working – deprived areas with high crime rates and a presence of extremist organisations – all four resigned. This led to me rethinking my recruitment strategy. I decided to go directly to the communities I intended to work in, and with. I sought out literate candidates, but not necessarily graduates. Sahar and I recruited people who not only had the intellectual credentials, but real life experience of actually living in marginalised communities.
The next four successful candidates who joined the PTP team did, and continue to do, amazing work, and are still with us 12 years later! The mistake I made was thinking academic achievements could outweigh experiential ones. That agents of change can be parachuted in as opposed to being nurtured from within. I won’t make that mistake again. It is as much about the person, and their intrinsic motivations as their academic prowess.
With my privileges come responsibilities, what I create is not the end but a means to spread the value much further than a small circle. That the community I belong, must contribute to, is nearly 8 billion strong.
If you were to go back in time, what piece of advice would you give to your younger self?
I’d advise my younger self to get started on social transformation activities and programmes sooner. To cross pollinate learnings from enterprise transformation to societal transformation much earlier in life, to create an innovation lab for social transformation experiments, like Peace Through Prosperity is, sooner.
To be people-centric rather than customer-centric, much sooner too.
https://www.kubairshirazee.com/public-speaking
We’re nearly halfway through our interview so it’s a great time to ask how does your business run. What three tools make your business run better?
Tools are just that – tools! And tools evolve, become redundant, reach an end to their value adding life. Encourage your teams to experiment with tools and facilitate the process, don’t let DevOps or IT be an impediment or the driver, co-create by discussing needs and your tooling experiments with them (DevOps or IT), and encourage teams to periodically review tools they employ.
What we want to do is create an environment where teams feel free and safe to experiment with processes and tools, and our responsibility is to facilitate those conversations and experiments. As for services, try and keep most of your service delivery in-house. Though one of my startups was outsourcing software development, I am now a proponent of in-house development of capabilities as far as core services are concerned, and Products are/should be core if you’re a product company!
What do you know now that you wished you had known before?
With my privileges come responsibilities, what I create is not the end but a means to spread the value much further than a small circle. That the community I belong, must contribute to, is nearly 8 billion strong. 
What has been your greatest or proudest achievement or moment?
Great is relative to its time and context, the Universe has been kind to have enabled me to have countless such moments. To share a few, to have created ‘HAL’, Alexa before Alexa was and remains a great moment, it brought no commercial success, however re-validated that my ideas at times are ahead of the times.
Completing my first social transformation experiment with the very first group of micro-entrepreneurs at Peace Through Prosperity was and remains a great moment! If I had to pin one thing down right now, it would be bringing Peace Through Prosperity as far as me, Sahar and our teams in Egypt, Pakistan and Yemen have. It’s a testament to what is possible when just two people recalibrate their purpose to be people-centric and focused on our continuous improvement as a community.
What future life goals do you want to achieve and why?
I am currently working towards a Certified Scrum Trainer ® (CST) qualification with the Scrum Alliance, which is tied into my medium to long term goal of enabling communities with what I see is the minimum viable vehicle to bring Agile to life for individuals, teams, communities, enterprises and society. As for why, society gets better at responding to complexity and change, and with that we are kinder to ourselves, each other, and our planet.
To finish our inspire questions…”We believe that sharing inspiring words can inspire others.” If there was one positive thing you would say to someone to inspire and empower them what would it be and why?
Never forget that a business needs a strong and united team in order to not just survive, but thrive. Be a leader who creates and nurtures an environment where transparency is valued, appreciated and encouraged, for transparency enables inspection, which in turn enables us to adapt. And Adaptation is where survival and growth are at.
“Thank you it has been great learning more about your founder story and Agilitea”
To learn more about Agilitea Visit aglitea.co
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