Badass Agile

A journalling practice is a great way to delve into increased discipline, structure, and self-examination. Your daily practice should include:– Planning Your Day– Stating your gratitude (3 things that you feel deep gratitude for)Re-stating your vision in the morning, and:– Noting your wins – what went well?– Stating your lessons learned, based on your reflections on the day and how it went– Stating your gratitude again (once more, based on your reflections on the day)

Words have impact. Some say ‘words are things’. If you want to innovate, you have to choose your words carefully. Why? • The words you choose have an impact on your internal state; which alters your beliefs, and affects your ability to act with courage and certainty • The words you choose also impact the state of those around you; and likewise their determination and certainty to act in alignment with the teams values and goals.

The only way to make sales is to have lots of prospects. The only way to find a partner is to meet a lot of people and have a lot of conversations.The only way to get that book written is to have a lot of ideas you can play with.The only way to find a solution is to have lots of experiments that you’re willing to try.It’s all a numbers game. You have to have lots of lines in the water in order to catch the fish.

What does it really mean to delight your customer? Are we doing this just because we’re doing Agile? And if not, why not? • Focusing on delighting the customer is the edge – that most businesses miss• You can minimize the bottom line all you want, but isn’t it easier to maximize the top line? In fact, what good are efficient processes and policies if you have no revenue because you have no customers?• What is the cost of replacing or retaining a customer? Is focusing on the bottom line still cheaper?• An Agile practitioner must support Customer Delight by not only creating shared values and advertising them at the sprint, daily, and momentary level, but also by trusting the teams….not only setting targets for how we live our values, but letting them actually go out and do the footwork of delivering it.

You won’t want to hear this, but as I stated in a previous episode on “Building A Shark Tank”, having an extra few seconds to orient and observe BEFORE responding to a physical or mental event gives you the edge over most other leaders.  The common name for the practice that develops this edge is mindfulness, or meditation.  It’s not only trendy, it’s table stakes, at this point, to be able to control your emotions and to telegraph self-mastery to those you lead and work with.

I like to think that what I’m teaching is not oriented at learning Agile, but honing survival skill.  Adapting – being nimble for our customers – is no longer an ‘ought to’; its a ‘got to’.  While it is wrong to (and customers often perceive our efforts as attempts to) ‘convert’ or switch an organization from 100% traditional to 100% Agile, survival is about finding and outfitting the areas of greatest impact.

Reasons – I’ve discussed how purpose informs vision, service, discipline and overall effectiveness. But likewise, reasons can slow you down. If you’re not conscious of the reasons why you do the things you do, not only can you not access higher levels of achievement, you may also be self-sabotaging your progress. Right reasons are necessary to access 10-20x performance levels. The life you aspire to takes way more work and capacity than when you’re at now

When fear shows up as a failure to commit fully to Agile, we experience one of the most common behaviours associated with Agile failure – failure to commit. Fear of Change, Fear of Failure, and Fear of Loss of Significance all roll together to create a failure to commit Very Slow Agile Adoption – Planning to Plan “Backsliding Into Waterfall” Insisting on specific processes or artefacts – BRD’s, Charters and Business Cases, Dashboards and Reports “The Only Way Is the Old Way” Summary Bullets

I read this quote somewhere. Too often, now, we seek to avoid challenge. We look for ‘low hanging fruit’ ‘low-risk, high-reward’ opportunities. There’s only one problem with that…..we don’t learn anything. This is my big issue with certainty and safety. By continuously doing what we know will work, what we believe to be safe and certain, the way we’ve always done things, we don’t ever have to shift. We have learned the mechanisms, the steps , and the routines, that get you to the finish line.

In this episode, I think out loud about why getting leverage is an Agile leader superpower. Getting Leverage refers to your ability to tap into another person’s intrinsic motivation to act and to change. Without leverage, you will often get stuck trying to ‘force’ people to change mindset or behaviour by calling in another leader, or building a logical/rational case for change…sometimes forcing a ‘bakeoff’ between two approaches or solutions.

What’s the common interpretation of business agility, and is it the best interpretation? – Business Agility is too often understood to mean Agile Software Development in support of business initiatives– Business Agility should mean the use of Agile mindsets, habits and patterns in the execution of daily business– It also has to reflect the adaptable nature of Agile – we should apply it where it fits, bend it where it makes sense, and leave it alone when it doesn’t.

Strategically, Agile is not something you can politely decline.  Agility is not something you MUST convert all operations too, but rather a tool in the toolkit that should be applied when the conditions support it.  However, if you don’t embrace it, you will eventually lose your ability to compete.

The Agile leader will not be bounded by traditional definitions of leadership – they need to have a very different persona than the groomed, well-suited leader that we’ve come to idolize and generalize.  What makes a great, effective, modern Agile Leader? Vision and PassionGuide your own destiny, and let your teams guide yoursObsessive Customer FocusMaverickDevelop OthersLove The Resistance

Scheduling meetings over lunch is getting more and more common.  But just because something happens often, doesn’t make it right.  There are times in life when the seemingly innocent occasional request goes unchecked and becomes disrespectful or even abusive.  Could this be one of those times?

I never used to be good at listening. My mind runs at a hundred miles per hour. So I used to find listening to be a fidgety, painful experience, that wasn’t focused on me… so I kind of hated it. But as I grow and develop, I realize more and more how important it is to simply be a great listener. That’s this week on the Badass Agile Podcast.

Question from Enzo in Texas: “How do you adapt faster with a new team, in a company very different from any previous companies you’ve worked with? What advice would you give in regards to what should be top priority when trying to merge into an entirely new team?” Companies may be different, but people are exactly the same.  It’s useful to understand the culture for the sake of context or perspective, but the muscle you need to flex is connecting with individuals. You have to make the time to connect:  understand and empathize.  You can do this over beer, or an initial round of 1-1 coaching, but never do it in public – people need a safe place to discuss.

As I was looking at yet another sales deck for which I was asked to comment on an Agile approach, I’m overwhelmed that even a meagre attempt to stick to the 7×7 rule of PowerPoint presentations is hopeless. Each slide reads like a high-school essay in 7-point Arial. What would happen if we trained our people to connect at a lower level – to focus on the actual human needs we are satisfying when we offer our product? Specs and logic often only confirm what we deeply know – we buy things to feel good or to avoid feeling bad.

Now that we’ve learned some things about fear, what are some practical ways to work around it? You don’t have to make change all at once Remember, you have to deliver things that THEY (team, client, customer) value. Do that in small, low risk, low-impact ways, and they’ll ask you to do more Always start with willing minds and projects that fit.

Today, we’ve got two killer listener questions, one to do with procrastination in agile team members, and the other on the difference between Being and Doing Agile. What I love most about these questions is that they go to the heart of our philosophy. That’s this week…. Both of these questions go to the heart of the Badass Agile Philosophy Agile, Scrum and Kanban, etc are all about minimum rails. Enough process to fix most of your common problems and enough flexibility and simplicity to shape them to fit the uncommon problems To cure a procrastinator, you might need carrots and sticks to get them in the room initially, but if you focus your daily stand-ups on making and keeping promises to each other, you’re golden. Most people value loyalty or fear losing face in front of others. Also, use the idea of MVP in everything you do. If people are procrastinating to the point where work is not getting started until the 11th hour, break big things into small things and re-focus on an MVP if scope continues to slip. In retrospective, you can commit to improvements. This way, nobody loses face. Doing Agile is all about the techniques, which are easy enough to learn, but also present two major risks – by focusing on individual techniques, we forget to focus on the bigger picture and underlying principles that help us when situations are less than ordinary, AND we create unnecessary complexity under the assumption that more information is better, when really we ought to be integrating information into a cohesive whole that drives our leadership. Being Agile means applying agile principles to your leadership game – continually inspecting and adapting YOURSELF, applying value-based prioritization and iterative planning, execution and measurement to your leadership game…this not only teaches you how to be a better agilest, but a better leader as well.

What’s the one thing you’ve always been good at? Knowing your ‘one thing’ allows you to link your passion to your profession, even if they seem completed unrelated Having that passion allows you to anchor all of your communications in areas where you feel confident and enthusiastic, which reflects in how you show up for your teams. This is what creates your unique value – your teaching and leading style

Fear of failure surfaces at every level of your organization In individuals, teams, units, leadership It is a perfectly natural human instinct.  People don’t want to lose face, lose trust, or lose security in the form of their jobs, prospects, opportunity for growth, and pay However, fear of failure creates several forms of waste and loss:  Hesitation (doubt, uncertainty, procrastination) Resistance to change Stonewalling – resistance to team Overcompensating with process to gain certainty and safety (planning, consensus building, failsafes, estimation All of these result in very poor performance The antidote is in the the culture you build  Hesitation – train people (through Agile Games, for example) the value of quick decisioning, and give them safety nets when their rapid experiments fail Pull change, don’t push it Connect more authentically with people’s sense of purpose, values, and needs. Again, start with willing minds and projects that fit – lower risk, less need for documentation – and pull people to you with the results Demonstrate, visibly, the results of thinking and acting in this way, and find people who will reward it (hint, you don’t need execs to approve incentives)

How do you handle date and deadline pressures in Agile Environments? A listener sends us his question on what to do if you are pressured in the early days of a project to commit to specific deliverables on certain dates Remember that some projects reasonably require delivery commitments – especially those with regulatory, audit, or compliance expectations. These may not make great first experiments in Agility, because Agile requires flexible scope in order to work well with the philosophy It is also perfectly normal for a business to want to make promises to its customers (and therefore demand them from its delivery teams) Agile provides a better model that allows for continuous scope negotiation. This requires trust between product owner and team Attitudes and beliefs, or ‘frames’ have to change in order for the ‘when by’ culture to change

Sooner or later…I have to tackle estimation. As the debate rages on (estimates versus no estimates), the fact remains that while customers need to know how much of an investment they’re in for, and what they will be getting for their money, we also need to admit that unless you’re repeating some variation of something you’ve already done before, it is very difficult to predict the future when so many variables can intersect to influence the outcome.

In order to spread and scale Agile practices, we need to raise up a tribe of elite, influential leaders. Those who know how to inspire the courage to change in others. If you are coaching – whether team members, Agile leaders or executives, it is important to balance their Agile/Scrum education with leader fundamentals. The first of these is the ability to articulate your vision. Helping others find theirs is a rewarding and eye-opening experience (for both the coach and the coaches).

A large corporate culture can get to the point where there are so many thoughtless demands on our time that we are forced to ’shut off’ our tools and dim our availability – either to hide from people asking us to do even more work, or just to find 10 minutes of respite to catch up or take a mental break. This can’t be good – have we missed the point?

This week, I interview Scott McCarthy of Moving Forward Leadership. Scott is a leader in the Canadian Armed Forces, and also runs his own leadership consultancy and podcast. In this conversation, we discuss why it’s so critical to trust your teams, planning for your own exit, teaching leadership from Day 1, and how to survive and thrive in the face of fear and failure. It was a great conversation that brought a very different leadership perspective into our world and Agile values! Check Scott out at www.movingforwardleadership.com, subscribe to his excellent podcast today, and stay tuned to the end because Scott has a very special free offer for you that I encourage every listener to take advantage of!

This week, we take a listener question from a new Scrum Master who struggles with public speaking. Ultimately, public speaking is something that has a good deal of fear associated with it, and the usual suggestions for dealing with it have something to do with imagining the fear isn’t there, or overcoming it through exposure. But there’s something more. Time to fall back to the Badass Agile Principles – Get Visionary, Get Focused, Get Humble and Flexible, and Get Gritty. Most important is the first one – if your reason for doing something is strong enough, and centred in your vision and purpose, you will have a much easier time managing and wrestling the fear. Check it out in this week’s episode!

In small enterprise, innovation is almost easy – natural. But what happens when we try to innovate at scale? What forces hold us back and slow us down? In large groups, fear becomes much more pervasive – fear of failure, fear of looking foolish, fear of going first It doesn’t help that management does not create structures to allow people to speak their truth, and to leap However, even when fully permitted and free to do so, people have been conditioned to hold back, and this is what the leader must break through.

Stop caring about who likes you Stop caring about who wins Stop caring about outcomes Stop caring about your ego

While we seek to understand patterns of Agile success and failure, we often overlook the impact of human emotion – specifically fear – on adoption and acceptance. This upcoming series kicks off the new year with a multi-part examination of how fears shows up in the workplace – on teams and in management – to effectively create Agile Resistance. The first episode begins with a hypothesis and by asking…what are the different types of fear that hinder Agile adoption?

Now and then I’ll draw your attention to the best of the best – the great online shows that can really help take your practice to the next level. Check out Chuck Durfee and the Agile Chuckwagon – one of my favourite Agile Podcasts – at Agilechuckwagon.com!!

An introduction to the core principles of agile and scrum.

One of the biggest productivity stealers in modern business is the 1-Hour Meeting. In large organizations, long meetings can often comprise the entire day, and mask a lack of productivity and decisiveness…leaving precious little working day to make meaningful progress on goals. Learn how to hack your way around this well entrenched but ominous black hole!!

Thinking about leadership, there’s a lot of information – of varying degrees of quality and helpfulness – about becoming an effective leader. The information overload doesn’t really help remove the fog.  Perhaps leadership, much like ‘intuition’ or ‘thinking’ can’t exactly be taught.   The source of all leadership is a more natural, authentic place…your humble desire to serve and improve.  Rather than trying to improve your skill by memorizing patterns and words and gestures, let your acts flow naturally from that place of service and desire to help your clients succeed. The resulting outward appearance will be far more natural, compelling and PERSONAL.

With any other skill, we understand that it takes time to learn the fundamentals, practice them, and gain experience. So why would agile be any different?

Remember to “work your fives” Figure out-“what your style?”. Working as a team? Then build working sessions and have a trigger word. You might like routine. You might like novelty. If you like solitude, be online, or have office hours. Minimize distractions

Another year is wrapping up. Let’s talk about maximizing the next 365 days to truly up your game.

Getting Butt Hurt Actually Costs you Money and Results. Let’s think about why. • Inability to have frank discussions about improvement areas means that we stay blind to blind spots• Only when we learn to view feedback as an opportunity to improve can we truly serve our customers Happy Holidays to all of you loyal badass listeners! Please stay safe – I’ll look forward to seeing you in the new year! I’ll continue to publish episodes every Sunday night through the end of December and beginning of January.

If you want to know the secret sauce to leadership and success in anything, I believe this is central – service. It’s time to visit this crucial concept so you can re-integrate it into your ongoing development. • Everyone talks vision, but few talk service • Service is shorthand for connecting with your customer’s value. Get in their shoes, and figure out what they need and want. • Most importantly, take your focus off of yourself. • The benefits that accrue include trust, reputation, increased connectivity with others but most of all…very, very happy customers

How do you choose ‘when’ to use Agile? I say ‘willing minds and fitting objectives’ but you actually can evaluate Agile fit on a case-by-case basis….but it’s not what you might think.It’s less about a standardized checklist and more about about appetite for adventure, uncertainty, risk, and discovery.

Staying steady and comfortable is easy. Are you pushing your edges? Growth depends not on a singular moment of glory, but on consistent, repeated action to gently stretch your capabilities and impact. This skill is so important for you and your teams if you are trying to spread agile and deepen your practice.

What is The Real Value of working in ‘Done Things?’ It’s too easy to let ourselves off the hook if we work to vague objectives. It’s even easier to let ourselves off the hook if we don’t have measurable targets at the micro level. We can just say ‘workin’ on it’ When something is Done, it is largely self reporting because it is obvious if something is complete or not. Partial states make it very hard to spot trouble early Done things are also ready to use – ready to ship to the customer or another team member. In general, done things force a (good) kind of accountability and visibility on a team’s work

Have you stopped to look at the things you do, and questioned the value they add – or subtract – to your ability to achieve? Process is neither good nor bad, but process almost never concerns itself with performance; rather, order, certainty and safety All process has some overhead, and the overhead is more costly when the activity being modelled is simple. For the most part, processes have to be engineered to be scalable. Agile is in many ways the antithesis of process, so be especially wary of complex processes that are “needed” in order to implement or execute Agile

Think and act like an owner. The world changes when you act as though you are accountable. Accountable can mean ‘on the hook for’ or ‘in charge of’, but it truly means feeling empowered to enact change or bring about an outcome – and to accept and work around the times you can’t.

How many people do you know that can cite the Agile principles and seem to know the ins and outs of Scrum, but can’t fully embrace the mindsets of minimizing planning, letting go of their need for certainty and safety, or inspecting their own game? Building up your leaders requires that you know how to inspire and ignite people to do the things they most dread. Here’s some thoughts on how.

Agile is not meant to be a building up – of process and complexity, or rules, or even ‘methodology’. It is meant to be a stripping away – down to the essential mindsets and practices that actually get things done.

Processes don’t make people better – right mindsets and the behaviours that flow out of them do.

Believe it or not, up until 2018, I had no exposure to the conferencing scene whatsoever. So what kept me from participating, and what did I learn once I started? 1. Just because its a conference, doesn’t mean it’s good. 2. Beware the sales pitch disguised as education. 3. Like any other information, you have to examine the sources. 4. There seems to be a trend toward over-complicating concepts in order to make them presentation-worthy. 5. Some of the best information at a conference happens in the after-discussion