Start talking about it - new ways of working

If agility is on your company's agenda, then start talking about it.

→ What does agile mean to you?

→ Why is it important to you?

→ What are your customers expecting?

→ What things can you begin to shift and adjust as you move towards newer ways of working?

→ What older ways of working might need to go?

Too many organisations impose change that disrupts employees and leaves them wondering ‘why’. So much so that no amount of town hall meetings or ‘ask me anything’ sessions will resolve or temper the uncertainty.

When agile or agility is on the horizon, or is underway, start talking about it - at all levels across the organisation and with all sorts of people.

Secretly configuring a change or transformation in the background that will be ‘rolled out’ across the organisation as of x date isn’t agility. It’s prescription and control - sorry, that’s still an old way of working.

Develop, discuss and explore the need for agility in your business and engage with people on it, talk about it. You might need to be willing to hear some uncomfortable questions and uncertain objections.

Action: Put agility on the agenda of your next meeting. Kick off with a conversation about it. Find out what people think. 

Don’t outsource your culture change

Adopting new more agile ways of working is on the agenda for businesses - large, small, corporate, not for profit, government - responding to the needs of customers and the changing ways of the world. If a business needs to change how it is working, the culture will need to shift too.

You can't hope to make changes to the way work is done without looking at what the culture might need to be like. Yet many organisations engage or outsource to a company to 'come in and do it for us'. It's ‘let’s get someone in, they’ll make it happen and we won’t have to do it'.

Yes it can get messy and complex and tough, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth doing.

Any cultural shift in your organisation will take time. It’s not a mandate; it’s a conversation, a demonstration, and a commitment to try on whatever new ways of working appeal.

New cultures are created, meeting by meeting, conversation by conversation, task by task, person by person. They don't switch over like summer time or flick on like a light.

So start now. It doesn’t need to be perfect and you don’t need to have it all ‘worked out’ first.

Action: Get your people together and start a conversation on the culture they'd like to work in.

Anti agile without even knowing it

It’s easy to be a critic or cynic of something, to put counter views out there or to dismiss or reject ideas. But it’s way more helpful to understand a few fundamentals first and then add your views.

If agile is something new-ish to you, it’s good to know that many of the agile ways of thinking and working are based on the principles and practices written in 2001 in the Agile Manifesto. You can read the list of them via the Agile Alliance website or here’s a visual I created a couple of years ago, helping people to share and recall the information in an easier way.

Yes, things keep evolving in the world of agile, but understanding some of the fundamentals can take you a long way forward by initiating conversations, building understanding and advancing the practice.

Why not start a conversation from one of these principles to uncover how you're currently working and what might be a new way of working.

Which of these look like a great way to work to you? 

Lynne Cazaly - Keynote at Agile Alliance 2019

What a privilege to be at Agile 2019 in Washington DC and today, to take to the stage and deliver a keynote.

The topic was ‘ish: The problem with our pursuit for perfection and the life changing practice of good enough.’

Here's a visual summary of the key points I presented. You can get the book, ebook or audiobook - yes with me narrating - wherever you normally buy your books!

The bottom line is, perfectionism is a problem that is on the increase. Most of us have a little bit of perfectionist in us. When we are encouraged to bring our whole selves to work, that means we will be bringing some of our perfectionist traits as well. Sometimes that can slow down our abilities to achieve, collaborate and deliver great value to our customers.

It’s worth our while to find alternative ways of working that don’t involve the pursuit of perfection (which is impossible to achieve.)

Are you a 'bit of a perfectionist'? 

Quotable quotes

At this, or any conference, it’s easy to be swamped, firehose style with content, topics, presentations, models and references. The key in distilling information is to get up higher in context, out of the detail of a case study for example, so you can take a key message and share it or explore it further.

Here’s a tapas of some quotable quotes from today:

🔸The culture of any organisation is shaped by the worst behaviour the leader is willing to tolerate (Gruenert & Whitaker)

🔸 Rules for inquiry: turn judgement into curiosity; conflict to shared exploration; defensiveness to self reflection; assumption to questions (Jeremy Lightsmith & Glenda Eoyang)

🔸 Great managers manage themselves first (Johanne Rothman)

🔸 When someone is in flight, fight, freeze - that’s not a time to coach. It’s not a teachable moment (Cailtlin Walker and Andrea Chiou)

🔸 Setting an objective that is impossible to achieve won’t motivate employees (Mariya Breyter)

🔸 Pay attention. Learn to see. Sense and Respond (Woody Zuill)

What's a quotable quote you live by or use as a guide for thinking and acting?