Agile Mindset

Chamod Pathirana
5 min readJul 18, 2018

A mindset is basically can be defined as ways of looking at talent or ability or intelligence. In detail, it can be defined as set of assumptions, methods, or notations held by groups of people that is so established that it creates a powerful incentive within these people to continue to adopt or accept prior behaviors, choices, or tools.

There are two types of mindset can be identified.

  • Fixed mindset
  • Agile mindset

“Fixed mindset” can be defined as people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them.

“Agile mindset” is about a value or behavior necessary for the success of Agile methodology, transformation, process, and practices. It’s about taking everything as lessons (from the previous experiences), adjusting actions according to feedback, and proceeding toward desired outcomes, resulting in continuous improvement.

  1. People in fixed mindset tend to avoid failures. but people in Agile mindset desire to learn continuously.
  2. People in fixed mindset, look for smart things to face, but people in Agile mindset, ready to face uncertainties.
  3. People in fixed mindset ,tend to avoid challenges. but people in Agile mindset, tend to embrace challenges.
  4. people in fixed mindset, tend to judge others quickly with limited information.people in agile mindset, do not judge others quickly.

There are several characteristics can be identified in agile mindset. these factors are considered when some people are selected for something.

  • Positive attitude
  • Thirst for knowledge
  • Goal of team success
  • Pragmatism
  • Willingness to fail

The ideal is for everyone to have what the team decides is its collective agile mindset, but that all starts with the individual.

Positive Attitude

When we are involving for some work, we may get challenge-able tasks. people are making mistakes. so that everything may not correct all the time. occurring mistakes are not a big thing, but important thing is to deal with these situations with the team collaboratively.

each and every cases all the members should have proper positive attitude on something that they are looking for. opportunities will be missing, when the negative things comes up.

Thirst for Knowledge

Agile is basically about learning and adapting for an area. people should be to gain as much information possible in order to deliver a quality product. we should not make assumptions that what we are doing is best for the client. we must responsible what we are doing. With the fast pace of business requirements and new technologies seemingly appearing every day, industry professionals need to keep aware of new changes.

Thirst of knowledge is a passion of people who follow agile concept who often are challenged to think outside the box to get tasks done within the tight time frames of an iteration. Participation in meet-up groups and reading technical articles are good sources of new ideas.

Goal of Team Success

Agile is about the success of the team, not individual success or heroic behavior. It is more important for the team to succeed than for the individual to have completed his/her tasks.

When team members are working on user stories of varying priorities and realize that they are not going to be able to complete a higher value story by the end of the iteration. Those who were working on lower value stories will swarm together and offer to help to complete the higher value story, even if they do not have the exact skills to complete the tasks left.

Pragmatism

Quality is an important fact of agile. However, everyone may have a different view of what “quality” means. It is critical that the team understands what is important to the business and then deals with things sensibly and realistically in a way based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.

Instead of making excuses, team members need to provide options. It is not good thing that saying it can not be done. Instead of that better to say what can be done.

professional people like software developers can’t force change on people in the world. Instead, show them how the future might be and help them participate in creating it. The team needs to be willing to help each other to succeed on the higher priority items, even if it means individual will not complete their individual task. Often, if team members see someone “walking the walk,” they understand that it would be beneficial for them to do the same.

Willingness to Fail

Some people say that the best way to learn is to fail at something. Most of employers want people in their team to have done as much research or questioning as possible beforehand and to ask for help from someone with more knowledge in that area to guide them so that they fail less.

Having said that, not everything is going to work well all the time. If it is a choice between having a go with the possibility of failure and not having a go at all, then people need to feel comfortable to try. While they want to challenge themselves without the fear of reprisal if they fail, there are some important lessons,

  • For a situations which is similar to a previous situation, it is better to learn from the past experience. Same choice should not be taken leading to failure.
  • Understand that it did not work in this situation but it may in others, so they have a new technique to add to your toolkit.
  • Individuals should have a strength to talk about failures occurred others can learn from it.
  • Individuals should not hide things and be open with their team.

Continuous Improvement

Agile mindset is influencing to continue learning even it succeeded or failed. that it should include the quest to learn (even when they fail) and leveraging what people learn to continuously improve on what they do.

The agile mindset is an attitude that equates failure and problems with opportunities for learning and invaluable feedback. In other words, it’s a belief that we can all grow stronger over time if they put in effort to increase their knowledge and support the team, and the organizational culture gives them the space to do it.

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