Change Mindset Through Building Real Abilities

When I worked in different organizations to help them improve their agility, I observed that many were talking about changing the Agile mindset or culture only. I have no doubts that the mindset is important, however, it is not sufficient to bring agility to the organization.

Everyone would agree that Kobe Bryant, one of the greatest NBA players in history, has a great champion mindset. But if he didn’t practice much harder than others every day to improve his skills, he wouldn’t be able to win five NBA championships.

What I want to point out is that only having a champion mindset won’t bring a championship to anyone, it also requires high abilities that need to be built through continuous practising and improving on a day-to-day basis.

The same in improving business agility, although we need to establish the right mindset and culture to create the spaces for change, it is also required to uplift the real abilities to enable the changes. For example, the organization may encourage the team to fail fast and learn fast, but if they can’t build a product iteratively in a short cycle time, they won’t be able to learn fast. Or, if they don’t know how to fail fast in a safe way, they also won’t be able to do it either.