The Forward Agility Mindset

It is often that most team agility starts at the most atomic level, as well as, at system level. The the most atomic level, working alongside with individuals and teams are crucial in getting the right kind of agility mindsets. This can be in a number of ways such as:

1. Getting the message through on why the new way of doing things will help her at work and grow as a person. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) talks about always-on transformation — we welcome change at the personal level such as read more, exercise more, etc. Growth is welcomed. However, we faced with organisational change, we tend to shut the door close. Growth is not welcome. So, the key here is to transmit the psychological safety and build step-wise change towards team agility. I suggest a regular team huddle that focus just on gaining team agility change (potentially with some key metrics such as Psychology Safety Rating, etc.)
2. Build change marker in team agility journey in order to demonstrate progress. Each day is we must endeavour to understand the impact team agility (building the first product backlog, ticking off Definition of Done) to understand its impact — each team challenge the team to bend towards the goodness of agility, and towards the positive. I am a great believer of Barbara Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Psychology. This is about is positive progress (hopefully, that’s turns into positive emotion), it allows individuals or teams to broaden their awareness and exploratory thoughts. From there, teams can start to build confidence to experiment. I suggest to create a team map (just like a hiking map) to illustrate where the team is now, and what coming next.
3. Deepen understanding of current constraints and dependencies because that’s where problems live. There is no joy in focusing or expending time on wasteful efforts. The joy is in finding the root causes of team agility problems. Change it. And, move on. I suggest to run through fish-bone analysis to figure out root causes and clearly define what are root causes and symptoms.

Let’s turn to the system level of building team agility. There is no doubt this is an uphill climb if the culture (the act of interpretation by the people, according Clifford Geertz) and system (the organisation design and structure) are not in a ready state condition. Let’s see whether we can chip-off some system level constraints:

1. There is always temptation to start with changing the culture (big bang or something else) or re-organisation (not always a happy path). A book that influenced over the last 10 years — Good Luck — It is a whimsical fable that teaches a valuable lesson that good luck does not just come your way — it’s up to you to create the conditions to bring yourself good luck (Written by Alex Rovira and Fernando Trias de Bes). The key word here is condition. Focus on creating the right condition, let me emphasise, creating the right ecosystem condition for team agility to develop and sustain. I suggest start to create critical success conditions for team agility, this will be a good start to map what is pushing team forward or pulling team backward.
2. Following closely with creating the right ecosystem condition, there is always an advantage to democratise information about the why, what and how of building team agility. It shouldn’t sit just with the agile coach or change manager. Once you’ve democratise information on the why, what and how to building team agility — we will start to see pragmatism, rather than dogmatic rule book of an agile coach or change manager.

Please stay tuned to Part 2.