There is no Agile without (personal) agility. So make it personal.
Strategy board meeting. Some top executives are sitting in the board room, contemplating a 52 slides deck about implementing Agile. The Head of Innovation concludes: “By doing Agile, our organization will respond to the market challenges and will empower us to deliver better products to our customers”.
Boom. Then the room gets empty and everybody is going back to their waterfall processes and their infinite emails carefully managed by a very well organized PA.
It’s a fictional story, but it’s not a fictional situation. Is happening as we speak, everywhere.
By doing Agile, in fact you don’t do anything. Because only by doing, you can’t achieve agility, and you won’t deliver anything else than a new methodology.
Agility is about being, not about doing. Can you ever imagine a cougar doing agile, not being agile?
How an organization, or even a small team, can be agile and implement a lean business model? Simple, by letting people be who they are. By giving people the freedom to express themselves, to innovate and maybe, to risk a bit.
Sounds easy, but is not.
Here is my easy plan to start being agile. You can start right now, with yourself. Because like anything else in this world, is about YOU being the change you want to see in others.
(I don’t claim it as an infallible “x-step roadmap to success”, but I do believe it’s a starting point; your very personal starting point):
1. Write down a short personal retrospective
I consider the retrospective as the most important ceremony in Scrum. It helps the team to understand itself, and very important, let people be honest and speak openly. It’s a self-discovery ritual.
Think about it from a personal perspective: write down, every 2–3 months, what you have done good, what you have done wrong and what you’d like to improve. And then, share it with your co-workers. And ask for feedback.
Execute, evaluate, learn, improve. This is the essence of Agile, not some sticky notes on the wall (yes, I know, the wall looks good).
2. Start caring about others
Somebody sent you an idea? Or a personal retro? Or asking for feedback?… Respond right now, not tomorrow. Do not apologize you were too busy for it.
Feedback is the main key in any Agile process and/or product development. We get feedback by doing a product validation experiment or customer interviews. Is the way the outside world (call it market if you want) responds to us.
Feedback is also an essential factor for any human being. Without feedback, we would be dead in few minutes. It’s the way we are learning, from the first years of our lives, to not swallow hot soup without testing it first.
So, you want to build an Agile mindset in your team… Start give feedback, start asking for feedback.
3. Start caring about your customers/users
Are you building a product? A digital product? A commodity service? A B2B SaaS? A logistics center?
Could be any type of organisation, even an NGO. Somewhere, at the end of the line, are sitting the king and the queen, The Customer and The User (yes, there is a difference, but it’s another story).
Doesn’t matter how hard the organization claims about its user-first approach, but make it personal. Did you truly look at the user needs when you decided x, y, z?
Start questioning yourself (and others) about your decisions. There are not any other things more important than your User and your Customer. Neither your boss (because your boss’ boss’ boss is the user, and he can fire your boss someday).
4. Be aware of your own biases
This is huge. And very hard. Because there is nothing more human, more deep, and harder to overcome than a personal bias.
As a product manager, I used to say very often “actually, I don’t know anything”. It means that I’m trying (and struggling) to detach myself (and my personal beliefs) from my professional persona.
The first step here is to accept your bias. To accept that you prefer solution X instead of solution Y. Accept and also communicate it. To make people around aware of your bias.
Then, once you (and others) are aware of it, start to think in Customer/User terms. What makes sense for them? Any data to look on?… No? Let’s ask them, let’s do an experiment, a mock, whatever.
Why ask people? Because we don’t know anything.
Building an agile organization, product development process or just implementing some best practices from Agile Manifesto is not an easy task. Because agility is a quality and Agile is just a methodology.
Without some simple and very personal agility, the Agile process is like the pink Himalayan salt: just salt, but hipsterish and overpriced, with no real benefits. Besides being pink, for sure.
