Do You Have an Agile Mindset?

Agile Mindset

Assess and Adapt Your Outlook to Thrive When Things Don’t Go As Planned

Whether you have been charged with helping your leaders, team or organization become more agile, are in the process of adopting agile methodologies, or simply recognize the need to be more effective in the midst of change, the starting place is the same: developing and reinforcing your agile mindset.

In previous posts and my book, The Agility Shift I have described this mindset as one that relies less on planning and more on preparing. This shift doesn’t mean that we need to throw planning out the window altogether, but that we recognize that in rapidly changing contexts we must approach our work with a readiness to learn and adapt.

The Agility Shift Book

For many of us, this represents a significant shift in perspective and mindset. Below are a few characteristics of this shift, along with a new resource for you to assess your current state of mind and begin your own agility shift:

An agile mindset welcomes discoveries.

An agile mindset welcomes new discoveries as an opportunity to improve and refine the work at hand rather than seeing them as a threat to anyone’s original idea, plan, value, identity, status, ego or any other barrier that can get in the way of innovation.

An agile mindset expects iteration.

Of course, iteration is at the heart of each sprint cycle in agile methodologies because developers of new software, products and services know that each iteration is an opportunity to test and learn. You don’t need to implement an agile methodology to understand the value of testing and learning. When you expect to iterate, you can hold your ideas and plans lightly, be open to new information, and fail, learn and innovate faster.

An agile mindset is responsive, not reactive.

You know the difference between being reactive and responsive if you have ever said or done something you later regretted. Reactivity is often guided by a knee-jerk impulse based on fear, defensiveness and the hard-wiring of our reptilian brain. Responsiveness can take place in the same amount of time, but includes a level of self-awareness and awareness of available resources, along with a rapid assessment of the situation and ability to prioritize effective action (or in some cases, inaction).

Most of us can’t honestly claim to have an agile mindset 100% of the time, especially under stress or in the midst of a high stakes challenge or opportunity. The stressed or anxious brain tends to revert to its familiar ways of thinking (at best) or go into full flight, freeze, or flight mode (at worst). Neither mode is particularly effective when innovation is our goal. The good news is that all of us can learn to make an agility shift to an agile mindset, even if it is not our first response.

The Agility Shift Book

An Agile Mindset Starts with Awareness.

The first step to making this agility shift is to become more aware of what you are experiencing when things don’t go as planned or when you discover new disruptive information.

The original Agility Shift Inventory (ASI) can help you with this first step: Awareness.

The ASI includes:

  • Survey questions designed to inventory your current agile mindset state
  • A Generative Conversation and Catalyst Guide with explanations and coaching questions to improve your mindset for effective action.
  • A chance to update your answers from the last time you took the inventory (remember, your results are highly contextual, so if your work setting/situation has changed since you last took it, your results will likely change as well).

Of course, if you are not ready to focus on your leadership agility just yet, you can still become familiar with the core concepts of agility by taking the original ASI here:

 

 

 

Best Practices for Celebrating Agile Success and Being More Agile

Whether it is at a big project milestone, or end of the quarter or year, taking the time to acknowledge and recognize your wins and learn the lessons from experience will help you build on your successes and continue to innovate. Read on for some of my favorite Retrospective questions and best practices for success in the coming year!

1: Celebrate your wins, large and small.

Research and your own experience show how important it is to pause and acknowledge your progress. Such reflection improves employee engagement and retention, the ability and motivation to persevere, and the likelihood of long-term success.

Here are just a few of the successes our clients are celebrating this year, some of which can be overlooked if we focus exclusively on financial metrics:

  • Individual and team growth, competence, capacity and confidence development
  • Expansion and diversification of your Relational Web of skills, knowledge, talent and resources that enable you to be agile and innovate through the unexpected and unplanned

• Business results in key strategic areas:

  • Time to Market
  • Customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention
  • The triple bottom line

2: Host a Retrospective.

In addition to celebrating your wins, consider hosting a year- or quarter-end Retrospective. As you may know, most agile methodologies include periodic retrospectives, in which the agile team reflects not just on WHAT it accomplished, but HOW it accomplished it and what lessons they learned that can guide them going forward.

Here are a few of my favorite retrospective questions to help you amplify your strengths and build on your areas of opportunity in the coming year:

  • When were you at your best?
  • How did you learn and adapt as you worked together?
  • Which of the Agility Shift dynamics did you actively demonstrate? Which do you need to develop and more consistently demonstrate? (Take the complimentary Agility Shift Inventory (ASI) to start this conversation, or contact us for a comprehensive Team ASI)
  • What lessons did you learn that could guide your success with your team?
  • Bonus Question inspired by Jeff Sutherland’s work: What one thing could you have done differently that would have made you happier?

3: Be More Agile in 2021.

Once you have celebrated and completed your reflections you will have a valuable list of successes to recognize and share across your organization. You will also have identified some exciting areas for new learning and talent development.

The next three questions can help you zero in on your areas of greatest opportunity by thinking about WHAT you want to get done, WHO would benefit most and HOW to realize those benefits:

  • Which of your key stakeholders and leaders have the necessary agility competence, capacity and confidence to execute your agile innovation initiatives and which could benefit from additional support?
  • How will your talent development strategy help your people at all levels develop their agility ability?
  • Who will champion these critical capabilities across the organization to help you achieve and sustain your commitment to agility?

You are not alone if you struggle to answer some of these questions. We regularly work with leaders and teams to help them discover the best agile learning and talent development strategies to meet their business goals.

Contact Us to Discover Your Best Approach to Agile Talent Development

Visibility is Overrated

Top of Excelerator Lift, Copper Mountain

Top of Excelerator Lift, Copper Mountain

This past week I had a new adventure as a first-time participant in the Peak Performance Ski Racing Camp run by top international coach Dave Gregory at Copper Mountain, Colorado. I’ll share the story of how and why I came back to ski racing in mid-life another time, but did not want to delay sharing a few of the cross-over lessons that stood out most as I get back to my life in Chicago.

Not surprisingly, with my attention laser focused on all things agility at the moment, skiing in general, and ski racing in particular, are proving to be a rich field (slope?) for new metaphors and fresh perspectives.

The skiing conditions during the first few weeks of November can be iffy in the mountains. Some years there is barely enough snow to open a few runs (and even then with liberal dustings of artificial snow). This year, aided by El Nino, we had several dumps of fresh snow—not the gentle atmospheric snow, but the piercing, side-ways blowing snow that makes you feel like you have landed on another planet when you get off the lift at the top.

 

Visibility is Overrated

As we camp participants gathered at the top of our Giant Slalom course a few days into the camp, a dense gust of falling snow swirled around us, obscuring all but the first gate or two of the course. One of Dave’s coaches, Shawn Smith, heartily called out “Visibility is overrated!” and without allowing for a shred of complaint or resistance, shifted to giving us each just the counsel we needed to focus our next run through the gates: “widen your stance,” “quiet upper body,” “steeper edge angles at the top of the turn,” “activate your ankles” and/or “get your legs out from under you.”

When it was my turn to slide into the makeshift starting gate, I realized the lack of visibility might actually be a gift. Of course, I couldn’t articulate much about that gift until I ran the course several times and had collapsed back in my condo, exhausted and exhilarated from a day of learning and stretching my physical limits at 11,000 feet. Here are a few thoughts.

When we can’t see very far ahead we are invited to, and perhaps have no choice but to, be present to our bodies. This means we can only attend to what is really going

The Author Skiing into the Abyss

The Author Skiing into the Abyss

on right here in the present moment. And in that present moment, inside our bodies we respond with our whole body, being and heart.

I quickly realized what our coach meant. In reality, visibility (the ability to see) only gives us an illusion of control. The illusion that if we can see farther ahead we will be able to plan and not have to worry about what is happening in the present—our physical sensations, messy emotions, intimacy with ourselves and others, responding to the unexpectedly changing terrain, because we can simply just follow the plan.

Readiness is All

In ski racing, every racer is given the chance to (and virtually required to) inspect the course before taking their first run. Sometimes this involves “slipping the course” in a snowplow and/or slipping sideways through to smooth ruts and widen the brim of snow on the outside of the turns, at others it means skiing along side of the course on the outside. Some people have the ability to memorize the course after one inspection. This is not my strong suit. At best, I hope to remember where the trickiest turns and ice patches are. But every racer knows that by the time it comes to your run, the information you gathered during your inspection may well be old news. While the gates will be in the same place, a new rut or ice patch has developed where there wasn’t one before. Or you may become engulfed in a snow squall or wind gust in the midst of your run that no one can plan for. The good news is that when you are prepared, when you enter the starting gate with strength, flexibility, balance, and a reasonable level of skill and tactics, you only need to see as far as the next gate so that you can set up the arc of your next turn, sometimes while simultaneously recovering from a less than perfect turn on the previous gate.

Action is only possible in the present moment.

                                                  —Christian Noss

In life and in our organizations we sometimes can’t even see as far ahead as the next gate, let alone know what lies around the next turn. We can, and often do, inspect the terrain and go ahead and make our plans, but we lock in on those plans at our peril. As soon as the plan becomes an invitation to become comfortable, to abandon our whole person experience in the present moment, we lose our ability to effectively respond to the unexpected and unplanned, and to learn continuously. We also lose our ability to expand our confidence and competence in our capacity to be effective when we can’t see around the next gate.

For me on the race course, this means inspecting the course, setting my intention (with a little help from my coaches), then trusting my readiness and ability to respond in the moment. It also means knowing that falling (we call it crashing in ski racing) is not the end of the world (more on that in a future post).