Badass Agile

“What else might work?” is to customer delight what “Yes, and…” is to improv.  Great solutions are the result of breaking rules; forays into unknown, even forbidden territory.  This flies in the face of compliance with established conventions and designs.  Finding or making new ways is neither cost nor risk-free, but if you want the payoffs of Agile thinking and doing, you must accept these commit...

In this conversation, Matt Comand of Consistent Elite Performance joins me in my home studio to talk about something that they don’t teach you in scrum master school….how to build elite, high, performing teams.  Matt is a performance coach in the sports and business domain, as well as a post-secondary instructor, and brings incredible insight and skill into building trust, training versus planning...

In much the same way that technical evolution makes old tools and techniques unnecessary and extinct, it is time for us as leaders to shift fire away from the mechanics of agility to the logistics of applying and spreading agile properly - not just in the IT realm, but to all of business, work and life.  Agile is no longer new and fresh; it is a tool in the toolbox, and everyone should know and un...

A journalling practice is a great way to delve into increased discipline, structure, and self-examination. Your daily practice should include:- Planning Your Day- Stating your gratitude (3 things that you feel deep gratitude for)Re-stating your visionin the morning, and:- Noting your wins - what went well?- Stating your lessons learned, based on your reflections on the day and how it went- Stating...

Words have impact.  Some say ‘words are things’.  If you want to innovate, you have to choose your words carefully.  Why?• The words you choose have an impact on your internal state; which alters your beliefs, and affects your ability to act with courage and certainty• The words you choose also impact the state of those around you; and likewise their determination and certainty to act in alignment...

The only way to make sales is to have lots of prospects. The only way to find a partner is to meet a lot of people and have a lot of conversations. The only way to get that book written is to have a lot of ideas you can play with. The only way to find a solution is to have lots of experiments that you're willing to try. It's all a numbers game. You have to have lots of lines in the water in order...

What does it really mean to delight your customer? Are we doing this just because we're doing Agile? And if not, why not?• Focusing on delighting the customer is the edge - that most businesses miss• You can minimize the bottom line all you want, but isn’t it easier to maximize the top line?  In fact, what good are efficient processes and policies if you have no revenue because you have no custome...

You won’t want to hear this, but as I stated in a previous episode on “Building A Shark Tank”, having an extra few seconds to orient and observe BEFORE responding to a physical or mental event gives you the edge over most other leaders.  The common name for the practice that develops this edge is mindfulness, or meditation.  It’s not only trendy, it’s table stakes, at this point, to be able to con...

I like to think that what I’m teaching is not oriented at learning Agile, but honing survival skill.  Adapting - being nimble for our customers - is no longer an ‘ought to’; its a ‘got to’.  While it is wrong to (and customers often perceive our efforts as attempts to) ‘convert’ or switch an organization from 100% traditional to 100% Agile, survival is about finding and outfitting the areas of gre...

Reasons - I’ve discussed how purpose informs vision, service, discipline and overall effectiveness. But likewise, reasons can slow you down. If you’re not conscious of the reasons why you do the things you do, not only can you not access higher levels of achievement, you may also be self-sabotaging your progress. Right reasons are necessary to access 10-20x performance levels. The life you aspire...

When fear shows up as a failure to commit fully to Agile, we experience one of the most common behaviours associated with Agile failure - failure to commit. Fear of Change, Fear of Failure, and Fear of Loss of Significance all roll together to create a failure to commitVery Slow Agile Adoption - Planning to Plan"Backsliding Into Waterfall"Insisting on specific processes or artefacts - BRD’s, Chart...

I read this quote somewhere. Too often, now, we seek to avoid challenge. We look for ‘low hanging fruit’ ‘low-risk, high-reward’ opportunities. There’s only one problem with that…..we don’t learn anything. This is my big issue with certainty and safety. By continuously doing what we know will work, what we believe to be safe and certain, the way we’ve always done things, we don’t ever have to shif...

In this episode, I think out loud about why getting leverage is an Agile leader superpower.  Getting Leverage refers to your ability to tap into another person’s intrinsic motivation to act and to change.  Without leverage, you will often get stuck trying to ‘force’ people to change mindset or behaviour by calling in another leader, or building a logical/rational case for change…sometimes forcing...

What’s the common interpretation of business agility, and is it the best interpretation?- Business Agility is too often understood to mean Agile Software Development in support of business initiatives- Business Agility should mean the use of Agile mindsets, habits and patterns in the execution of daily business- It also has to reflect the adaptable nature of Agile - we should apply it where it fit...

Strategically, Agile is not something you can politely decline.  Agility is not something you MUST convert all operations too, but rather a tool in the toolkit that should be applied when the conditions support it.  However, if you don’t embrace it, you will eventually lose your ability to compete.

The Agile leader will not be bounded by traditional definitions of leadership - they need to have a very different persona than the groomed, well-suited leader that we've come to idolize and generalize.  What makes a great, effective, modern Agile Leader? Vision and PassionGuide your own destiny, and let your teams guide yoursObsessive Customer FocusMaverickDevelop OthersLove The Resistance

Scheduling meetings over lunch is getting more and more common.  But just because something happens often, doesn’t make it right.  There are times in life when the seemingly innocent occasional request goes unchecked and becomes disrespectful or even abusive.  Could this be one of those times?

I never used to be good at listening. My mind runs at a hundred miles per hour. So I used to find listening to be a fidgety, painful experience, that wasn't focused on me... so I kind of hated it. But as I grow and develop, I realize more and more how important it is to simply be a great listener. That's this week on the Badass Agile Podcast.

Question from Enzo in Texas: "How do you adapt faster with a new team, in a company very different from any previous companies you've worked with? What advice would you give in regards to what should be top priority when trying to merge into an entirely new team?” Companies may be different, but people are exactly the same.  It’s useful to understand the culture for the sake of context or perspect...

A brief summary of this episode

As I was looking at yet another sales deck for which I was asked to comment on an Agile approach, I’m overwhelmed that even a meagre attempt to stick to the 7x7 rule of PowerPoint presentations is hopeless. Each slide reads like a high-school essay in 7-point Arial. What would happen if we trained our people to connect at a lower level - to focus on the actual human needs we are satisfying when we...

Now that we’ve learned some things about fear, what are some practical ways to work around it? You don’t have to make change all at onceRemember, you have to deliver things that THEY (team, client, customer) value. Do that in small, low risk, low-impact ways, and they’ll ask you to do moreAlways start with willing minds and projects that fit.

Today, we’ve got two killer listener questions, one to do with procrastination in agile team members, and the other on the difference between Being and Doing Agile. What I love most about these questions is that they go to the heart of our philosophy. That’s this week…. Both of these questions go to the heart of the Badass Agile Philosophy Agile, Scrum and Kanban, etc are all about minimum rails....

What’s the one thing you’ve always been good at? Knowing your ‘one thing’ allows you to link your passion to your profession, even if they seem completed unrelated Having that passion allows you to anchor all of your communications in areas where you feel confident and enthusiastic, which reflects in how you show up for your teams. This is what creates your unique value - your teaching and leading...

Fear of failure surfaces at every level of your organizationIn individuals, teams, units, leadershipIt is a perfectly natural human instinct.  People don’t want to lose face, lose trust, or lose security in the form of their jobs, prospects, opportunity for growth, and payHowever, fear of failure creates several forms of waste and loss: Hesitation (doubt, uncertainty, procrastination)Resistance to...