All life requires circulation.
You can't sit still. Here's why that matters
and how it affects us going forward. That's
this week on the Badass Agile podcast.
Greetings, team. Welcome to the Badass Agile podcast.
I'm your host, Chris Williams.
I got something that I hope will have
impact on you and freshen up your practice
and invigorate your practice for the year ahead.
Look. You can't sit still.
If your organs don't receive blood, you're goner.
When water isn't moving, bacteria gathers on the
surface.
When you don't move, as a practitioner,
your byways to opportunity are going to clog
up.
Let me tell you what I mean. But
first, let's take a moment to remember why
we're here, to create an elite tribe of
leaders who truly serve their clients and community
by doing what matters and what works, relentlessly
chasing value and excellence like a badass.
There's so many resources out there about what
you need to do to be agile, but
we focus on who you need to become
in order to lead teams.
So let's hammer down those fundamentals
to create a truly unique and powerful force
in this industry. If you love this episode,
share it with your friends.
To talk about yesterday's Agile today is to
immediately put yourself
behind.
Business changes every day, every week. You have
to meet new people who need new things.
You have to have new conversations
about doing things in new ways. This means,
put more simply, you have to circulate.
We have to evolve
the same way we tell our customers to
evolve. Doesn't that make sense? Constant change, constant
improvement, constant evaluation.
Remember that? It's built into what we preach,
but maybe not so much in what we
do.
And I'm finding this happening a lot.
In our practice, in our community,
the simplicity of the 12 agile principles are
easy to understand.
They're easy to share.
They're easy to preach, but they're not so
easy to do. Think about it. Welcoming change,
do we do that well? I would say
no based on the continuous presence of stuff
that you see in the literature, the books,
the videos, the social media that says we
should go deeper into process.
And especially concerning
is all the politicking
about how agile is just fine. It's not
going anywhere. And that anyone who says it's
in jeopardy is just fear mongering. I'll talk
about that more in a future episode, but
let's move on. Deliver early and frequently. Do
we do that? Do we not see more
and more teams going to 1 month sprints
or 3 month sprints sometimes?
Are we really being courageous in helping our
teams deliver stuff early, valuable stuff early and
frequently?
Are we keeping things simple?
Are we valuing face to face communication? Are
we driving deeper, thicker wedges between ourselves and,
let's say, the product team or ourselves and
the executive, the people who we're supposed to
be serving?
If we don't live by those principles,
if we don't evolve those principles,
then how do you expect to compete and
survive?
We love to tell people the stories of
Kodak or Blockbuster,
the businesses that stood still, that denied the
revolution or the rebellion by sitting there certain
with their arms folded,
rejecting the oncoming change.
But we,
as practitioners,
don't seem to wanna know
how to evolve better ourselves,
how to be the Netflix or the digital
camera.
The secret to everything is to circulate.
Now, look, you don't have to believe me,
but if you're struggling to find or keep
your contracts or your job, if it feels
like the industry is changing shape all around
you and you're worried about what tomorrow holds,
the secret
is not to hang on to what you've
got.
Don't stand still and let blood pool up.
You gotta move. You gotta circulate. So what
does that mean? How do you do that?
I remember saying a while back in one
of my videos, I think, that you've gotta
become more intrepreneurial
and entrepreneurial, And everyone's like, boo. We don't
wanna hear that. What we wanna hear is
that if I just bring my scrum guide
and maybe my Lego to work, everything is
gonna be fine. Well, look. If you want
things to be fine, you yourselves have to
evolve and innovate. And the prize of a
bright future
in your industry or within your organization depends
on you being able to do the following.
Here are some examples.
These are not from the back of my
head. These are examples that are working for
me
now. You don't have to do scrum or
kanban or any other process or framework
to be agile in your organization. And most
importantly,
you don't have to live in the software
feature room
anywhere in an organization
where you can, number 1, help people prioritize
better.
Number
2, help them make more evidence based decisions.
Number 3,
help them reduce the cost of trying something
new.
By doing what? By simplifying, by MVPing, by
prioritizing, etcetera, etcetera.
Number 4, help them get comfortable with failure.
Number 5, help them reduce old, slow, and
inefficient ways of planning and documenting stuff.
Number 6, help them make things simpler.
Number 7, help them learn better,
especially learning through their own experiences.
Number 8, help them to prefer
action
over anything else.
And number 9, help them deliver value sooner
and more frequently.
We've heard this a 1000000 times. This should
make perfect sense.
But what I'm saying is,
there is questionable value in the way we've
been implementing scrum,
agile
in organizations around the world, especially the biggest
organizations. The reason why we're feeling what we're
feeling now is because we're failing to circulate.
We're failing to move blood through the system.
So what does that mean when I say
circulate? Go meet people who have problems.
People outside of tech,
people outside of software projects because those nine
things that I just ran through with you,
these things are agile. Do one of them
and you will help a team or a
group get better.
Any one of these would be sufficient
to add value somewhere in the organization.
Can you deliver a better training experience? Can
you shorten the time to hire a new
candidate?
Can you create new policies more easily? Can
you find new ways of reaching your customers?
Can you simplify or lower the cost of
social media marketing?
Is there a warehouse process
to which any one of the nine principles
I just ran through
would apply and make things somehow better
If you do these things in small pockets
where the need is greatest
and worry about the scaling later or never,
then you'll be providing and creating real, genuine
value for your customers.
But if we fail to circulate,
if we fail to move on from the
old way of doing things, if we stand
still intellectually
and physically,
we're gonna struggle for air,
and this is important because we're facing a
crisis of faith
with our clients, with the world at large.
I still love agility
as much as I ever have,
but as we continue
to improve it in the technical domain, we
owe it to ourselves at the same time
to be reaching out to other parts of
the organization. Every organism must grow, and you'll
only grow if the blood is moving.
Get out there and have those conversations.
Advertise the nature of what you do as
not being software development process experts,
but rather as experts in delivering value to
the marketplace
in simpler, better ways.
Thank you for listening, my friends. You can
find me as always at badassagile.com,
and you can check out my products and
services
atlearning.fusechamber.com.
Thank you again for listening. I look forward
to seeing you next time, and until then,
stay badass.