At the March 2017 Agile Brisbane meetup, we were lucky to have Pat Reed, an internationally recognised Agile transformational leader in Adaptive Leadership and Value Innovation, present on “Business Agility: Creating the Future”.

She provided a copy of her slides, and here are my notes from the evening:

• Every leader at eBay (440 of them) are Agile Coaches, it’s the third round now for them, imagine the change if you get frozen middle on board
• We need to thrive through uncertainity
• Elon Musk practices first principles ways of thinking

• Compasses are what we need to thrive on uncertainity, we cannot leverage maps because it is an unknown future
• Don’t do more with less, do less, to execute in uncertainity
• Change is changing, we need time for learning and innovating
• If you demonstrate belief in the team and give an environment of safety, the team will believe in their potential – stop telling teams what to do, ask them what they think what we should do
• Safe to fail is critical – we were all born with an Agile mindset (Carol Dweck) but our work and experiences push us towards a fixed mindset – if people can’t learn and thrive, your transformation will fail – as a coach we need to provide air cover
• Keep timelines short all the time – the size of the iteration accelerates the learning cycle and the faster the learning
• Using David Marquet’s Ladder of Leadership model at Ebay – cards you can download, when your employee says this, you say that
• NeuroLeadership Institute – “Why Organizational Growth Mindset Matters“

• An adaptive framework – believing is seeing at centre, need to see awareness and understand the problem, need to process options through discovery (really short time frame, as for 3 value experiments), taking action (learn by doing not thinking), transform learnings into collective knowledge
• DTA has some great tools around discovery
• There is a cost to value, we won’t do anything that doesn’t have x% value, we need to stop being order takers and become value shapers
• Principles for Navigating the Future  (Joi Ito) from the Media Lab at MIT, doing interesting stuff
• Your organisation is not a machine, you can’t fix it – most organisations are setup to work how they were intended to work
• Innovation, growth and transformation does not happen without tension – learn to identify good and bad tension
• What could we do if we knew we couldn’t fail – embrace that
• Do Stanford free Design School program online – same as the expensive in person program
• Polarity Management – polarity is when you think you nailed a wicked problem and then it comes back to bite you, need to find the best win-win from any scenario, if you try to solve it traditionally you make it worse
•  VUCA is here to stay, learning is our competitive advantage
• Microsoft’s CEO Sent an Extraordinary Email to Employees After They Committed an Epic Fail
•  Measure real value, speed to value and cost of value, need relative value not precision because it doesn’t serve us – Case Study and spreadsheet to calculate value