Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and with guest revolutionist Toby Thompson (who was sitting at the table and initially didn’t want to speak on the podcast but then we couldn’t keep him quiet!) catch up with Jessie Shternshus, CEO at The Improv Effect and author of “CTRLShift“:
When you are facilitating you need to know your audience and believe in what you are doing – to get people involved, do things in small groups in partners so nobody has the attention on them initially and then build them up to group activities
Make people safe and get them to laugh – then you have them for the ride
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
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
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
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
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
The final day of Agile 2011 in Salt Lake City was keynote day but not before a couple of announcements. Next years conference will be organised by Mitch Lacey and held in Grapevine, Texas and a number of presentations were videoed (including one of my talks) and will be available over time on the Agile Alliance website.
Finally it was officially announced that my good friend and colleague Shane Hastie had been elected to the board of the Agile Alliance (a first for our little area of the world!). Here are my notes from the keynotes:
there are two mindsets – fixed and agile – determines everything we do – determines goals, reactions to failure, belief about effort and strategy, attitudes towards others successes
we can continue to grow, you can’t measure someones potential with an IQ test
belief about yourself affects belief about others – we are hardwired to judge and stereotype others, fixed mindsets do it on very little evidence, agile mindset still does it but are less positive/negative
bright little girls are typically praised constantly
bright little boys are typically criticized or reprimanded
organisations have a mindset as well
Enron had a fixed mindset to hire the best talent – “rank and yank” – only keep the best
Southwest are about people not planes – don’t hire for IQ, but for attitude and learning
Craig and Tony are at Agile Australia in Melbourne and with guest revolutionist Toby Thompson (who was sitting at the table and initially didn’t want to speak on the podcast but then we couldn’t keep him quiet!) catch up with Jessie Shternshus, CEO at The Improv Effect and author of “CTRLShift“:
Craig Smith 
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