Enabling Agility

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There are two Kristyns.  The first worked at a large, well-respected firm, did her job competently, but nothing extraordinary.  The second Kristyn is extraordinary. She is unemployed, and a volunteer Producer/Director of “The New England Job Show”.  It is a new cable program to help people find work, produced, directed and run buy people out of work.  Articles have been been written about the show and carried by the Associated Press.  Good Morning America, Chronicle and Fox are planning to do pieces on the show.  There is interest in expanding the program to help more people statewide. Kristyn is a masterful networker, connecting people everywhere she goes, always looking for new possibilities.

They are both the same Kristyns, only separated by about 5 months.

So what’s different?   If she were to get a job tomorrow, would Kristyn go back to her cube, keep her head down and do her job?

I doubt it.  I don’t think you’ll ever see Kristyn in a position where she’s unable to make a difference in the world again.  Ever.

I asked her what was different.  In her previous job, she’d tried to make things better, but never got much support to make the changes she wanted to make.  There was a lot of talk about change, but nothing changed. When she was laid off, she realized she had to do something special to get noticed.  And she did.

How many of the keep-your-head-down-and-do-your-job Kristyns do you have in your organization who would do extraordinary things with only a bit of nurturing?

For an organization to be truly agile, it is critical to have people who are enabled to give their best.  The next product idea, the killer customer-service model and the next great marketing campaign are probably out there.  You just need to give them room to come out.

In their book a simpler way, Margaret J. Wheatley and Myron Kellner-Rogers write:

Fuzzy, messy, continuously exploring systems bent on discovering what works are far more practical and successful than our attempts at efficiency … They slosh around in the mess, involve many individuals, encourage discoveries, and move quickly past the mistakes  The are learning all the time, engaging everyone in finding what works.  The system succeeds because it involves many tinkerers focused on figuring out what’s possible.

Go find your Kristyns and let them loose.  They are everywhere. And they will make your organization great.

I’m committed to people experiencing joy, self-expression, partnership and accomplishment in their work.  That statement is my guiding principle.  It helps me decide where I’m going to focus my time, my effort and my education.  So how did I get interested in Agile and how does it connect to my personal statement of purpose?

The first Agile project I encountered was far from ideal. The QA team didn’t understand how they fit into the Agile process. They attended daily stand-ups (on the phone) waiting patiently for requirements so they could start testing at the end of development.  There was no team room; everyone worked at their desks. Shortly after the software was deployed, it had to be pulled out of production and reworked because its downstream effects hadn’t been fully considered.  Somewhat messy, as first tries can often be.

I was curious to find out what people thought about the project on the business side and gave several of them a call.

The overall business owner considered it the best project he’d ever worked on with IT. He loved knowing what was happening every day, and the close collaboration between the developers and the business people. Someone on the team told me he appreciated talking about ideas for a feature with a developer in the morning and often seeing it work that same day. A user said how happy she was with the software; that it gave her an easy and intuitive way to do something that had been hard before.

I knew that there was something really right about Agile if a project with this many challenges had left such a positive impression.  There was a rare level of enthusiasm.  Joy, self-expression, partnership and accomplishment were present.

These conversations flipped me from being interested in Agile to being an evangelist for Agile.