Badass Agile

Badass Unscripted – Journalling

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 vision in 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 your gratitude again (once more, based on your reflections on the day)...

Episode 95 – The Language Innovators Use

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 with the teams values and goals.

Badass Unscripted – Have Lots Of Lines

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 to catch the fish.

Episode 94 – Delighting Customers

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 customers? • What is the cost of replacing or retaining a customer? Is focusing on the bottom line still c...

Badass Unscripted – Mindfulness

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 control your emotions and to telegraph self-mastery to those you lead and work with.

Badass Unscripted – Survival

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 greatest impact.

Episode 93 – Your Reasons

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 to takes way more work and capacity than when you’re at now

Episode 92 – Fear, And Failure To Commit

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 commit Very Slow Agile Adoption – Planning to Plan “Backsliding Into Waterfall” Insisting on specific processes or artefacts – BRD’s, Charters and Business Cases, Dashboards and Reports “The Only Way Is the Old Way” Summary Bullets...

Badass Unscripted – If It Doesn’t Challenge You, It Won’t Change You

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 shift. We have learned the mechanisms, the steps , and the routines, that get you to the finish line....

Badass Unscripted – Leverage

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 a ‘bakeoff’ between two approaches or solutions.

Episode 91 – Redefining Business Agility

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 fits, bend it where it makes sense, and leave it alone when it doesn’t.

Badass Unscripted – No Longer A Choice

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.

Episode 90 – Essential Qualities Of An Agile Leader

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 Passion Guide your own destiny, and let your teams guide yours Obsessive Customer Focus Maverick Develop Others Love The Resistance

Badass Answers – Lunch Meetings

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?

Episode 89 – Listening

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.

Badass Answers – Connecting With New Teams

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 perspective, but the muscle you need to flex is connecting with individuals. You have to make the time to con...

Badass Unscripted – Thanks, Texas

Badass Unscripted – Too Much of The Wrong Thing

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 7×7 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 offer our product? Specs and logic often only confirm what we deeply know – we buy things to feel g...

Episode 88 – Working Around Fear

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 once Remember, 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 more Always start with willing minds and projects that fit.

Badass Answers – Keeping Procrastinators on the Rails and Being vs. Doing Agile

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. Enough process to fix most of your common problems and enough flexibility and simplicity to shape th...

Badass Unscripted – Your One Thing

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 style

Episode 87 – Fear of Failure

Fear of failure surfaces at every level of your organization In individuals, teams, units, leadership It 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 pay However, fear of failure creates several forms of waste and loss: Hesitation (doubt, uncertainty, procrastination) Resistance to change Stonewalling – resistance to team Overcompensating with process to gain certainty and saf...

Badass Answers – Timelines and Predictions

How do you handle date and deadline pressures in Agile Environments? A listener sends us his question on what to do if you are pressured in the early days of a project to commit to specific deliverables on certain dates Remember that some projects reasonably require delivery commitments – especially those with regulatory, audit, or compliance expectations. These may not make great first experiments in Agility, because Agile requires flexible scope in order to work well with the philosophy It is ...

Badass Unscripted – Estimation

Sooner or later…I have to tackle estimation. As the debate rages on (estimates versus no estimates), the fact remains that while customers need to know how much of an investment they’re in for, and what they will be getting for their money, we also need to admit that unless you’re repeating some variation of something you’ve already done before, it is very difficult to predict the future when so many variables can intersect to influence the outcome.

Badass Unscripted – Coaching Vision

In order to spread and scale Agile practices, we need to raise up a tribe of elite, influential leaders. Those who know how to inspire the courage to change in others. If you are coaching – whether team members, Agile leaders or executives, it is important to balance their Agile/Scrum education with leader fundamentals. The first of these is the ability to articulate your vision. Helping others find theirs is a rewarding and eye-opening experience (for both the coach and the coaches)....

Badass Unscripted – Shutting Off Messenger

A large corporate culture can get to the point where there are so many thoughtless demands on our time that we are forced to ’shut off’ our tools and dim our availability – either to hide from people asking us to do even more work, or just to find 10 minutes of respite to catch up or take a mental break. This can’t be good – have we missed the point?

Badass Conversations – Scott McCarthy of Moving Forward Leadership

This week, I interview Scott McCarthy of Moving Forward Leadership. Scott is a leader in the Canadian Armed Forces, and also runs his own leadership consultancy and podcast. In this conversation, we discuss why it’s so critical to trust your teams, planning for your own exit, teaching leadership from Day 1, and how to survive and thrive in the face of fear and failure. It was a great conversation that brought a very different leadership perspective into our world and Agile values! Check Scott ou...

Badass Answers – How To Master Public Speaking

This week, we take a listener question from a new Scrum Master who struggles with public speaking. Ultimately, public speaking is something that has a good deal of fear associated with it, and the usual suggestions for dealing with it have something to do with imagining the fear isn’t there, or overcoming it through exposure. But there’s something more. Time to fall back to the Badass Agile Principles – Get Visionary, Get Focused, Get Humble and Flexible, and Get Gritty. Most important is the fi...

Favourite Podcasts – Moving Forward Leadership

Episode 85 – The Innovation Inhibitor

In small enterprise, innovation is almost easy – natural. But what happens when we try to innovate at scale? What forces hold us back and slow us down? In large groups, fear becomes much more pervasive – fear of failure, fear of looking foolish, fear of going first It doesn’t help that management does not create structures to allow people to speak their truth, and to leap However, even when fully permitted and free to do so, people have been conditioned to hold back, and this is what the leader ...