Systems Transformation: Agile Thinking and Leadership Transformation
What is Agile?
Agile refers to a way of thinking, the way the mind processes ideas. Being an agile leader will require you to stay nimble i.e., always learning and improving.
‘A team that will arrive earlier must accelerate faster’
Principles that guide Agile thinking:
- The focus must be on satisfying the end user. e.g., Toyota prioritizing their end user.
- Focus on dynamism and changing requirements. Reiterating processes for improvement.
Warren Buffet says look for Integrity, energy and intelligence.
- Look for motivated staff and keep them motivated
- Focus on excellent communication
- Focus on technical excellence and performance measures.
- Strategic adaptation and continuous Resilience
- Endurance and sustainability of results
WHY AGILE?
- It is the ability for an agile person to subdue the culture of mediocrity that resists innovation in their system.
- You must be agile to deal with volatile and uncertain circumstances in your system, your life, organization, or nation.
- You also need to deal with complex and ambiguous challenges.
- You also need to be agile to create working environment that enhances creativity. Especially, to prevent large teams from working in silos
- An agile mindset is also needed to manage world systems with high emotions and expectations.
(Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber – Often referred to as the creators of the Agile Methodology.)
Features that Agilist must possess:
- Focus: Ability to keep focus
- Commitment
- Transparency
- Culture of mutual respect
- Courage
- Consistency
- Intelligence
- Mastery
Qualities of Agile leaders:
- Courage
- Continuous learning
- Conceptualization of ideas
- Commitment to continuous improvement
- Coaching, mentoring, teaching and facilitating
- Communicating Clearly
- Continuous collaboration
- Celebrate and motivate team success
- All agilist are change agents.
Below is an in-depth look into each Qualities.
1) COURAGE – is the soul of focus.
Four things life/leadership will demand from you.
Focus
Consistency
Strength
Maturity
FACTS ABOUT COURAGE;
Courage is what drives the quality of your thinking as well as your growth capacity
Courage is the capacity for deep meaning, continuous learning, adequate self-evaluation.
Courage is your capacity to dig out fine details about the origin of problems
Another reason you need courage is for Ability to engage in difficult conversations about growth.
You will need to protect your team from negative impact to possess a steady team
2) Continuous learning – Learning as an adaptive nature for change
You must develop curiosity everyday (Learning as a way of thinking).
You need to stay nimble in learning.
You must maintain active rhythm.
Agile leaders are continuous learners. Learning is never done in the place of comfort and complacency.
Learning requires deep reflection.
Flush out the lies in your mind with the truth.
Learning is an attitude of continuous, permanent, personal development.
You must maintain active management of your life.
Learning requires courage, collaboration and interaction.
The Circle of learning:
Question phase where you’re curious
Contemplation phase
Idea phase
Testing phase
Reflective points
Question again
What is your willingness to change? “Learning in itself is not the ultimate goal”.
Your willingness to commit yourself to a disciplined life after a principle with which you have learned and changed.
So, are you willing to embrace the truth for change, are you willing to give up on all lies, to stay focus and disciplined? Willing to take feedback?
What are you willing to give in exchange for a transformed state?
STAGES OF THE LEARNING PROCESS
State of uninformed optimism
Informed pessimism
Valley of despair
Informed optimism
Learning births understanding and clarity. Lack of clarity is cruelty to an organizational system. A leader must ensure there is clarity of thought, clarity of speech, clarity of action and intentionality of action
3) Conceptualization of Ideas
The destruction of the old gives birth to the new, creativity is first of all an act of destruction – Pablo Picasso
You cannot put new wine into old wine skin. Holding on to the old and new will collapse your system.
Agile leaders who conceptualize ideas are actually creative thinkers. You must think as think within the box, outside the box and as though the box does not exist
That you cannot see a possibility does not mean it doesn’t exist.
You must challenge assumptions and stay curious. Why is this so? Why is this not so?
If you want innovation and disruption, you must be able to manage the EXPERT MINDSET. Possibilities exist more in the beginners’ mind than an expert mind – Shunryu Suzuki
Experienced leaders most times already have a formulated philosophy of things that can work or cannot work which is not always the truth. When you need to innovate and create, you must limit the negative voices from the expert mind but embrace the positive voices from them. However, when you’re done create and need to sustain the improvements. When you ship into the market listen to the experts.
You need to always be open. Create space in your mind for new revelation and discoveries.
Embrace the power of visualizations; Agile leaders conceptualize ideas through continuous improvements, innovation and transforming. Accommodate people’s ideas.
4) Commitment to continuous improvements
What is Continuous Quality Improvement? The formal approach at the assessment of quality, safety or equity and systematic data and measurement-guided efforts to improve outcomes within a context.
ASSUMPTIONS OF CONTINUOUS QUALITY IMPROVEMENTS
There is a current situation, desired outcome and performance gap between the two that we must quit blame game and embrace teamwork, engage systems thinking and establish a just culture – that rebukes people for their recklessness and accommodates people’s weakness and systems challenges.
That there will be resistance, some resources restriction, but we will pull through if we hold on long enough.
That capacity building is essential and must be done regularly.
That leadership commitment is key to success and we all must take charge as stakeholders.
We have to see from the eyes of value to the customer, leadership excellence and updated technical excellence.
If we fail to take charge now, the cost of solving it will always increase. Quality improvements always comes at a cost.
There are systems that are working efficiently and effectively and its simply because there are dedicated people who make it work.
The Five Dimensions of Continuous Quality Improvement
Process Focus
Customer Focus
Data-based decision making
Employee/Staff empowerment
Systems or Organizational – wide thinking
Models for driving Continuous quality improvements.
a) PDSA
P – PLAN; plan ahead for change, analyze and predict the results
D – DO; Execute the plan, taking small steps in controlled circumstances
S – STUDY; study the results
A – ACT; take action to standardize or improve the process
(Referred to as Shewhart/Deming Cycle)
The 10-step quality improvement process
What do we want to accomplish?
Who cares about what we do and what do they care about?
What are we doing now and how well are we doing it?
What can we do better?
What’s preventing us from doing better?
What changes can we make to do better?
Keep doing.
How did we do it? Try again if necessary.
If it worked, how can we do it every time?
What did we learn? Let’s celebrate?
b) Another process for improvement is Six Sigma.
AGILE LEADERS EMBRACE THE SIX SIGMA MODEL
-DEFINE
– MEASURE; with data (data speaks the voice of the process when well analyzed)
– ANALYZE
– DESIGN (for new product) /IMPROVE (for existing product)
– VERIFY (new product) /CONTROL (existing product)
c) TRIP MODEL (4Es + 2Es)
Engage all stakeholders.
Educate people to develop the culture.
Execute – the real work.
Evaluate – Measure the process and progress through data.
Embed – policy-drive the process once its working.
Expand – scale-up
5) COACHING, MENTORING, TEACHING AND FACILITATING
“We do not need leaders who are like the sage on the stage anymore, we need them right by our side.” – Maureen Bisoyano (CEO, IHI. check that up later)
A MENTOR IS SOMEONE WITH A GOOD BALANCE BETWEEN CHARACTER, COMPETENCE AND COMPASSION
A mentor sees more talent in you than you can even see in yourself
FACILITATION – means making something easy. It is a process of drawing people’s ideas out and connecting them with other people in a way that leads to positive outcomes.
Agile Leaders – facilitate communication, change, collaboration, healing, connection, decision making, continuous improvement, innovations and transformation.
Agile leaders are in part Servant Leaders, adaptive leaders and transformational leader.
An agile leader must be able to build stable teams like a servant leader will build a community.
A COACH – is a person usually a facilitator not necessarily an expert who trains a person to improve their intelligence, motivation, performance, focus and accountability.
Agile Transformational Leaders are;
Visionary
Servant Leaders
Coaches
Facilitators
Role models
FOCUS OF TRANSFORMATIONAL COACHING
Coaching is a data-based and performance driven
Coaching is focused on quality relationship and continuous feedbacks
Coaching is a communication process that focuses on connecting people to performance
While relationship is important in coaching, performance must not be neglected
Coaching is based on accountability
Coaching is based on compassion, openness and vulnerability, using their personal experiences in most cases.
The Result cycle involves;
beliefs
Behavior
Relationship
Results
These things are critical to your result cycle.
6) CLEAR COMMUNICATION
An Agile Leaders must give a Clear Communication of;
The vision, the purpose, the mission, the strategy goals
Value’s discipline and diligence
The knowledge the understand and widow
The plans and design
Excellence, improvement, innovation and transformation
This must be done with Courage, strength, hope and energy and can is to be communicated verbally and non-verbally
When you don’t communicate with clarity that’s cruelty…
Clarity of communication creates confidence and makes the communication compelling
The sequence of Communication Presentation can be done in the order of;Stating the problem first – Solution – Benefits
Stating the Problem first – Benefit – Solution (preferable because when people here what the benefits are they can be motivated to be part of the solution)
Communication can either be Subjective (client focused) or Objective (team-focused) but both must be brought for sound scientific analysis before crafting a plan for intervention and implementation.
What impacts how to communicate with people?
Awareness; what has been observed or known about you
Experience: the rational thoughts and feelings of the people. People listen to your experience
Intention: the purpose and the goals to be achieved also determines how people embrace what you’re saying
Ownership; what’s your part in what you’re saying
Their understanding and interpretation of the matter for or for the future. You have to pay attention and manage them carefully
Clarity is key for agile Leaders. You must learn the capacity for reasoning (deep thinking), reflection and restraint. Switch more to your forebrain
Agile Leaders Celebrate and Motivate Their Teams
They reward Reliability and consistency
They reward excellence and Innovation
They praise the small achievements
They express gratitude when things work well
They align with the team members motivation or needs
Strategies to use to Celebrate and Motivate Teams include; Shout-out to team members, deliberate recognition, promoting empathy in your culture, encourage Peer to peer recognition. Be creative in team celebration
Reasons to Celebrate
A successful culture
A successful project
Employees Personal achievements
Achievements of Company sales goals
Why Agile Leaders celebrate their teams?
Keeping your employees motivated
Positive branding
Celebration engenders Trust
Improves morale, productivity and innovation
Summarized By Dr.Joshua Kolawole
(MD, MBA, MASc., FISQua, CPHQ, PMP)
Agile Program Manager & Transformational Leadership Expert, Valdymas Intelligence LLC, Grand Prairie, Texas, USA.
valdymas@valdymasintelligence.org