Deane Sloan - a lean Agilista

Increasingly I’m coming across the fallout from “failed agile” in complex organisations. What strikes me is how well-intentioned people have defaulted to a Newtonian approach for the adoption itself, invariably driving and measuring the change through levels of best practice adherence. As a parting gesture, they often leave the organisation with the enduring belief that the adoption failed because they didn’t adopt the practices in their entirety.

The irony is that this presumed predictability is at odds with the Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) roots of the Agile world view that they were looking to help the organisation adopt.

You might have come across the work of Kelly McGonigal with her 2011 book The Willpower Instinct, which looks at the science behind willpower.

I’m a surfer, and have been since the 80’s. At a point in my teens I surfed for a local surf shop here in Wellington and started down the path of competitive surfing… then the shop closed. And with that closure I went out and focused on a more traditional career - though I would often wonder “what if”?

Breaking some of the stereotypes associated with surfers, I was also a geek, so a life in IT was never really far away and it is well down this career path that I came into contact with Carol Dweck’s work on Mindsets when I was at Stanford d.school.

Reflecting on Carol Dweck’s Mindset book had me making a rather unattractive conclusion about myself - I had been guilty of a fixed-mindset. I was relieved that I was able to bow out of competitive surfing, without people judging me. I used “fail” as a noun rather than as verb.

The Mindset insights have proven to be invaluable in helping me get out of my own way, and have given me a new outlook on the fundamental ability of people to grow - changing how I manage, mentor and even parent.

Why not give the growth-mindset a shot - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTsF2TaEaJA .

Stephen Denning summed up the kind of reaction typical of my own experiences when I’ve first talked about adopting the likes of agile approaches in the wider management context – it’s an unfortunate reality that the advice is seen to be coming from an unexpected source, something to do with “IT” no less and all the baggage that entails. It is therefore pretty damned cool to see the likes of Jurgen Appelo making the top 50 most popular English language management and leadership writers over in this article at Inc..