Episode 9 – Agile Mindset

The Agile Manifesto.

For me personally, the agile manifesto is a very, very personal yet informative way of looking at business and life as well. And I think it’s really compelling thing to look at if you are, especially, in startups or small to medium-sized businesses. Or just trying to rapidly get through projects or to make a significant difference fast.

The original part of agile did originate from developing software and helping others to do that. I think for me that is a really great way in our world to blend that way of thinking into business, and it’s about how can you run this different mindset throughout the business whilst being highly collaborative and actually being very responsive to change and disruption during the journey.

So the four key points that come up in the manifesto are:

1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. The reality there is the whole thing is about the team. It’s about individuals solving problems together, making solutions together, not being tied down to just following a process of like a flow of what they do for their jobs, or just having to kind of do what has always been done for the various tools they have. It’s almost about a way of looking for constant improvement and doing that together as a team and not having to be stuck in the old ways of doing things because it’s always been done that way.

2. Working software over comprehensive documentation. I’ve seen, from personal experience, the amount of time that gets wasted as the company is trying to build that documentation and process flows and bibles for how people should engage with each other inside the business versus actually just focusing on the main thing – building something that works, and even if you build something that doesn’t work, the data shows why it isn’t working, and it’s something you can take, iterate and learn from and make a much faster response than trying to project document and process a process of the whole thing again, and again, so definitely it’s all about the working software over comprehensive documentation.

3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. What that is saying is – it’s about working in partnership with your clients and your customers. It’s not about trying to build the most robust, long-winded contract that locks people into deals that probably won’t even be needed in the future and takes far more time to negotiate into draft versus actually saying: Let’s just work out what the challenge is. Let’s see how we can build a roadmap together and let’s move forward together as in us as the people facilitating the help and guiding you and the customer that need your help to get them to their happy ending of their story. So, it’s about collaboration and not about trying to spend all the time trying to build very complicated legal documentation, etc.

4. Responding to change over following a plan. That is literally as it sounds. If you build a plan that is completely set in stone, and that’s the law in the rulebook you have to follow, naturally there’s going to be some problems in that going forward because you can’t project everything. The change aspect of agile is to make sure that when your ‘change’ comes up, the process in the mindset is literally designed to respond to it in the quickest way possible. And with the most collaborative set of people it possible as well. That underpins the entire philosophy of agile and actually without using that as a benchmark for our company, we wouldn’t be able to move as fast as we can, adapt as fast as we can, and work in genuine partnerships with people to turn their ideas into innovations.

So… for me, agile is more than just a word or buzzword or manifesto. It’s actually a methodology that you can use right through your life, through business. And for you, as an individual, just to make an impact fast and to deliver good things to the world.