Agile methodology is a business practice that encourages collaboration and empowers people to make decisions as close to customers/members as possible in order to continuously improve the planning and delivery of a project. Last week I listened to this HBR IdeaCast that debunks myths of the agile management with two gurus in the field, Bain’s Darrell Rigby and Scrum’s Jeff Sutherland. From deep stakeholder engagement to favouring prototypes over plans, the interview helped me to articulate many of the lessons I’m learning as I work to deliver the training within an agile project environment. Here are five career lessons from agile management.
Lead without title
Agile methodology offers a collaborative alternative to traditional command-and-control management, which, in my past experience, involves a manager dictating assignments to a team. In my current experience, every day we commit as a team to what we want to achieve that day; I rarely, if ever, tell people what to do. Based in input from colleagues or customers, leaders need to be open to reassigning the team’s direction and pivoting to a new idea if stuff isn’t working. This is what managers at Zappos learned when they planned and delivered a transformational project in 12 weeks because great ideas come from everywhere and everyone.
Embrace chaos
On our team, you can try to perfectly organize everything from your Outlook calendar to your impeccable project plan, but sooner or later everyone’s professional toolbox needs to get a bit lighter in order to work more flexibly. Agile embraces multiple, simultaneous iterations of a project (customer/member-feedback, product development, communications planning, training, corporate strategy, etc.) and when so many things are dependent on the completion of so many other things the work can become very messy. Folks who excel on our project can organize within the chaos. They leverage attributes like resilience, adaptability, tolerance for risk, and positivity to solve problems with others. What makes people strong contributors in an agile environment are the same attributes that Jim Bright highlights in his “chaos theory of careers”.
Hyper-connect, Hyper-communicate
One of the easiest ways to stay organized in a fast-moving, kinda-chaotic work environment is to know who is doing what work and talking to them about it. Constantly. Every day our team meets for 30 minutes to share updates and identify where we might need help from others. It took us a while to get the hang of speaking directly and clearly to each other – at first it doesn’t feel like the nicest way to communicate – and now we’re in a rhythm of communication and collaboration. Countless problems at work happen because of indirect or unclear emails and muddled meetings, so think about how you might introduce some elements of a scrum meeting into your daily routine.
Prototype and iterate
My favourite thing about the agile approach is that having “the golden plan” doesn’t work on this project. Our team is accountable for training people on a new system and we’ve built several prototypes of how we’ll do it. Some we’ve thrown out and others have really resonated with our stakeholders (the learners). We’re also updating – or “iterating” – them in order to build the best possible final product. Most importantly, what we deliver will not be totally finished when we hit the classroom. Early access to our stakeholders means that we can incorporate their feedback and ideas into the continuous improvement of their learning experience. If you’re interested in prototyping something simple, cool and/or transformational for your community, check out IDEO’s Rapid Prototyping kit.
Embrace failure
The thing about moving pretty fast, changing direction, building prototypes, and doing all of it without 100% of the information is that you will inevitably make mistakes. This is a good thing. Fast Company’s Tim Miller highlights how the inability to change direction quickly can be detrimental to organizations:
When famous failures happen, the board usually looks to the leadership of the company and starts making drastic changes. (Adios, CEO.) But many times, a leader’s inability to execute is due to paralyzing inertia that runs deep throughout the fabric of an entire company. The lack of ability to change fast, turn on a dime and react to market demands prevents them from delivering the right thing fast enough.
Inertia – so often articulated by a forty something middle-manager who says “…because we’ve always done it that way” – is killing your community. By building and testing pieces of work, whether that’s art or code or documentaries, we are always learning from our failures and our successes. By bringing the work along in small pieces and constantly seeking feedback, the long-term success of your project will be more likely. But you have to be willing to fail fast and fail often in front of others to make success happen.