Badass Agile

What happens if you summon all of your courage and creativity to put something new, authentic and valuable into the world….and nobody comes?

Better to wait for those who are naturally magnetized to your voice than it is to change your offering to suit a wider public.

Creativity is fundamental to agility.  Problem solving blockers, interpersonal conflict, adapting and scaling agile, and general innovation demand that we tap into our deepest well of creativity.

But how can you tap into this underused and unfairly labelled ‘artsy’ skill?  Three things will help.

1.  Be aware.  Find a way to pay attention, focus, notice.  Be in silence and lock out distractions so you can hear what your creative brain is saying.

2.  Surround yourself with inspiration.  It’s great to borrow passion AND ideas from others.  Adding your own unique splash to it is still a form of creativity.

3.  Win.   Victory creates the confidence, freedom, and positivity that is fertile ground for creative thought.  Find something you are good at and you find fulfilling and do it as often as you can.

Don’t forget – creativity is lost if you don’t record it so set up your life to easily capture it when it happens…and don’t forget to groom your catalog every once in a while!

If the sole motivation is efficiency, and the means create unhappy people or lower quality…it still won’t be faster, even if it’s faster.

You’ll lose people, you’ll lose fans, you’ll lose time – fixing broken product and broken teams.

You’ve been doing daily lessons learned or silver linings in your journal, right?

If you have, I’ll show you the next step in the brainstorming process – a periodic grooming of you best ideas for personal and team improvement.  I’ll go through a small sample of notes from my journal that, without a grooming/mining habit, I probably would have completely forgotten about.

It’s a new year…but don’t make resolutions.  When was the last time that worked anyway?

Instead, use the occasion to reflect on your existing vision and service statements (you DO have one of those, right?) and tweak it to reflect your path for the upcoming year.  Don’t expect massive change, but rather, an update to keep you pointed in directions that build on the previous year’s successes, and move you toward the things that you are passionate about and can demonstrative unmatched value in.

If you want to stay accountable, share your updated vision at [email protected]…or post it in our new Facebook group!

https://www.facebook.com/groups/badasslistenerlounge/

Happy New Year!

Commitments with a resounding and well-communicated ‘why’ have the best chance of getting done well. That ‘why’ should not be limited to the ‘…so I can’ element of a story headline.  A business value statement allows you to more clearly articulate why the business should invest in this story, feature or outcome NEXT.  It also allows various stakeholders (business and technical) to describe rationale for prioritizing this item that may not be obvious to the product owner – technical dependencies, regulatory or compliance demands, etc.