Mindful Agility

In this thought-provoking episode of Mindful Agility, learn how to transform confrontational encounters into productive dialogues. Ankur Shah Delight and Dan Greening share a transformational technique to handle triggering comments, guiding listeners to notice their physical reactions, pause, seek the core of the statement, rephrase it, and share with the other party. Hear an engaging case study where a potentially volatile workplace scenario is skillfully diffused. It's an essential guide for anyone seeking to enhance their communication skills, foster healthier relationships, and maintain a calm mental space amid conflict. Lean in, breathe deep, and transform your conversations.

Resources

• Momentum Labs, Elephant in the Room Challenge (starts July 1, 2023)
• Wikipedia, Nonviolent Communication.

• Stinger sound Swing beat 120 xylophone side-chained by Casonika licensed CC BY 4.0

• Daniel Greening, host, agile consultant, software executive
• Mirela Petalli, co-host, meditation guide, and neurocritical nursing instructor
• Dan Dickson, business coach, executive and management consultant

• Mindful Agility Substack ("The Mindful Sprint" weekly brief)
• Mindful Agility web site
• Mindful Agility Community Facebook group
• Mindful Agility Youtube channel

In this Mindful Agility podcast episode on procrastination, hosts Mirela Petalli and Dan Greening delve into the hidden costs of procrastination. Have you wondered how procrastination could impact not just your work, but also your mental and physical health? This episode uncovers shocking research findings from Sweden that link procrastination to poor health outcomes. Tune in to discover an innovative tool developed by productivity guru Tim Ferriss to help overcome his fear of failure. You'll also hear compelling personal stories of overcoming procrastination through mindfulness techniques. Are you ready to turn your procrastination habit around and boost your success and wellbeing? Don't delay; listen to this enlightening episode today.

• Eva Skillgate et al, “Procrastination is linked to poor health – new study,” The Conversation (Jan 16, 2023).
• Fred Johansson et al, “Associations Between Procrastination and Subsequent Health Outcomes Among University Students in Sweden,” JAMA Network Open 6(1) (Jan 3 2023), doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2022.49346.
• Tim Ferriss, “Why you should define your fears instead of your goals,” TED2017.
• Tim Ferriss et al, Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers, 2017.

• Reviewers: Ron Lussier, Stephen Zimmerman, Colleen Zimmerman, and Eve Rubell
• Stinger sound Swing beat 120 xylophone side-chained by Casonika licensed CC BY 4.0

• Daniel Greening, host, agile consultant, software executive
• Mirela Petalli, co-host, meditation guide, and neurocritical nursing instructor
• Dan Dickson, business coach, executive and management consultant

• Mindful Agility Substack ("The Mindful Sprint" weekly brief)
• Mindful Agility web site
• Mindful Agility Community Facebook group
• Mindful Agility Youtube channel

Want to learn the secret behind Warren Buffett's success? Curious about how SpaceX rockets are built? This episode of Mindful Agility podcast uncovers the power of low-cost experiments and how they can propel your success. Hosts Dan Greening and Dan Dickson discuss how to use low-cost experiments to reduce risk and increase reward, and suggest practical steps to apply this concept in your own life. Learn how to turn your significant projects into a series of small, manageable experiments. By embracing failure and learning from it, you can fast-track your road to success. Tune in to find out how!

• Dan Greening, Pattern: Experiment to Improve, June 11, 2015.
• Dan Dickson, Dan Greening, "1: Low-Cost Experiments," The Mindful Sprint," April 4, 2023.

• Beta reviewers  helped improve this episode: Stephen Tryon, Eve Rubell, Amelia Hambrecht, Divya Maez.
• Stinger sound Swing beat 120 xylophone side-chained by Casonika CC BY 4.0

• Daniel Greening, host, agile consultant, software executive
• Mirela Petalli, co-host, meditation guide, and neurocritical nursing instructor
• Dan Dickson, business coach, executive and management consultant

• Mindful Agility Substack ("The Mindful Sprint" weekly brief)
• Mindful Agility web site
• Mindful Agility Community Facebook group
• Mindful Agility Youtube channel

Toxic work and home environments are all around us: intimidation, humiliation, secret discussions, manipulation. Those environments are psychologically unsafe. When we and those around us feel unsafe, we become fearful, stop learning, and fail to improve.

Discover the power of psychological safety in fostering high-performing teams, as we dive into techniques to cultivate trust and open communication. Learn from Google's Project Aristotle case study, Mirela Petalli’s experiences in hospitals, and Dan Greening’s experiences in tech companies, which reveal the transformative impact of psychological safety on productivity and collaboration.

Join us as we challenge norms with mindfulness and agile practices to elevate team performance. Listen to this episode and transform your understanding of what it takes to create a successful, innovative, and cohesive team. Don't miss this chance to unlock your team's potential – tune in now!

This episode parallels  our 2-minute newsletter (click to subscribe) The Mindful Sprint.  Mirela Petalli and Dan Greening use the Psychological Safety brief as a jumping off point for more details and stories around Psychological Safety.

• Duhigg, C. (2016). What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team. The New York Times
• Amy Gallo (February 15, 2023) “What Is Psychological Safety?,” Harvard Business Review.

• Beta reviewers Divya Maez, Amelia Hambrecht and Colleen Zimmerman helped improve this episode.
• Stinger sound Swing beat 120 xylophone side-chained by Casonika CC BY 4.0

• Daniel Greening, host, agile consultant, software executive
• Mirela Petalli, co-host, meditation guide, and neurocritical nursing instructor
• Dan Dickson, business coach, executive and management consultant

• Mindful Agility Substack ("The Mindful Sprint" weekly brief)
• Mindful Agility web site
• Mindful Agility Community Facebook group
• Mindful Agility Youtube channel

Discover the secret behind successful partnerships in this episode on incremental reciprocity. Start with a small task without expecting anything in return, and ask your partner to match your effort. As you both grow, this technique helps measure reliability and build trust. Famous duos like Lennon-McCartney and Oprah Winfrey-Gayle King used this method to achieve greatness. Enhance your teamwork and friendships by trying this approach yourself. Give it a shot and transform your connections!

One more example of how mindfulness and agile skills help you succeed, from the Mindful Agility podcast.

• Beta reviewers: Amelia Hambrecht, Stephen Tryon
• Beatles image from the Nationaal Archief, the Dutch National Archives, and Spaarnestad Photo. CC BY-SA 3.0 NL
• Stinger sound Swing beat 120 xylophone side-chained by Casonika CC BY 4.0 license.

• Daniel Greening, host, agile consultant, software executive
• Mirela Petalli, co-host, meditation guide, and neurocritical nursing instructor
• Dan Dickson, business coach, executive and management consultant

• Mindful Agility Substack ("The Mindful Sprint" weekly brief)
• Mindful Agility web site
• Mindful Agility Community Facebook group
• Mindful Agility Youtube channel

Unlock the mindful power of the Five Whys technique in this intriguing episode, with agile coach Dan Greening and corporate fixer Dan Dickson. 

The Five Whys method has transformed businesses and personal lives, revealing hidden causes of problems, and promoting safer, more lasting improvements. Hear intriguing stories, like how Toyota fixed a recurring production line issue for good, and how Dan Greening hosted a Five Whys "party" that possibly saved an employee's job! Learn how this simple, effective approach can help you tackle challenges in your own life. Listen now, to transform your approach to problem-solving forever!

• Dan Greening, “Root Cause Mapping Party,” https://senexrex.com/cause-mapping/
• EPM, The 5 Whys Explained - Root Cause Analysis, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7FcK8jV2yA
• Mindful Agility, The Mindful Sprint: Five Whys for Lasting Breakthroughs

• Thanks to beta reviewers Amelia Hambrecht and Dan D'Agostino.
• Stinger sound Swing beat 120 xylophone side-chained by Casonika, CC BY 4.0 license.

• Daniel Greening, host, agile consultant, software executive
• Mirela Petalli, co-host, meditation guide, and neurocritical nursing instructor
• Dan Dickson, business coach, executive and management consultant

• Mindful Agility Substack ("The Mindful Sprint" weekly brief)
• Mindful Agility web site
• Mindful Agility Community Facebook group
• Mindful Agility Youtube channel

By developing two uncommon skills, mindfulness and agility, you can achieve true success in most fields of life and work. You must define success on your own terms, rather than rely on others' metrics or recipes. Imitating others who have been successful works fine to get your feet wet, but it won't make you successful, because the world has new competitors, and you are a different person.

Mindfulness practices develop skills in seeing the world more clearly, along with its opportunities and dangers. With mindfulness, we can discover hidden causes more readily, and we can fix problems and exploit opportunities more easily. In a word, mindfulness gives us insight.

Agile practices develop skills in low-cost, low-risk experimentation. Insight is great, but to blaze new paths you have to take risks. There are lots of dangers in that unexplored jungle, so we need to learn how to explore safely. In a word, agile gives us innovation.

We discuss the challenges of developing mindfulness and agile skills, including the distractions of modern life and the need for ongoing study and practice. We show how mindfulness and agile practices can be applied in different fields and situations, from healthcare to career development to family life.

Mindful agility is a practical philosophy—i.e., it is composed of practices and principles. These principles of success encourage you to first think critically about your own goals, then imitate others to get the basics of a field, then use mindfulness to build competence and insight, then use agility to innovate.

This episode is chapter 1.1 of the Mindful Agility book under development. 

• Amelia Hambrecht, Rob Coles, Eve Rubell, Jeff Stuit, and Divya Maez were our beta reviewers, for whom we are super grateful. Early beta review is an agile staple: we make changes to our episode based on feedback. If you ever want to give it a try, reach out to us. If you are reading this, you are in our target audience. 
• Nichols, M. (1967). The Graduate. Embassy Pictures. Amazing movie. Seven Academy Awards.
• Stinger sound Swing beat 120 xylophone side-chained by Casonika licensed under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) to Mindful Agility
• Image of magician backed by Imitation by DALL-E

• Daniel Greening, host, agile consultant, software executive
• Mirela Petalli, co-host, meditation guide, and neurocritical nursing instructor
• Dan Dickson, business coach, executive and management consultant

• Mindful Agility Substack ("The Mindful Sprint" weekly brief)
• Mindful Agility web site
• Mindful Agility Community Facebook group
• Mindful Agility Youtube channel

Learning from failure ought to be easy. Good experiments should fail, about half the time, especially if they aren't costly. And agile experiments are designed to be low cost. But failure, it turns out, freaks us out, especially when we are new to a field. That might explain why agile transformations fail at a very high rate, even though the benefits of agile are well studied. Folks in an agile transformation are new to agile, and little failures at the beginning can lead them to run away.

In this episode, Dan Dickson and Dan Greening talk about a recently published paper, "You Think Failure is Hard? So is Learning from It." We discuss the insights in the paper, and how those insights translate into agile practice.

Here's the problem

• People avoid bad news
• People are ashamed of failure
• People don't share what they learned from failure (so others have to repeat their experiments)

And so, not only do we not learn from our own failures, our friends don't discuss their failures with us. So we don't learn from our own failures or our friends' failures. Bummer.

We talk about the implications for agile: it's a problem we have to address head on. We provide some ways to make learning from failure much easier. 

• Dan Greening, Root Cause Mapping Party [on “Five Whys”], 2015, https://senexrex.com/cause-mapping/
• Mindful Agility team, Business on Fire Part I: Steve Jobs protege Ron Johnson burns JC Penney cash fast as CEO, 1:11 (2022), https://sr.link/ma1-1
• Eskreis-Winkler, L., & Fishbach, A. (2022). You Think Failure Is Hard? So Is Learning From It. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17(6), 1511–1524. https://doi.org/10.1177/17456916211059817

• Thanks to Dan Dickson, our guest and collaborator
• Image of athlete tripping on a dog, by DALL-E
• Stinger sound Swing beat 120 xylophone side-chained by Casonika licensed under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) to Mindful Agility.

• Daniel Greening, host, agile consultant, software executive
• Mirela Petalli, co-host, meditation guide, and neurocritical nursing instructor
• Dan Dickson, business coach, executive and management consultant

• Mindful Agility Substack ("The Mindful Sprint" weekly brief)
• Mindful Agility web site
• Mindful Agility Community Facebook group
• Mindful Agility Youtube channel

Our clumsiness in life creates most of our suffering. We haven't practiced the skills we need to be happy. We don’t see what’s going on around us. We don’t see the causes early enough to prevent a train-wreck in work or life. And when we don’t know how to distinguish truth from delusion, well that leads to a world of hurt.

But if we don't have a purpose, should we or anyone else care that we mess up?

Mindfulness skills help us reduce the dumb stuff we do to ourselves. When we get more comfortable and skillful just living in our existing situation, then we can contemplate why we are here and how to actively live. Knowing where we're going, means agile skills can get us there, finding creative solutions to the tough stuff.

So, here's one way to think of our journey to higher purpose and fulfillment:

1. Mindfulness skills
2. Purpose
3. Agile skills

A couple of months ago, Dan Greening was interviewed for another podcast, called 10,000 Heroes, by his pal Ankur Shah Delight. If you’ve wondered what the hell those Mindful Agility people were trying to do, Ankur asked the right questions. Here’s that 10,000 Heroes episode, in its entirety. If you like the idea of exploring purpose, 10,000 Heroes is a nice thing to check out. 

• Ankur Shah Delight was our guest host for this episode. He is host of the 10,000 Heroes podcast. The original of this episode is
  #00039 The curious offspring of Agile and Mindfulness with Dan Greening. If you're curious, check out the follow up episode
  Nate signs up for Yet Another Challenge – this time applying Dan Greening’s Mindful Agility to his professional life.
• Tom Looy, Ron Lussier, Amelia Hambrecht, Divya Maez were our beta reviewers, for whom we are super grateful. Early beta review is an agile staple: we make changes to our episode based on feedback. If you ever want to give it a try, reach out to us. If you are reading this, you are in our target audience. 
• Stinger sound Swing beat 120 xylophone side-chained by Casonika licensed under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) to Mindful Agility
• Image of anime bear with a purpose list by DALL-E

• Daniel Greening, host, agile consultant, software executive
• Mirela Petalli, co-host, meditation guide, and neurocritical nursing instructor
• Dan Dickson, business coach, executive and management consultant

• Mindful Agility Substack ("The Mindful Sprint" weekly brief)
• Mindful Agility web site
• Mindful Agility Community Facebook group
• Mindful Agility Youtube channel

The faster and better we take action against impediments, the more successful we'll be, according to renowned military strategist John Boyd, developer of the OODA Loop.

The OODA loop is observe, orient, decide and act. It’s how we take action in new situations and succeed. In this episode of the Mindful Agility podcast, Tom Looy explores how John Boyd used the OODA Loop to help fighter jet pilots, and ultimately whole military campaigns, succeed against enemies. You can use it in your own life, even to overcome your own “opponents,” the dysfunctions that hold you back.

The most important things in the OODA loop are first to observe what you can and reorient your mental model to fit the data that you have. Sometimes that means you have to destroy your old mental model of how the world works, because it's not working anymore, and substitute something new that does work.

There's feedback involved in this loop. When we observe something anomalous, we might need more information to understand what is happening. So that's feedback that brings us right back to the beginning of the ooda loop.

Then when we stick data into our model, we may discover that the model generates something weird or it doesn't match what we expect. So we need to get more data. We need to adjust things in our model. We may go right back again to observe more stuff before we can even make a decision. So that's why there's feedback directly from observing back to the beginning of the OODA loop or from orienting back to the beginning of the OODA loop.

What John Boyd discovered was that the faster we can operate through this loop, the more success we'll have in many areas, not just in military combat.

Faster looping wins because if we're looping faster than our opponent, our opponent doesn't have time to reorient their own mental models. And so we just confuse them. And win.

For a book on John Boyd and the OODA Loop, see

• Osinga, F. P. B. (2006). Science, Strategy and War: The Strategic Theory of John Boyd (1st edition). Routledge.

For an article examines the implications of the OODA loop on the Ukraine-Russia war, see

• Flaherty, C. (2022, March 23). The OODA Loop, Information Warfare, the Ukrainian Defense and the Collapse of the Russian Army. OODA Loop. https://www.oodaloop.com/archive/2022/03/23/the-ooda-loop-information-warfare-the-ukrainian-defense-and-the-collapse-of-the-russian-army/

For an article showing how leading indicators are essential for all agile methodologies, including OODA, see

• https://senexrex.com/pattern-measure-progress/

• Daniel Greening, host, agile consultant, software executive
• Mirela Petalli, co-host, meditation guide, and neurocritical nursing instructor
• Dan Dickson, business coach, executive and management consultant

• Mindful Agility Substack ("The Mindful Sprint" weekly brief)
• Mindful Agility web site
• Mindful Agility Community Facebook group
• Mindful Agility Youtube channel