What Is An Agile Mindset?
A quick search of Google brings up these results:
SAFe gives four pillars of an agile mindset:
“respect for all team members, optimized and sustainable flow, encourage team innovation, and focus on relentless improvement.”
Those sound pretty good, and they are. But this won’t make you agile.
Here’s another definition:
“Respect, collaboration, improvement and learning cycles, pride in ownership, focus on delivering value, and the ability to adapt to change.”
The ability to adapt to change is getting closer, but the rest… not so much.
One more:
“The agile mindset calls for team members to be transparent with their work—including failures. When a member is struggling, they have to admit it. Mistakes should be brought up in Daily Scrums to learn lessons and avoid them in the future.”
Okay, transparency is good, but wow. I don’t think I’d work there!
After reading these, it makes sense that the agile mindset is a popular buzzword that means pretty much everything and very little at the same time.
That’s pretty weird because the agile mindset was born from the Agile Manifesto, which gives us the four values of the agile mindset:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
The problem is that those values don’t go very deep, and very few people understand what they really mean.
So what actually is an agile mindset?
First, we need to understand why we want an agile mindset. Product development is risky and markets change fast. If your company can’t figure out how to get the right product or product improvements out faster than your competitors or the latest technology, your company will probably die. In fact, there’s strong evidence that the life of companies is dramatically shrinking over time.
So how do you respond – not just faster, but in the right way that keeps you ahead of the changes in the world?
There are four keys to an agile mindset: Team Readiness, Customer Connection, Team Empowerment, and Embracing Uncertainty.
Team Readiness:
This is the one part of agility that those previous definitions kind of got right. If you are going to move quickly, you need a team that has the skills to work together effectively and rapidly. I wouldn’t trust building a multi-million dollar app to a team of kindergartners, especially if they haven’t learned to share yet. But, you need a lot more than a well-functioning team to be agile.
Customer Connection:
Companies exist because a customer is willing to pay them to solve a problem. Unfortunately, the larger a company gets, the more they tend to forget this. They focus more and more on process efficiency (which usually turns into bureaucracy and email) and less on the always-changing customer needs. The few that do talk to customers are usually siloed into roles far from the people that are actually building the solution meant for the customer. An agile mindset means that the people building the solution for customers actually know their customers. They get direct feedback from them. Two common agile frameworks are XP (Extreme Programming) and Scrum. XP puts the customer on the team. Scrum has a proxy for the customer, but at least every few weeks, real customers should be providing feedback to the whole team.
Team Empowerment:
It doesn’t matter how well the people doing the work understand the customer if they don’t have the power to do anything about it. Again, as companies get larger, they tend to grow hierarchies and silos. That means it takes more documentation, approvals, and collaboration (usually by email) just for people that know what the customer needs to actually do what the customer wants. Many think agile is a set of processes for developers. But, to get things done quickly, teams need the ability to handle their own budget, legal, marketing, sales, and development to respond to customer needs fast. Agile isn’t an IT thing, it’s a whole business thing.
Now that’s not easy for leadership. It takes tremendous trust to empower frontline workers. People might mess it up, or handle things differently than they expected. But to be quick in the market, it’s essential.
Steve Jobs said it best:
“It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
That’s trust.
Embracing the Uncertainty:
We want certainty. It’s part of the human condition to feel that we understand and have control in our world. And it’s why we want numbers, roadmaps, and estimates. But an agile mindset accepts that there is actually very little certainty in our complex world. It’s why agile focuses so much on testing, reviewing, learning, and adapting, so that we can use what actually happens in the world to drive our decisions, not what we think will happen. The needs of customers can change so fast that even if we knew what they wanted a week from now, that might change a week after that.
So, here is my definition of an agile mindset
“An agile mindset is one that embraces the uncertainty of the world by rapidly and knowledgeably responding to changing customer needs. This is achieved through strong customer understanding, empowered employees that can skillfully respond quickly, and an organization that trusts its employees to carry out strategic decisions day-to-day.”
