Behavioral Agile

I am fond of remembering Zen Ex Machina quoting

Agile mindset is nothing without behavior. To have an agile mindset means living the values through action. Don’t make it an excuse just to tick the box.

This perspective is key in complimenting Ahmed Sidky's Agile mindset, with a linear flow from mindset to practice.

It is very important to emphasize doing-agile and being-agile can co-exist, thus the two being left-brain and right-brain activity. This enables to prevent cognitive dissonance of feel good factor like “I think I am agile, therefore I am” , and makes one grounded on the reality to strive balance between intent and action, which is essential to take concrete action. Having a healthy marriage with being-agile and doing-agile always supports good offspring like growth-mindset as discussed below.

?One such healthy off-spring is growth mindset in agile practice, because being adaptive to change is the bedrock of organisational agility. When people experience change with a fixed mindset, they question their ability and are worried about others outperforming them. This anxiety constrains the ability to innovate. Where teams tend towards a fixed mindset culture and feel competitive, this can block the effective collaboration on which Agile techniques rely, and encourage a silo culture. When doing-agile (left-brain) and being agile (right-brain) activities conflict, we see cognitive dissonance and a fixed-mindset offspring.

Healthy offspring like growth-mindset not only make the delivery more elegant and creative, they also give better structure in arriving at minimum viable product.

Lastly, it is also important to note that goose (production capability) is taken care of and we are not just focusing on the golden-egg (production - MVP). A healthy resonance of doing-agile and being-agile will ensure DNA of teams to evolve.

Citations:

• Bob Hartman Agile Mindset art.
• Ahmed Sidky's Agile mindset.
• Zen Ex Machina 2017
• Agile Business Consortium Limited 2018
• LeadingElements 2018