Captain Marvel and Musings on Agility

I hope by now you guys have already watched the latest Marvel Movie, Captain Marvel.

Be warned, before reading on any further please make sure that you’ve already watched the movie – otherwise run the risk of possibly reading spoilers ahead. :)

The movie starts out with Vers our protagonist having a weird dream. She gets up after waking feeling confused and agitated, not entirely knowing what to do next. She goes to her team leader Yon-Rogg and requests to have a sparring session with him while they discuss -- why they’re sparring, instead of sleeping in the first place. Her team leader being more adept at hand-to-hand combat, manages to tie her up into a knot and dissuades her from using her “light show” abilities – focusing instead on her hand to hand combat training. Somehow, she’s led to believe and convinced that in the Kree race, there is a premium for controlling your emotions and not using your powers.

The early goings of the film leads us to this conclusion: she has ‘partial’ amnesia.  Her strange dreams giving her a glimpse to what happened to her in the past and somewhat a peek into her identity. Not fully remembering her past, she’s been having anxious wrestling bouts with her lost years, her purpose, and her part in the war she found herself in the middle of.

Jumping forward an hour and half into the movie, she finds out she’s been lied to by the alien race that has adopted her, her team, and her team leader. Her real past has been exposed to her by the seeming antagonist race she was tricked into and sworn to exterminate (her memory was tweaked by ‘Supreme Intelligence’, the AI leader of the Kree race – changing segments of her memory to suit their agenda and blocking-out most of her past), she now finds herself finding her place and her purpose in the middle of this war.

After fighting and grappling with her former team leader Yon-Rogg, she finds herself falling off of a ship and plummeting down to Earth with no seeming hope of getting rescued before she hits the surface.

And then she gets it. While falling down, it suddenly all clicks inside her head. Somehow, what she learned while fighting off both Kree and previously also the Skrull reminds her that she can use her  abilities to do something, and in this case putting all those small ingredients together allowed her to fly.

That’s it, a rather simplistic summary of how she discovers that she can fly. What I didn’t mention was that Yon-Rogg had on purpose prevented her from using her powers so she could presumably ‘maximize her potential’ by working on her melee/close range combat skills. On the contrary, by limiting her options and the execution of her powers -- she went the opposite way. She allowed herself to be bottled up. When she finally let’s go, she was able to achieve more. This turning point wouldn’t have been possible had she not retrospected and looked at her situation as a whole – looking at what works and why it works; looking at what seemed to be a limitation and leveraging it; no, exploiting it rather for the greater good.

This is where the power of Retrospectives begin. We can and we should take a look at what really happened and put aside the make-believe-world for a while. Sure, the ideal and make believe world may seem so much more enticing and comfortable. But we’ll never arrive to where we want to and beyond if we continually ignore real data and adjust accordingly.

Some of our leaders and managers may tell us what to do (or what not to do for that matter) and some will follow them, albeit some blindly. We can think we should rely *solely* on their wisdom because they’ve gone ahead of us or we shouldn’t go against them. Or we can think outside the box, take what works. Discard what doesn’t. Experiment. Innovate and adapt. We can all then *fail forward* by learning from our past mistakes and leveraging our experiences to succeed. But that requires and entail that we look at our past and come to grips even with the unsavory parts.

Only then and then alone, can we all really ‘maximize our potential.’

About the author: Chris is a movie fan who happens to be a new dad. Now that his daughter has turned one, he hopes to get more movie time, enjoy the story and glean insights about Agile and life in general. When he's not busy watching a movie, he's working as an Agile Coach. He has been Coaching since 2013 -- mentoring & training teams, fellow Scrum Masters and companies become more Lean and Agile. On top of his regular work duties on project teams that span the United States, Australia, UK, India and Bangladesh, he has on shore Scrum and Agile coaching experience in the following countries: Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia.