The importance to enjoy everyday with a Lean & Agile Mindset

I would like to share some thoughts of mine about what it means to maintain an everyday Agile & Lean Mindset. Even if Life serves you lemons. Sharing these thoughts means that I'm going to tell you about something that occurred to me in my personal life a couple of weeks ago. Something that really shook my life and the lives of all the people I love and care about. Before I start it's important for you to understand how I look at things in a broader perspective.

When I look at my personal life I truly believe that I have a purpose and that is to add Value to a product I call 'My Personal Life' over time. As a continuous user of this product I carefully pick what Value to add and what not. I'm an ambitious person in work and in my free-time. I like to have an active lifestyle. Which means that my agenda often is bulking of things to do. That spans from climbing a mountain to creating a presentation about ISO-compliancy. Very dynamic and because of all the options some might say that the choices I make aren't always adding the right Value. So, sometimes, I stumble and fall and often can celebrate small victories. To achieve the goals I want to achieve, every year I outline a plan, that I adapt bi-weekly. So adding the right Value to my Personal Life makes eliminating Waste sometimes a challenging puzzle. To make the puzzle a bit bigger I see the life I live with my partner and daughter somewhat in the same way. The way I see it is that we work as small team with the purpose to add Value our shared Product I call 'Our Family Life'.

Ambition

Luckily my partner is at least as ambitious as I am. She also pursues an active lifestyle and is a pretty good triathlon age group athlete. Our latest addition to the team (our daughter) develops a whole lot of Value every day. I think she at least is as ambitious as we as parents are. Due to the ambitious nature of our team and the fact that we want to achieve our goals as much as everybody else it means that the combined product roadmap we outline together is adapted very often.

The reason for adapting can be due to reasons that can be related to Work, disappointing Race Results, sickness or any other reason you can think. Sometimes events come along that are more important than the things we might have planned. So there are 2 options when these events occur. First is to hold on to the plan (fixate on the plan), second is to be Agile and adapt and change in order to minimize the impact of the event. We always choose for the second option because of our own experience with our product had learned us that in the end that delivers the most value (and costs the least amount of energy to maintain). You can call this the Grow-option.

Does this path of Life leads us exactly where we want to go? No not all... it sometimes disappoints us, but it also gives us a lot of Joy and Happiness because we experience things we didn't expect.

The Event

So with this in mind I would like to tell you about something that, as I mentioned before happened a few weeks ago. After a busy week of Work and Personal stuff it became Saturday - like every week. Together the 3 of us first went to pick up an apple tree for my daughter (great initiative of Oerrr - Natuurmomenten) and had some fun in the forest surrounding Oisterwijk. This was really fun morning and after a quick stop at the nearby La Trappe Abbey, to get a gift for my father-in-law, we went home. A couple of these things we planned a few things we didn't and the 3 of us just went with the Flow.

When we got home I decided it was time to go for a small run just to clear my head. Normally I just run around the local trails nearby the river. Today I decided I would do something different. Let's see how that works out. Well… when I was running for about 15 minutes I suddenly felt an acute headache. I’m diagnosed with a heavy form om Migraine so I thought ‘well this is not what I expected at the moment, let’s deal with’. Though the pain was manageable I decided to walk to my family-in-law that lives close by to the location I got the headache. When I got there they brought me home and said to call the Emergency Room. This moment I still thought it was a Migraine-attack there were no other implications thought I started to vomit and couldn’t handle light.

My partner didn’t trust it, so she called the Emergency Room. Based on her story they send an ambulance. Next thing I knew I was in the Ambulance on my way to the hospital. This was definitely not what I expected when I woke up that morning. Brought into the ER a CT-scan was made, which showed that I experienced a Subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) which is a life-threatening type of stroke caused by bleeding into the space surrounding the brain.

The protocol for this is to hospitalize you for at least 5 days and then determine if you’re able to go home. Well good news was that I was able to go home. All things that needed to work were functioning. So time to start recovery.

Enjoy small victories

The first thing I did when I was home was stepping out for a few minutes and enjoy the blessings of fresh air and just being outside. This truly was an amazing experience. Little did I know what was coming next.

Until this point all went well and I was very pleased to enjoy the ‘intocht’ of Saint Nicolas with my daughter. This experience added some nice value to our ‘Family Life’ especially because my daughter was allowed to ‘haar schoen zetten’ (this translates not so well in English – this is what little children do in Holland when St. Nicolas is around) for the very first time in her life.

The next couple of days it went better and better, although I still had some serious headaches – probably caused by the blood in my head. Everyday I walked around my hometown and was able to do some small groceries without experiencing to much trouble.

...and then it got worse

All went well until the next Wednesday. When suddenly, while taking a shower, my left leg and arm didn’t function anymore. I wasn’t able to use both of my limbs. Thankfully I remembered a commercial that’s been going around for some while in Holland. It is about people having a stroke, first signals are hanging mouth, weird speak, unable to move arm. I scored 1 out of 3 so I didn’t freak out but was well aware immediate action was necessary.

Fortunately I was able to get out of the shower, to the couch and call 1-1-2 after contacting my partner. The ambulance came and after a stop in Den Bosch I ended up in the hospital in Tilburg. Luckily a new bleeding wasn’t happening, but another rare complication was at hand, spasms of the veins that provided blood to my brain. Actually that new made my situation a lot worse. After a few hours in the hospital it became clear that I had a TIA and a stroke. My prospects at that moment were pretty horrible. The only solution at hand was to sustain a high blood pressure in order to get as much oxygen to my brains as possible in order to prevent everlasting brain damage.

Needless to say that these events (hemorrhage, TIA and stroke) didn’t add value to our Family Life when they occurred. Perhaps later on in Life I will think different about these events.

After a few days of treatment, things slowly were getting better. I was able to move my toes and execute some force with my hand. In a few days I was able to walk around and take care of myself while standing in the shower. After 10 days of being hospitalized I was ready to go home for the second time. Right in time for St. Nicolas and the 2nd birthday of my daughter. Goals I hoped to achieve when lying in a bed on the IC-unit in Tilburg. That gave us a lot of Joy!

Roadmap to recovery

From then on the real recovery-roadmap has begun. Due to the stroke it is not clear if there will be permanent damage. So order to find out, I want to try out all the things I was able to do before these events happened.

At the moment I’m luckily able to ride my road-bike and I’m able to run for 15 minutes straight. Those minor personal victories are great but the road is long. Before this I was able to run ridges in the mountains. Nice prospect to find that out again… but that’s a big goal. Things today look really positive compared to the situation at the IC-unit.

Other things that added Value to Life is not to tumble over when putting on my socks, even typing this and getting my thoughts out of my head helps in a therapeutic way I guess.

So what has this to do with the title of this piece of work ‘the importance of maintaining an everyday Agile & Lean Mindset’. I truly believe that if my partner and I didn’t possess this kind of mindset our future might look a lot more grim than it does today. We could have handled with 2 types of mindset. A fixed one and one focused on growth. The growth-mindest is the one we use to handle this and any other event in Life we didn’t expect. When trying to solve this with a fixed mindset I think a lot more tears and grief would have been involved. But life gave us bunch of lemons, we might as well make some nice lemonade out of it!

It's all about Growth

So since the day the stroke happened everyday has been about Growth. The purpose of every day is to grow and be a little bit better than yesterday. So I can grow in a skill that I’m not able to perform but was before, or grow in knowledge about the events that occurred. Or just imply grow in being a better person and try to eliminate as much waste as possible that block adding Value to our Family Life.

These events that occurred to us might seem not to be happening in your part of town. But don’t forget, these things happen on a daily basis in more companies than you think of. When building beautiful software products and releasing them. How many of those releases caused some kind of stroke in the business processes or users? Go ask yourself? Creating such strokes and being able to solve these things in a fashionable timeframe is not something every software company can achieve. It needs a Lean & Agile Mindset of all those involved.

So my advice to you is, when such events occur you have a choice… the best choice you have is to:

•  Adapt to the new situation
• Improve using the new requirements and constraints
• Change into the new environment
• Transform your behavior
• Grow your skills and mindset to a Joyful live

Hope you enjoyed this read, happy to receive feedback and to learn and grow.

On a side-note

What struck me during my stay in the hospitals was the fact that the medical professionals literally didn’t spend a lot of time on finding the root cause of the events. They accepted the fact of the situation and started solving things right away. I think in business we can learn from that to… just spend enough time as needed to find a cause and start solving the problem and prevent it from happening again.