Little deeds of Kindness, little words of Love …. Little acts of “being agile”, showers happiness from Above ….

I’m not very good at writing poetry but just tried to make something rhyming. Though it did mean a lot to me. It has been more than 4 months, I’m at home and working online from home, much like everyone else. We say, “we are all in this together” and everything around has taught me to appreciate little things.

We talk about big Agile Transformations and perhaps miss the small happiness that it’s bringing in our everyday lives. Just after COVID-19 started, I lost my major contracts because of uncertain situations that everyone was foreseeing.

I moved completely to online training, which was quite a change. However, “being agile” helped me to embrace the change. I learned to be more patient with people who log in to a wrong Zoom link or think it’s another timezone. I make those mistakes too at times and see that people are patient with me too. It’s not only me, but all of us are learning to embrace change and still be happy.

We create working agreements at the beginning of the class. Among other agreements, I always remind everyone, “we are all at home and we know that we are not alone, we have kids and we have pets and we have other people who might just need our attention so please don’t be embarrassed and please don’t mind if someone shows up.” Everyone becomes happy and comfortable hearing that and brings themselves completely to the training instead of worrying about looking perfect. We even had some kids coming to us during the training and saying “hello” to everyone, some even telling us some jokes. Everyone smiles and laughs and understands “we are all in this together, so let’s enjoy together”.

People from all over the world join my training - people from Japan, China, Spain, Peru, Argentina, Ecuador, Germany, The Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, India, Australia, South Africa, United Kingdom, Middle East, Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand and many more, everyone speaking English differently. Once we even had one of the participants presenting in Spanish even when none of the others knew Spanish. Everyone enjoyed, including the speaker, with full respect for each other. I even had people sing me “Happy Birthday” song in different languages when I was teaching a class on my Birthday. That was the most beautiful gift. These people join from different timezone. For some, it would be evening or maybe a late night or early morning. It’s fun to say “Good Morning” to some and “Good Evening” to others at the same time. I love the most when people empathize with someone who had been awake for the whole night to attend the class. It’s amazing how we are able to coordinate and synchronize lunch times and dinner times for people in different parts of the world.

Not everyone is tech-savvy, so people help each other to use Zoom and Collaboration Tools like Miro and Mural during the training. Everyone waits patiently for those who take a little while to get used to the tools. There is a “kid” like “smile” and excitement on people’s faces when they are able to make some shapes and add some stickies on the Virtual Boards for the first time.

The Internet is often not stable, and people take care to ensure that all their classmates are there and help them recover if someone misses out anything.

There are so many things to share and I’m sure most of you are realizing the same. It’s amazing to watch how everyone is not only becoming more flexible but also more tolerant and sharing the space with others and becoming a Global Family.

In the end, I just want to summarize that this pandemic has brought out the real agility in us. It’s not about “Agility in the Enterprise”, it’s about “AGILITY IN OUR EVERYDAY LIVES”.