Personal Agility - Why and How

As we step into the second decade of the 21st century, and continue living in a VUCA (Volatile Uncertain Complex Ambiguous) world, we are continuously inundated with change, and human endeavors. What matters to us, what our priorities are, and what makes a big impact are our major concerns. 'Success today requires the agility to constantly rethink, reinvigorate, react and reinvent'- Bill Gates.

Personal Agility is a simple framework for people who want to do more that matters and have more impact through their actions.  This framework enables you to reflect upon yourself and your goals at a regular interval, so as to make sure that you do the right things first, and discard the things that are of less importance.

Personal Agility is based on the same Agile values and principles as Scrum, but, it emphasizes more on the fact that organizing your life is a different challenge than creating products as a Scrum team.

Similar to the questions you ask on a Daily Scrum Meeting, ‘What did you do yesterday?’ ‘What will you do today?’ and ‘Are there any obstacles in achieving your work?’ the following questions could be asked to yourself to reflect upon the things that are important to you.

·       What is important and urgent to you?

·       What do you want to achieve?

·       What do you want to do today?

Remember, that this could always be reflected with Peter Druker’s five most important questions.

·       What is your mission?

·       Who is your customer?

·       What does your customer value?

·       What are your results?

·       What is your plan?

 Few years back, while I set my spirit high for bush walking, I got trapped in an appalling situation. I got lost in a jungle, in New South Wales, Australia. I was alone, and there was no way I could fail, if I wanted to come out of the jungle, alive. I was my own product owner, my own coach and had my own one man army team then. There was nothing much that I could do, than to inspect and adapt to the situation I was in. I couldn’t follow anyone, nor could I have anyone who could mentor me to come out of the situation, as I was my own lead, leading my own autonomous team, with a headstrong purpose, finding my way to achieve mastery. Who I was, was a reflection of what I did. The decisions I made while traversing the jungle was what really mattered to me, and those were the only urgent and important things to me at that point of time. I worked on my priority map then, to meet my one and only goal- to have a safe exit from the jungle.

Similarly, this could be worked out in your daily lives. You could set aside some time for yourselves where you could reflect upon yourselves, your goals, your priority map, things that needed urgent attention, things that you wanted to accomplish today, and things you want to do this week. You could reflect upon your past, what went wrong last week, how could you have made it better, what could you have done differently, and so on. These powerful questions would help you to recognize your priorities and refocus on the things that matter. One voice, your own voice is enough for you to answer ‘why?’

How could you practice achieving Personal Agility then?

·       Adopt a growth mindset

·       Embrace change

·       Inspect and adapt

·       Become your own celebration coach

·       Celebrate success

·       Prioritize your work

·       Produce something of value at regular intervals

By investing in your personal well being, you would be more confident, strong and healthy, which in turn would cleanse your mind and consciously make you aware of your internal self, which would protect you from unnecessary stress and anxiety. Personal Agility will help you to deal with your personal and professional life in a better pace and experience.