Agile4Life
By Aaron Kraft
Agile4LifeJun 14, 2021
Agile Habit Forming
On today’s episode Moriah and Aaron consider the importance of habits in an agile life. Charles Duhigg wrote a book called The Power of Habit where he helps his readers better understand how habits are formed and how they can impact our lives in all the best ways.
How do we create habits in an agile manner? We do so iteratively, over a period of time, getting fast feedback to know how it’s going, and various other intersections between the ideas of agile and habits.
Often times we think of breaking bad habits, but those need to be replaced with the good patterns of behavior. How do we finally get what we want to do engrained? How does biology impact this and how does relate to learned patterns of behavior?
Links to resources mentioned in the podcast.
Agile at Scale
On today’s podcast we are going to talk to our next guest, Bernard Williams, about his experience developing scaled agile, meaning agile when you want to practice agile on a grander scale then just a single team. This is often the case when there are lots of moving pieces, when one thing is dependent on another, when timing is complex, and you need a birdseye view of all the complexities.
Moriah and Bernard met recently at a training session covered SAFe, which stands for Scaled Agile Framework. This is an approach to applying the Agile principles we talk about each week when things get really big.
For our listeners who are more interested in personal agile this episode will probably lean a little more toward professional agile. So we’ll understand if this isn’t your cup of tea. That said, things can get pretty complex in our personal lives so maybe there will be some nuggets for you if you keep listening.
What is Business Agility?
Without an understanding of Business Agility it makes it difficult for organzations to adapt and change to the world around us.
In today's podcast we're going to be talking about Business Agility as a pivitol piece in our successes. We discuss the definition of Business Agility as found in this Wikipedia post, defined below, and how we can use this in our everyday life.
Business agility refers to rapid, continuous, and systematic evolutionary adaptation and entrepreneurial innovation directed at gaining and maintaining competitive advantage.[1] Business agility can be sustained by maintaining and adapting the goods and services offered to meet with customer demands, adjusting to the marketplace changes in a business environment, and taking advantage of available human resources.[2] In a business context, agility is the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways. An extension of this concept is the agile enterprise, which refers to an organization that uses key principles of complex adaptive systems and complexity science to achieve success.[3] Business agility is the outcome of organizational intelligence.
Thank you for listening,
Aaron and Moriah
Why we must be emotionally agile to be successful
Without healthy emotional control in our lives we won't accomplish everything else we want to do. On today’s podcast we’re going to be talking about emotional control as a critical factor for our agility.
4 areas where emotional control or the lack there of can positively or negatively impact things
- Decision making
- Relationship success
- Day to day interactions
- Self care - physical and mental health
Cole, Michel, Teti, Emotional Regulation is “the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with the range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed” (Cole, P. M., Michel, M. K., & Teti, L. O. (1994). The development of emotion regulation and dysregulation: A clinical perspective.)
Crystal Raypole lays out a variety of ways to achieve that healthy emotional balance. We won’t talk about all of them today, but I’ll put the link to the article in our show notes. https://www.healthline.com/health/how-to-control-your-emotions
- Learn to identify what emotions you are experiencing.
- Learn to regulate not repress
- Know when to express yourself and with whom
- Give yourself space as needed
If you or someone you know is struggling with emotions or general mental health please reach out to someone. Your personal well-being is far more important than anything else. While we're not trained to provide that support, we would be very happy to connect with the right person if you want.
Sincerely,
Moriah and Aaron
Continuously Improving through Accountability
In today’s episode Moriah interviews Aaron about the idea of accountability, linking it with responsibility. These two pillars are foundational for a successful life, personally and professional.
But how? Accountability and responsibility are like two sides of the same coin and the metal that it’s made of is transparency.
Are you willing to be transparent so can be accountable for the goals you want to achieve in life or will you simply tell yourself that everything is great and you don’t need anyone’s input?
Personality is clearly a factor. These concepts will be easier for some than others. Listen to Aaron & Moriah pretend to be psychologists (apologies to real psychologists). What’s the difference between changing habits vs changing behavior?
We need meaningful mechanisms for accountability to stay on task and do the hard work that is truly important. Let’s not waste time. If we’re just going to tell ourselves or others what we want to hear, like “oh yeah, I’m making lots of progress” then we’ve lost before we’ve even begun.
All of this requires we be open to receiving feedback from other people who have a different perspective, setting our egos aside in order to be our best selves, teams, and organizations.
For more information check out our blog at agile4life.com
Are email, chat, and texts making things worse?
Productive Planning
#4 How do we get from here to there?
We don't know about you, but we want to great things with our lives and that's not really possible if we don't have a well executed plan. On this episode Moriah and Aaron talk about what's its like to make plans that get us toward our personal and professional goals.
Don’t just do work for work’s sake. There's that great bit in the movie Office Space where the obnoxious boss is so focused on the creation of the TPS reports. But who cares? Is anyone using them? Or are they simply doing work for work's sake.
Instead we need to live life with intentionality, with purpose. Productive planning can help fill our lives with achievements and accomplishments. Life without a plan doesn’t produce much value professionally or personally.
How are we going to track if we’re getting where we want to go? Focusing on the bigger picture establishes the horizon so we know where we want to go. Small plans align to larger plans. Companies have a strategic direction, we should have those same kinds of strategic goals for our personal lives as well.
Hear Moriah talking about not getting stuck in the “lazy pool” of life. Lots to consider on this topic. We hope you enjoy it!
For this an many other topics check us out at agile4life.com
Tackling Complex Problems
In today's Agile4Life Podcast we interview longtime friend George Westwater. George is a solutions architect who has worked on technology projects for some of the largest companies in America.
In addition to being an amazing technologist, George is also passionate about transformation. When thinking of how to approach a solution he starts with the people part before diving into either the process or technology needs.
Some of the themes covered are: How do we break down complex problems to make them solvable? How do we know what the real problem is that we need to solve? How does this impact the way large technology companies approach architecture? And will George ever get his hydroponic garden?
We hope you enjoy and as always you can find more information at our website www.agile4life.com
Thanks!
Moriah & Aaron
Course Corrections
The very agile Moriah suggested the idea for this podcast. It started out as "test your hypothesis" and evolved into the idea of making those small, agile course corrections necessary to get you where you want to go as quickly and painlessly as possible. In this episode we take another pass at a definition of agile that applies to both our personal and professional lives and then talk about the difference between our goals and how we go about achieving them.
We finally agiled our way into a podcast!
Moriah and Aaron introduce themselves and talk a little about how life brought them to this agile mindset. What started at work has quickly spilled over into the rest of their lives.