The Agile Mindset in Practice, December 6-7 2018
Two-day practical leadership development training, on being an Agile Leader.
Has leading in today’s agile world become overly complex? Do you feel overwhelmed when people look to you to navigate and explain this complexity to them? While we cannot get away from a certain amount of increasing complexity in our environments, we can learn how to avoid making it more complex than it needs to be! To do this, we propose a set of agile mindset practices that can both help release unnecessary complexity, and from the increased clarity that comes from this, to better navigate complex adaptive systems.
An ongoing challenge is that people, early in their agile leadership journey, start by doing agile practices – scrum meetings, kanban boards etc. While these can lead to improvements, they often run into problems or plateau later on, when deeper patterns of thought and behavior become limiting factors. What you learn eventually is that these external changes in practice do not overcome the internal practices and habits of thought. You need to move from externally focused doing, to an internal focus of being agile in your mindset.
In the same way, underneath various approaches to leadership (e.g. servant leadership, transformational leadership, Agile leadership), there are a simple set of mindset practices that can enable and improve all of these external practices and tools about leadership. These mindset practices are clear, simple and high leverage and will improve your agility and ability to act on ideas, improve communication, foster ongoing learning etc. These habits of mind can be learned and become robust tools for ongoing agile improvements in our core mental operating systems.
Course Methods
The two-day event will be a laboratory where you can practice working on specific mindset tools. You will experience a combination of brief inputs with iterative case applications. This will sequentially build a capacity to make important distinctions in the connection between your thinking and your doing. The event will involve iterations of learning that continuously build on what you learn at each step. You will practice developing a more agile mind, meaning that you will learn practices for making sure you focus your attention on things that matter!
Learning outcomes
You will learn to:
- Notice, slow down and refine your automatic patterns of thinking
- Learn how to design and implement your own virtuous cycles of learning
- Work with the principle of discernment to identify value flow creation
- Learn how to improve your ability to notice and regulate attention
- Learn to notice the connection between your inner condition and intentions, and how these form attractors and influence complex adaptive systems
- Learn how to identify and release unnecessary complexity
- Learn to identify how you collude with others to create the actual systems you have
Targeted to:
Agile leaders and managers, Agile coaches, consultants and change/transformation agents.
Prerequisite:
Managerial or coaching experience with Agile practices and change initiatives.
