Agility Leadership Quotes

Vision without action is a daydream, but action without vision is a nightmare.

Great ideas don’t die in the market, they die in the shower. People are too scared to pursue them because they appear crazy.

The pace and ability at which an organization is able to effectively innovate will be the determining factor of competitiveness in the future. The future is now.

There is an absolute need for organizations to innovate, grow, transform, and reinvent themselves faster than ever before.

Arming employees with the tools, know-how, and mindset needed to successfully innovate on a continual basis will be paramount to organizational survival.

Innovation is a learned organizational capability. You must train people how to innovate and navigate organizational barriers that kill off good ideas before they can be tested.

The problem with most strategic planning processes is they are not designed to create strategy. They are designed to create consistency and predictability.

Psychological pseudoscience dies hard, especially when there are commercial interests at stake.

If you don’t collect any metrics, you’re flying blind. If you collect and focus on too many, they may be obstructing your field of view.

Leaders need to sacrifice "power-over" to get "power-to".

Leaders need to correct for cognitive biases the way a sharpshooter corrects for wind velocity or a yachtsman corrects for the tide.

Mindfulness requires being a beginner. Setting absurdly high-standards, and being unwilling to be a novice, are the joint enemies of personal progress and change. Nobody benchpresses 100 kilos the first time they enter a gym.

Too few leaders have the emotional fortitude to take responsibility for failure.

Strategic coherence is more important than strategic perfection.

When business leaders talk about the next quarter, they ought to sometimes be talking about the next quarter century.

People who appear to be resisting change may simply be the victim of bad habits. Habit, like gravity, never takes a day off.

Don't let your tools become your process.

Overactive ego chakras kill objectivity, but mindfulness activates the win-win leadership chakras and brings collective and shared leadership.

Don't let Deepak Chopra manage your change program.

The best way to encourage out of the box thinking is to draw the box correctly in the first place.

The essence of extended rationality is to know when you are being irrational.

That which a team does not want to discuss, it most needs to discuss.

Just stamping out anti-science and bad science will eliminate an enormous amount of business waste

Leadership must evolve into a “science-based craft”, like surgery.

The most damaging cognitive bias is overconfidence (illusory superiority), making leaders use their “gut” when they should be more rational.

There was nothing scientific about Scientific Management (Taylorism), and neither was it good management.

Strong executive commitment is a success factor for implementing Scrum, and management can best demonstrate their support of the transformation through their actions.

Delegation is not a binary thing. There are shades of grey between a dictatorship and an anarchy.

We have minds that are equipped for certainty, linearity and short-term decisions, that must instead make long-term decisions in a non-linear, probabilistic world.

Alignment is a force multiplier.

The sword doesn't change. So you have to adapt to the sword. You can't change your surroundings. They only change once you have changed.

Team performance is directly proportional to team stability. Focus on building and maintaining a stable team. Stability reduces friction and increases credibility and confidence.

By adopting an agile mindset and providing improved engagement, collaboration, transparency, and adaptability via Scrum's values, roles, events, and artifacts, the results were excellent.

Many of the cataclysmic leadership failures were failures of rationality. The pendulum of leadership development needs to swing back toward the rational: strategy, creativity, foresight, decision-making, and analytics.

The Future of work is all about CREAM. More Consciousness, Relationships, Empathy, AdaptAgility, and Meaning. We must be building a more human-centered context for stakeholders, as opposed to JUST MORE profits for shareholders".

Stubbornness pays! We tend to think that it doesn’t, we might be hesitant to be stubborn – however only the stubborn succeed.

The notion of "business as usual" is a harmful myth.

It is time to euthanize change management.

Yesterday’s decision-making strategies are ill-equipped to deal with petabyte information flows.

Creating change-agile businesses will eliminate the need for what we today call change management.

We need leadership books that offer information as well as inspiration. Pop leadership is one of the most destructive forces today.

Humanity can not afford to have 21st Century businesses run on 20th Century science, and (worse) pseudoscience.

The change "grief cycle", for some people, may be excitement, enthusiasm, engagement, effort, and excellence.

Business is the most important institution on the planet for furthering human flourishing.

Behaviorism was a busted flush, but neo-behaviorist theories, especially choice architecture, achieve behavioral change without coercion or the downsides of carrots and sticks.

21st century leaders will be growers, not knowers.

Cyber resilience is much more than a matter of technology. Agility, balance and high level view are indispensable...

But for those that have not already attained mastery, structure and doctrine are needed because formlessness is useless to the beginner.

Risk is managed not through cautious planning but through bold experiments combined with frequent inspection, feedback, and adaptation.

High Performance Teams and Execution Speed, has no value, if you are going in the wrong direction!

If you focus on the strength of the team, you will begin to find work as a positive challenge.

A good manager focuses on managing impediments, process, team’s health, protects the boundaries of self-organizing teams, promotes a healthy culture, and helps eliminate waste.

In an era of predictable unpredictability and untamed algorithms, agility allows us to emerge in the here and now, without sacrificing our longer-term vision.

APM focuses on team management, from building self-organizing teams to developing a servant leadership style. It is both more difficult, and ultimately more rewarding than managing tasks.

While Abraham, gifted with physical agility and uncommon athletic prowess, had to make his mind, Teedie, privileged beyond measure with resources to develop his mind, had to make his body.

Your first investment should be in yourself. Learn new skills. The market can go up or down but you’ll never lose your skills. This is more true today than ever before. Diversify your skills.

USE EMOTIONS AS INFORMATION. Horses use emotion as information to engage surprisingly agile responses to environmental stimuli and relationship challenges: (a) Feel the emotion in its purest form (b) Get the message behind the emotion (c) Change something in response to the message (d) Go back to grazing. In other words, let the emotion go, and either get back on task or relax, so you can enjoy life fully. Horses don’t hang on to the story, endlessly ruminating over the details of uncomfortable situations -- from an October 30, 2013 article on the Intelligent Optimist magazine

Frame your problem statements into actionable tasks and goals that lead to a solution. Problem statements incite procrastination and resistance whereas solution statements inspire hope and motivation.

Situational leadership articulates that effective leaders are the ones able to change their behavior according to the situation at hand. It identifies leadership styles relevant to specific situations.

Pop leadership abuts pop psychology, and is very destructive. In no other serious domain of human endeavor (surgery, playing the violin) is the subject distilled down to nice-sounding aphorisms that mean nothing.

What is the difference between project management and project leadership? Although there is an elusive line between them, the core difference is that management deals with complexity, whereas leadership deals with change.

Consciously Constructive Human Capital Development, Perpetual Reinvention: innovation & Creativity, Adaptability, Resilience and Agility, are not only CORE DRIVERS, but also the DEFINING features of economic success in the 4IR.

Agile project leaders help their team balance at the edge of chaos—some structure, but not too much; adequate documentation, but not too much; some up-front architecture work, but not too much. Finding these balance points is the "art" of agile leadership.

Agile coach: The individual is an agile expert who provides guidance for new agile implementations as well as existing agile teams. The agile coach is experienced in employing agile techniques in different environments and has successfully run diverse agile projects. The individual builds and maintains relationships with everyone involved, coaches individuals, trains groups, and facilitates interactive workshops. The agile coach is typically from outside the organization, and the role may be temporary or permanent.

The function of leadership – the number-one responsibility of a leader – is to catalyze a clear and shared vision for the organization and to secure commitment to and vigorous pursuit of that vision.  This is a universal requirement of leadership.”[11] Jim Collins

Shifting customer needs are common in today's marketplace. Businesses must be adaptive and responsive to change while delivering an exceptional customer experience to be competitive. Traditional development and delivery frameworks such as waterfall are often ineffective. In contrast, Scrum is a value-driven agile approach which incorporates adjustments based on regular and repeated customer and stakeholder feedback. And Scrum’s built-in rapid response to change leads to substantial benefits such as fast time-to-market, higher satisfaction, and continuous improvement—which supports innovation and drives competitive advantage.

Only experience can refine a leader's art. High-uncertainty projects are full of anxiety, change, and ambiguity that the team must deal with. It takes a different style of project management, a different pattern of team operation, and a different type of project leader. I've labeled this type of management leadership-collaboration.

high performance starts with organizations whose leadership focuses on building an environment where people from different backgrounds and with different identities, experiences, and perspectives can feel psychologically safe working together, and where teams are given the necessary resources, capacity, and encouragement to experiment and learn together in a safe and systematic way.

I made a lot of mistakes along the way and wish I had access to the information in this book back then. Common traps were stepped in—like trying a top-down mandate to adopt Agile, thinking it was one size fits all, not focusing on measurement (or the right things to measure), leadership behavior not changing, and treating the transformation like a program instead of creating a learning organization (never done).

A value-added step in a process is defined by three characteristics. First, the step must be something that the customer is willing to pay for. Second, the step must directly change the form, fit, or function of something to produce a product or service. The final characteristic of a value-added step is that it is so important that it must be done right every time to successfully produce the intended product or service.

It is not loyalty or internal motivation that drives us programmers forward. We must write our code when the road to our personal success is absolutely clear for us and writing high quality code obviously helps us move forward on this road. To make this happen, the management has to define the rules of the game, also known as "process", and make sure they are strictly enforced, which is much more difficult than "being agile".

Saying that “the business is IT’s customer, and the customer is always right” seems like a good idea when there is deep dissatisfaction with IT that stems from a long history of unreliable service. But over the long term, this value trap sets up the IT unit for failure because customers are often wrong (especially about matters in which they are not experts), and calling colleagues “customers” puts a wedge between IT and the rest of the business.9

The most important element of leadership effectiveness is authentically living the Vision of the company.  The values and ambitions of a company are not instilled entirely by what leaders say; they’re instilled primarily by what leaders do.  In a healthy company, there are no inconsistencies between what is said and what is believed deep down – the values come from within the leaders and imprint themselves on the organization through day-to-day activity.

DevOps requires potentially new cultural and management norms and changes in our technical practices and architecture. This requires a coalition that spans business leadership, Product Management, Development, QA, IT Operations, Information Security, and even Marketing, where many technology initiatives originate. When all these teams work together, we can create a safe system of work, enabling small teams to quickly and independently develop and validate code that can be safely deployed to customers. This results in maximizing developer productivity, organizational learning, high employee satisfaction, and the ability to win in the marketplace.

Heracles was the strongest man who ever lived. No human, and almost no immortal creature, ever subdued him physically. With uncomplaining patience he bore the trials and catastrophes that were heaped upon him in his turbulent lifetime. With his strength came, as we have seen, a clumsiness which, allied to his apocalyptic bursts of temper, could cause death or injury to anyone who got in the way. Where others were cunning and clever, he was direct and simple. Where they planned ahead he blundered in, swinging his club and roaring like a bull. Mostly these shortcomings were more endearing than alienating. He was not, as the duping Atlas and the manipulation of Hades showed, entirely without that quality of sense, gumption and practical imagination that the Greeks called 'nous'. He possessed saving graces that more than made up for his exasperating faults. His sympathy for others and willingness to help those in distress was bottomless, as were the sorrow and shame that overcame him when he made mistakes and people got hurt. He proved himself prepared to sacrifice his own happiness for years at a stretch in order to make amends for the (usually unintentional) harm he caused. His childishness, therefore, was offset by a childlike lack of guile or pretence as well as a quality that is often overlooked when we catalogue the virtues: fortitude -the capacity to endure without complaint. For all his life he was persecuted, plagued and tormented by a cruel, malicious and remorseless deity pursuing a vendetta which punished him for a crime for which he could be in no way held responsible- his birth. No labour was more Heraclean than the labour of being Heracles. In his uncomplaining life of pain and persistence, in his compassion and desire to do the right thing, he showed, as the American classicist and mythographer Edith Hamilton put it, 'greatness of soul'. Heracles may not have possessed the pert agility and charm of Perseus and Bellerophon, the intellect of Oedipus, the talent for leadership of Jason or the wit and imagination of Theseus, but he had a feeling heart that was stronger and warmer than any of theirs.

SEVEN CHANGE MASTERY SHIFTS • Change Mastery Shift 1: From Problem Focus to Opportunity Focus. Effective leaders tend to perceive and to innovate on the opportunities inherent in change. • Change Mastery Shift 2: From Short-Term Focus to Long-Term Focus. Effective leaders don’t lose sight of their long-term vision in the midst of change. • Change Mastery Shift 3: From Circumstance Focus to Purpose Focus. Effective leaders maintain a clear sense of purpose, value, and meaning to rise above immediate circumstances. • Change Mastery Shift 4: From Control Focus to Agility Focus. Effective leaders understand that control is a management principle that yields a certain degree of results. However, agility, flexibility, and innovation are leadership principles that sustain results over the long haul. • Change Mastery Shift 5: From Self-Focus to Service. Effective leaders buffer their teams and organizations from the stress of change by managing, neutralizing, and/or transcending their own stress. • Change Mastery Shift 6: From Expertise Focus to Listening Focus. Effective leaders stay open and practice authentic listening to stay connected with others and to consider multiple, innovative solutions. • Change Mastery Shift 7: From Doubt Focus to Trust Focus. Effective leaders are more secure in themselves; they possess a sense that they can handle whatever may come their way; their self-awareness and self-trust are bigger than the circumstances of change.

The IT leader must have the courage to own outcomes.

Agile Methodology: Learn from how terror networks work. AGILE methodology is about being able to iterate and reiterate till you get it right. You are always at the start and the end at the same time till the launch. You are more nimble than the waterfall method and more resourceful than the lean method.

Building emotional agility: 1. “Label your thoughts and emotions” My coworker is wrong—he makes me so angry becomes I’m having the thought that my coworker is wrong, and I’m feeling anger. 2. Accept them “The anger was a signal that something important was at stake and that he needed to take productive action. Instead of yelling at people, he could make a clear request of a colleague or move swiftly on a pressing issue. The more Jeffrey accepted his anger and brought his curiosity to it, the more it seemed to support rather than undermine his leadership.” 3. Act on your values “We encourage leaders to focus on the concept of workability: Is your response going to serve you and your organization in the long term as well as the short term? Will it help you steer others in a direction that furthers your collective purpose? Are you taking a step toward being the leader you most want to be and living the life you most want to live?

Surprisingly, this divergence continues despite the deep influence of Agile and Lean thinking on general—that is, non-IT—management. The disciplines continue to evolve separately even though corporate strategy is increasingly about both agility and IT strategy. The two worlds do not converge, even though IT leadership books advise CIOs to pull themselves closer to strategy formulation and claim a “seat at the table.” But while the other C-level executives around the table are discussing the need for agility, senior IT leaders, eager to gain or retain a seat at the strategy table, are pursuing the path of demonstrating the value of IT ... by locking in old-school practices that encourage rigidity.

In traditional performance management models, working teams present to leadership in performative, high-stakes monthly or quarterly reviews. By keeping these reviews on such an infrequent cadence, both sides can lose sight of what the real purpose of the review is: to support and sustain the work, and to ensure that everyone is moving together toward the desired results. Such an approach is ill-suited to the ecosystem economy. When you have agile tribes, chapters, and squads working on dynamic, cross-sectoral value propositions, you need to push your performance management process toward a much more frequent operating cadence.

In the agile model, and especially in the context of the servant leadership mindset, it is not uncommon to have weekly or even more frequent check-ins—not in a punitive or adversarial way, but simply to find whatever roadblocks are standing in the team's way and to ensure that everyone has what they need to move forward.

After considering what gets covered, you will need to turn your attention to who is involved in the performance management cycle. Traditional performance management models are typically formal and hierarchical—and often involve only the senior management or leadership team. When you're setting up performance management for the ecosystem economy, you need a less hierarchical, more project-oriented, more results-oriented model. You need to involve not just senior management, but also people from all levels within your agile model (e.g., tribes, chapters, and squads). Involving more of the team not only creates a more streamlined and efficient process, but also facilitates an unfiltered flow of information. Management gets an opportunity to hear an unfiltered report straight from the team members who will be best equipped to give it. And the team members get an opportunity to receive feedback and instruction straight from management, without anything getting lost in translation as the information passed through two or three levels of hierarchy and bureaucracy.

The GAP, or divide, between... Knowing and Doing, is only crossed by people who can effectively, and positively, manage their emotional state, and their inner RESPONSES to the outside world.

1 Minute Wisdom for Success: To Succeed in the world of business, requires one to create the most RELEVANT, and meaningful, value, and promote it, effectively, to those who have the need/interest, and capacity, to transact.

We can list more than 20 dimensions we’ve found in successful leaders: the ability to create a vision, thinking strategically, building influential internal and external networks, courage to make tough decisions, and so on. Successful leadership is multidimensional for sure. But most of the traits of successful leaders can be distilled down to two elements. They know how to: bring multiple teams together make great decisions And these two elements have a lot to do with whether organizations are agile.

Most people's BIG PICTURE focus, is still way too small to understand reality, make intelligent decisions, and take SWIFT Actions, that ENSURE long-term Success.

Thinking of small tiny improvements would be exhausting if not impossible from the leadership team. Hence it has to happen at micro level, at each team level to control their own product & their own destiny. They are the closest, they know more about it.

Faithful leadership isn’t about sticking to your plans when you should abandon them. Instead, it’s about being willing to question them and be questioned in pursuit of them, then course correct where necessary. 

Unmanaged” deconstructs the discipline of management and makes the compelling case that knowledge workers perform much more effectively for “Humble Gardeners” than “Angry Ranchers.” With decades of experience working with hundreds of professional service firms, Jack Skeels presents a convincing case for how the chronically misunderstood agile framework can produce transformational results.

High Performance teams disrupt themselves to be future future and increase AdaptAgility. Fear based teams driven by greed protect the status quo, to be safe....but it's clearly not a safe smart approach to retain the status quo.

Agile is not your goal—it’s only the best way to achieve your goals.

Educate your team on the usefulness of conflict as a signal for change and normalize conflict as part of change and evolution. Examples of language for this might be: “Conflicts in teams are normal. They are signals for change, and they indicate that something new wants to emerge. They point us to the need to innovate.” This softens the emotional field and creates openness for exploration.

Are you a ‘Listening Organization?’ Organizations that execute constant feedback loops from customers, vendors, and employees will have a competitive advantage in staying agile and evolving. Building systems to ensure that your firm is empathetic and open-minded is critical to your survival and growth.

One of Amazon’s leadership principles applies here: Disagree, then commit. The notion of disagreeing, and then committing, can be a pragmatic approach for causing an honest dialogue because with this notion, you are explicitly stating the expectation that there will be disagreement.

If I have to motivate you, I’m spending too much leadership time and leadership energy on the raw materials. Each employee needs to bring the raw materials: the energy, the enthusiasm, the professionalism, the drive. The leader creates an environment where people can do great work in service of something bigger than themselves. This environment includes projects that are meaningful and valuable. The leader brings the work to the right people.

Let’s consider changing the word “motivated” to “inspired.” Here’s why: if your challenge as the leader is to motivate people, I would argue that you’ve got the wrong people. People who need daily motivating require a cheerleader; your role as the leader is not to lead cheers. Your role is to create an environment where each individual can do great work in service of something bigger than themselves. Creating such an environment requires that you as the leader have and can articulate a compelling vision of the future and a compelling vision of the value of the work that you’re asking your team to do. Creating such an environment requires that you as the leader can articulate the value that each person on the team brings to that team. Creating such an environment requires that you as the leader understand what “value” means to each person on your team, how they define it, how they view it, where they see it, and where they don’t see it. You as the leader need to know, and enable, each person on your team to connect themselves to the value of the work in front of them. That’s inspirational leadership.

stories. It is unimportant, disregard

It has been said that we have been given two ears and only one mouth, so we should listen twice as much as we talk. Listening is an art form, and asking questions is a tool to active listening. Yet, asking

Leadership – inborn or learnt? The case for situational leadership