Leadership Agility 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 correct for cognitive biases the way a sharpshooter corrects for wind velocity or a yachtsman corrects for the tide.

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

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.

Don't let your tools become your process.

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

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

Strategic coherence is more important than strategic perfection.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Don't let Deepak Chopra manage your change program.

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

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

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

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

Alignment is a force multiplier.

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

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".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is time to euthanize change management.

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.

21st century leaders will be growers, not knowers.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

three mortal leadership sins (i.e. not walking the talk, leading from power and not authority and assuming agreement) that can derail even the most adept and agile of leaders. 

Remember that these are the same project executors that we chose to execute the project—presumably because we believed we could trust them to make good decisions. They were probably trained, or at least hired, by the enterprise to make sure they had the right skills. So when the project is off schedule, is it natural to first suspect those project executors?

The first servant-leader in any successful organization is its founder.

It is difficult for IT to gain a seat at the table when IT is always failing, but on the other hand, an IT leader who is reacting to statistical noise—failures that he or she has already chosen to accept—is destroying business value. An IT leader must have the necessary technical skills, make impeccable decisions under uncertainty, and then have the courage to face the consequences.

There is no a priori reason that IT cannot lead the business’s digital transformation. The fact that organizations widely don’t believe this suggests that there is something wrong with the way we have been defining IT.

a way, the Agile community is suffering from the same insecurity as the CIO community. While CIOs feel that they need to justify their existence and claim a seat at the table, the Agile community is stuck on the idea that it has no place until dramatic cultural and organizational changes happen.†

My fellow IT leaders, we must use these new Agile, Lean, and DevOps practices as a lever for changing the relationship between IT and the rest of the business. We

believe that this is simpler than it sounds. It is about identifying the obstacles in our way and taking today’s best-practice ideas—those found in the Agile Manifesto and in books like Lean Startup, Lean Software Development, Lean Enterprise, The DevOps Handbook, and others on today’s management bookshelves—and applying them to IT leadership.

I have discussed the challenge of defining business value in The Art of Business Value; even more challenging in this case is defining what we mean by business value delivered by IT. Business value is delivered by the enterprise with support from IT—IT is part of a whole, a complex system in which its ability to deliver value depends on factors outside of IT. The only way that IT can deliver business value itself is through cost-cutting within the IT cost structure—in all other cases that I can think of, IT is delivering product that might or might not then be used by someone else to deliver business value.

In the long-distant past, we were taught that IT was the keeper of technology and that IT leaders were service-providers to the rest of the business. Their job was to stay aligned with business strategy, taking orders from the business and delivering new systems. If they kept the systems running and delivered new projects on time, then all was good. That time is over, and has been for many years.25

Obsessed with proving that it deserves a seat at the table, IT leadership continues to frame its problems in the same old ways—oblivious to the deep changes brought on by the Agile revolution—while the Agile world, ever suspicious of management, proceeds as if it can manage without the involvement of IT leaders.

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

DevOps simply adds the idea that small, cross-functional teams should own the entire delivery process from concept through user feedback and production monitoring.

cumulative flow diagrams help us pinpoint process flaws;

The leadership team would then spend most of their days walking the floor trying to understand where we were struggling and why. This is a new role for most executives and one we encourage executives to embrace if this process is going to be successful. We

Some of the same forces have come to bear in the business world, where many companies in thriving talent-dependent industries embraced a new workplace ethos in which hierarchies were softened and office floor plans were reengineered to break down the walls that once kept management and talent separated. One emerging school of thought, popular among technology companies in Silicon Valley, is that organizations should adopt “flat” structures, in which management layers are thin or even nonexistent. Star employees are more productive, the theory goes, and more likely to stay, when they are given autonomy and offered a voice in decision-making. Some start-ups have done away with job titles entirely, organizing workers into leaderless “self-managing teams” that report directly to top executives. Proponents of flatness say it increases the speed of the feedback loop between the people at the top of the pyramid and the people who do the frontline work, allowing for a faster, more agile culture of continuous improvement. Whether that’s true or not, it has certainly cleared the way for top executives to communicate directly with star employees without having to muddle through an extra layer of management. As I watched all this happen, I started to wonder if I was really writing a eulogy. Just as I was building a case for the crucial value of quiet, unglamorous, team-oriented, workmanlike captains who inhabit the middle strata of a team, most of the world’s richest sports organizations, and even some of its most forward-thinking companies, seemed to be sprinting headlong in the opposite direction.

In our highly disjointed world at VeraComm, where functions don’t communicate well and don’t significantly collaborate, we fail to improve as a whole. Everybody seeks opportunities for improvement, but because we’re separated from each other, the best we can do is improve our individual step in the process and no more. We fail to understand that problems at one step can be caused by fundamental issues at another. And with learning cycles as slow as ours–pretty much equal to the frequency of releasing, every eight or ten months–we just can’t learn. Cause and effect are so widely separated from each other on the timeline that we simply cannot connect the dots. •

Donald Reinertsen’s book The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development

Kanban is David Anderson’s

Jeff Patton in User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product,

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?

Impact

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. 

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.

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.

The best leaders think broadly and act directly. The best leaders articulate a clear and compelling vision. The best leaders model the ethics and the values and the behaviors that the company stands for. “As the leadership goes in this regard, so goes the health of the company” (Interview with Mike Irizarry, 12/19/22). The best leaders deliver.

Leaders act. The best leaders bring people together, and they engage with them. These leaders work to establish an organizational routine of connecting with customers, their peers, and their teams. They engage resources and connect them—see Leadership is conjunctive above—and they enable new and unexpected or unanticipated or even unimagined outcomes.