Agile Thinking: Raising Awareness for Better Collaboration

Thinking agile is a paradigm shift that requires active balancing to keep it there. This cannot be overstated and is often under recognized as true by the person making the shift or balancing to stay there. Throughout life all of us have mastered various aspects of agile thinking and we are indeed wired for this type of thinking. However, paradigms reinforced by educational systems, hierarchically dominated work structures, pursuit of hero’s to save the day, belief in finding only the right people as well as aging are constantly pressuring us to adopt rigid thought models. I always agree with myself. What we find is that when we effectively engage others to do something our thought processes become challenged and we are encouraged to seek models of thought that are useful for a given situation. If we are not part of an effective team we would not feel safe enough to help each other challenge ourselves. This presentation points out techniques and thought patterns for mastery that when used collectively can lead to broad shift in perspective; we might call this a tipping point. Successful product development is a haven for agile thinking. Our ability to collaborate, explore, effectively managing time and energy, dig into the right things at the right time, enjoy our work, build quality product, please our stakeholders and create products that “WOW” is agile thinking aimed.

The ideas presented on agile thinking can be successfully adopted by individuals as well as teams. When teams adopt these agile thought processes we have observed a doubling of team productivity within one or two cycles. Individuals claim similar increases in personal ability. In either case the thought process has been the key to successfully ramping up of complex product development capability. Participants will leave with a map of places to explore, specific applied examples and ideas to consider.

Process / Mechanics:

If this is delivered presented to a large audience (50+) then it would be classic presentation with light Q&A encouraged throughout.

I would like to break this up into small group discussions (5-7 at a table) and then shift back to larger group summary. This format allows participants to personalize the information presented with a stronger feeling of value. I can orchestrate this well only for groups less than 45.  

Ideal, would be to add a co-presenter that would deliver with me (I have someone in mind). Then we would demonstrate agile thinking through an interactive dialog and we could handle a larger format for small group discussion break out with large group summary (60-70 folks with small group discussions).

Groups larger than 70+ would be a lively interactive dialog with the co-presenter and light Q&A from the audience.