Mindset Matters in 'Agile'

When talking to people about ‘Agile’, I've found it helps to explore early on whether they’re talking about Agile as a workflow process or an overall approach or mindset. I’m often asked 'Where do you begin – with the mindset or the method?'. 

I’m a fan of starting with the mindset, because that’s what will make sense of the method. Get the mindset right at the start and the method naturally follows.  

We can restructure our teams, divide our work into timeboxes or sprints, and add a cadence of team meetings, but if we don’t change the way we approach the work, we won’t improve our outcomes. 

I just love Marija Hajnal’s cartoon, included here. There’s so much more to ‘Agile’ than adding a standup to your workflow 😊, and it's the synchronisation that the standup enables that can make the difference, not the format of the meeting itself.

Adding an agile process into our work could be fairly straightforward, but changing the way individuals and organisations think and respond?? Now, that’s a much bigger challenge! 

Moving from ‘I’ to ‘We’ 

Anyone that’s worked with me knows that I talk a lot about moving from 'I' to 'We'. We need to stop thinking as individual professionals and shift to thinking and collaborating as a team. This isn’t always easy. From when we first set out on our career journey, we’re taught we need to excel as individuals. We have individual goals, we’re encouraged to make an individual impact, we’re trained that we need to know ‘the answers’ (as individuals), and we need to look no further than ourselves for the seeds of our progression. All of that is partly true. But only partly! 

One of the biggest challenges for any team embracing agile ways of working is to start thinking and working as a team. To acknowledge that no single one of us has the absolute answer in today’s complex world.  An Agile way of working encourages us to pool our thinking, look at challenges from different perspectives, and collaborate to find a new approach. We find a hypothesis to test and try and drive forward based on data rather than our own opinion. 

Embracing a Growth Mindset 

To be truly agile, we need to develop a growth mindset. For ourselves as individuals, for our teams, and for our organisations. 

What is a growth mindset, and how does that differ from a traditional mindset? 

The term ‘growth mindset’ comes from the work of Dr Carol Dweck and her book ‘Mindset’. If you haven’t read it, add it to your reading list! Carol Dweck highlights that being successful is not about innate skills and abilities, but about how we approach challenges, and our preparedness to grow and develop. She emphasises that modern society often implies that our talents and potential are in some way fixed at birth. We hear that someone is ‘not good at maths’. What if we simply observed they aren’t good at maths ‘yet’? 

She stresses that Thomas Edison didn’t create the lightbulb as 'a single moment of invention’ but that it came at the end of a long journey of development, with corporate funding, thirty assistants and a state-of-the-art laboratory. Likewise, James Dyson invested huge effort and commitment to learning before his success in inventing a bagless vacuum cleaner. He first started building vacuums in 1979, and it took 15 years and over 5000 attempts to perfect the design. Dweck points out we often underestimate the effort needed to learn and develop. She says: 

‘Mindset change is not about picking up a few pointers here and there. It's about seeing things in a new way. When people change to a growth mindset, they change from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework.’ 

Providing Space for Innovation

Dyson had the backup of this wife, who we’re told was prepared to be short of money to give him the space to experiment and innovate. Experimentation doesn’t bring guaranteed returns, and so in an organisational setting, people need explicit permission to try new things, to invest time and effort in development, and to continue learning. 

Psychological safety is a critical element of an agile mindset. It supports transparency and authenticity, allowing problems to be acknowledged and tackled rather than buried. I like the concept of a watermelon project. How many project dashboards have you seen that have been manipulated to appear green to stakeholders – and yet, when you cut in, they’re red. 

An agile way of working needs an agile mindset that allows for transparency to call out problems, that acknowledges ‘the answer’ may require effort and learning to emerge, and that the journey towards the desired outcome may be uncomfortable. 

We need space and psychological safety to develop and grow. We need to know we won’t be criticised if we don’t succeed, and we need to be supported to continue learning. 

Continuing to Learn 

In Carol Dweck’s book, there’s a reference to a fixed mindset as being ‘boxed in, in a stand-still world’. Our world is anything but ‘stand-still’! It’s a VUCA world, that seems increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. For organisations to survive in such a world, they need to become ‘learning organisations’ that sense and explore all around them to understand the shifting context in which they operate, so they can respond and adapt to maintain their value and relevance. 

A learning organisation invests in the development of its people, so they can grow and allow the organisation to continually evolve and transform. This is an agile mindset, where we’re targeting growth, where learning is never ‘done’, and where transformation is never complete. A fundamental principle of being agile is to expect change, and where there’s change, there’s also a need for more learning – and so the cycle continues. 

This provides an uncomfortable environment for professionals who have built their careers through their confidence in having ‘the right answers’. What if there is no longer a right answer? What if traditional ‘command and control’ leadership now needs to be replaced by something closer to the role of a gardener, who prepares the ground for others to grow? In a learning organisation, leaders support others to build their expertise and their thinking. An agile mindset has a big impact on leadership style, and you can read more about that in the Nine Principles of Agile Leadership and the nine short white papers that describe them. 

Shifting the way we think

Exploring the nature of an agile mindset makes it clear that whilst we often know what we need to do to adapt to agile ways of working – e.g. focusing on fewer tasks concurrently to release value faster, creating cross-functional teams, and so on – the greater challenge lies in shifting the way we think. The traditional mindset is often heavily ingrained within our organisations. 

Training will give us information on how an agile way of working is intended to operate, but it takes time, coaching, and commitment throughout all levels of an organisation to loosen deeply entrenched beliefs to make space for new possibilities and true innovation.

For me, this is the essence of an agile mindset and the way to create a sustainable pace of work, with stronger value delivery. 

This article is updated from an earlier version on the blog of the Agile Business Consortium , the professional body for business agility, where I'm facilitating panel discussions on Agile Leadership, Agile Culture and Agile Governance in the weeks to come.