The mindsets and practices you need to lead an agile organization successfully

An agile mindset translates into an agile way of thinking (Barve, 2022). For a software development department, it may mean responding quickly to change, while for a business it may mean treating those features as a hypothesis and treating those based on a user’s feedback.

McKinsey (2018) argues that an agile mindset is not easy for leaders of an agile organisation, who above all, may make a profound personal shift in their mind-sets, from reactive to creative.

Socialized reactive, or socialized agile mind-sets are an outside-in way of experiencing the world based on reacting to an organisation’s circumstances, other people’s expectations of it and its leadership. Organizations default to this mode when challenged, which limits our perspective, focuses us on what can go awry, and causes feelings of anxiety, fear, frustration, and stress McKinsey (2018).

Creative, or self-authoring agile mind-sets are an inside-out way of experiencing the world based on creating organisational reality and way forward through tapping into and expressing our authentic selves, our core passion and purpose. Being “in the creative” expands an organisation’s perspective and focuses us on the positive, leading to the experience of feelings such as joy, fun, love, and flow.

According to Denning (2009), the features of practitioners with an agile mindset include:

● Getting work done in small self-organizing teams, and collaborating together in an interactive network.

● Practitioners with an agile mindset are preoccupied — and sometimes obsessed — with innovating and delivering steadily more customer value.

● Developing capacity to adapt rapidly to a quickly shifting marketplace.

An example of an organization that focuses on an agile mindset is Amazon, the American software Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) multi-national that retails products such as books and groceries online. In 2007, Amazon launched Kindle, the digital e-reader, which was the first of its kind to change the way that people would read and publish e-books, notes Bhatia (2020). It also marked the first foray by Amazon into a new hardware product category. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, envisioned that he wanted an e-reader to include wireless connectivity so that it could be easier for the readers to download the books from the digital book store anywhere, any time of the day. He instructed the designers to design the Kindle as a single-purpose device in a way that it marries a BlackBerry phone and a book. It took the design and engineering team at Amazon three years to build the e-reader. It was a secretive project that was unknown to most of the Amazon employees. Prior to its launch, Bezos wanted to launch the device with a bigger catalogue of e-Books. He, however, was challenged in convincing publishers to stock their books on Kindle. On November 19, 2007, Bezos launched the Kindle in the state of New York, in the United States of America (U.S.A), having 90,000 e-Books that were sold out in 5.5 hours.

Taskworld.com states that the agile mind set focuses on four values, that is:

● Accountability.

● Being adaptive to change, learning cycles and improvement.

● Collaboration.

● Respect.

Steps to consider for an organisation wishing to adapt an agile mindset:

● Change yourself first, then the organisation.

● When do you show up with a reactive mind-set? When do you show up with a creative mind-set?

● How might you choose mind-sets of abundance, discovery, and partnership more frequently?

● What would be the impact on you and those around you?

● What disciplined practices might you adopt to be in a creative mind-set?

Written by Caroline Theuri