"How can I make my company realize that they are NOT agile?"

I just got an email from a company called agile42 that I talked with at Mile High Agile. I was really just looking for a good place to save this for my own use, but figerd that agile42 wouldn't mind if I gave them some free advertising by sharing it here.

Q: How can I make my company realize that they are NOT agile when they say they are?

agile42 Insight:
This is a great question and one we often get from the community. If a company is saying "We're all good, we're agile now!", it likely means they're looking at it as a binary measure - that they simply areor are not agile. In this case, convincing someone that they are not something they claim to beis difficult, because it feels like failure. Instead, we prefer to think of it like a spectrum. Some might think of it as a journey and most organizations are somewhere between "We need to get started" and "We've reached our destination".

One way to have this conversation at any level of the organization is to have people reflect on the 12 Agile Principles and then rank them in order of how strongly they are living them.

1. First, select the top 3 strongest and bottom 3 weakest.
2. Next, go through the 3 strongest principles and identify two or three concrete things the organization does that makes them good at those principles.
3. Finally, go through the weakest 3 (opportunities for improvement if you'd like a less negative connotation). Identify two or three concrete things that might improve these principles.

• Through this method, you get a list of improvements that either shore up weak spots or double down on strengths - either way, they all make your company more agile!

Easter At Home?

It's strange to be home at Easter. Jen and I are almost always in Vegas on this weekend for Viva Las Vegas. Because of Easter falling early this year, VLV doesn't begin for another few weeks. It isn't so strange that I wrote a very similar post to this four years ago when we were on our way to VLV.

It isn't strange because I feel this way every year this time, a feeling of hope and renewal. Maybe it comes from a Christian upbringing. Maybe it just comes because winter is over and spring is here and for eons human beings have held celebrations at this time of year, though most probably don't involve Rockabilly music, loud cars, tatted-up pinups, and Pabst Blue Ribbon.

I've always liked Mardi Gras because it was that one last Bacchanalian celebration before setting my sights on making some real changes come Easter. I would say that sometimes I was marginally better. Usually I just realized that I was another year older and my Rock-n-Roll lifestyle wasn't doing my body much good. (Three or four nights in Vegas will do that to you.)

This year has been different. The changes I have made have been "out-of-band" so to speak, not occurring in the regular course of events. Mardi Gras was less "Mardi Gras" this year, knowing, as really I always have, that true change comes little by little, day by day.

Easter time this year has me feeling the same feelings as always, hope and revitalization. There is still so much I need to work on as a person. Winter had me pretty down. (The meds help a lot to whitewash it.) Now the sun is up, the daffodils are blooming, and the Cubs are on the t.v. (Someone needs to re-energize the Cubs starting rotation, however!) I'm motivated. I hope you are too. For whatever challenges you are facing and whatever your faith, this is a great time to "get after it" as my old football coach used to say.

Happiness and Community

I'm listening to The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World. It's the third in a series, which started with The Art of Happiness, a Handbook for Living, that a psychiatrist, Howard Cutler, has written along with the Dalai Lama. Confession: I had started the first book several years back, and when I checked this audio book out of the library, that was the one I thought I was getting. This book actually seems more appropriate for the current time, though, in the wake of the Vegas and Parkland shootings.

Obviously Cutler and HHDL (that's His Holiness the Dalai Lama to the unintiated) have a good rapport if they are working together on their third book together, and that rapport does come through. The Dalai Lama is a funny dude. When Cutler asks him the simple question of how do we get humans to better see the humanity in each other, HHDL suggests that if Martians invaded Earth we'd all ban together pretty quickly. "Okay, well apart from that..," continues Cutler.

Im only a short way into the book, but it seems that the main premise is an important one, and I wanted to share. The Dalai Lama suggests that a good deal of the trouble that occurs amongst humans today is because we have lost our sense of community. Tibetans are shocked when they hear that Westerners can live for years alongside neighbors that they do not know. Cutler admits that he doesn't know his neighbors, and I admit that I don't know mine at all. And it isn't just our immediate neighbors that we've lost touch with. We don't socialize in the ways we once did. Television and the internet has removed a lot of the personal interaction we once used to have. Church attendence is down. Socializing with coworkers has been eaten into by longer and longer commute times.  Many of us live in different cities or even states from where we grew up in numbers that are unprecedented. We've become a lonely society. The average number of intimate friends that Americans said they had has decreased from three ten or twenty years ago to two now. Twenty-five percent of us say that we have no real intimate friends at all.

That loneliness is literally killing us. Sometimes it's showing up at the door to the school armed with an AR-15. Sometimes it shows in a suicide rate that is the highest it has been in thirty years (Is it just coincidence that the three states with the lowest population densities, Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana, have the three highest suicide rates amongst U.S. states?) . More often it shows in heart disease and cancer rates in lonely people. One health study showed that lonely, disconnected people are four times more likely to catch a cold than someone who isn't.

I struggle with making human connections. It's a lack of self-confidence and really a bit of cowardice generally that keeps me in my little bubble. For years I tried to overcome that with alcohol. Finally I've come to the harsh truth that breaking down my reserve with alcohol doesn't work for me. I've been struggling again for about the past five months of feeling disconnected once again. So listneing to this book has come at a good time. It came as a revelation that what I really need is to connect within a community. It's almost absurd that it comes as a revelation to me, since Jen has been saying as much for at least the past half-dozen years, though not in the same words.

As I sat and thought last night, I realized I am part of a great many communities. I'm a Rockies fan and last night we had our season ticket draft. Sure we only meet once a year, but that has been for the last dozen or so years. In a broader sense I connect with other Rockies fans online and connect with sports fans generally. Sports fandom is a community that is overlooked as a meaningful one to many people. There is a community of people I work with here at Nordstrom and beyond in a general sense of technical people in the Denver area. I'm a member of Mensa and the Triple Nine Society, not that that in itself is meaningful, as we have much less in common amongst ourselves beyond a high IQ. But within those groups I identify with subgroups. It gives me a group to sound off about running or books or politics. In quitting drinking I attended a handful of AA meetings. That is a community, and an important one for some people. It can be very lonely when you quit drinking and for the past number of years the only new friends you made were people at the bar.

Being a part of those communities is not the same as being connected to them, however, just as living next to people doesn't make you connected to your neighbors. I'm working on that. Just identifying all the opportunities I really have was an unexpected step for me. Maybe I'll actually make a Mensa meeting in the next 6 months.

I didn't start this intending to write so much about myself. I meant it more to get people thinking more about community and what they can do to be more connected. For those of you who struggle with it like I do, keep trying. Do little things to reach out. Be brave. Don't let rejection deter you.Think of the communities you are a part of and what you can do to be connected within them. For those of you who don't struggle, reach out to those of us who do. We'll likely reject you using crucifixes and garlic as if you've walked out of a monster movie. Don't let rejection deter you either. Eventually we'll run out of garlic.