How do leaders achieve long-term goals? How do they inspire people to achieve goals larger than themselves? Three stories of successful leaders, three secrets, and three tips for becoming a better leader. (Hint: The answer is hiding in plain sight.)
1. Three secrets of Agile Leaders:
Leading others by leading yourself
Peter Stevens
@peterstev
2. Who is in the room? Would you consider yourself a…
• Developer – you design, create, test or deploy a product or service
• Agile Developer – you subscribe to the values and principles of the
Agile Manifesto
• Anti-Agile – you’re one of those developers who hate “Agile”
• Agile Leadership role– you serve as Agile Coach, Scrum Master or
Product Owner
• Manager– Project, Team or Group Manager
• C-Level Manager – You have overall responsibility for your company
or business unit
• Anyone else?
5. What is agility?
User Stories
SAFe
Sprint
Scrum
Planning
Poker
Story Points
Product
Backlog
Scrum Master
CI/CD
Pair
Programming
Kanban
LeSS
Product
Owner
10. Do you want to be agile?
• Remember your best project?
• What made it a great project?
• Take a look at the agile values
and principles…
• How do the values and
principles match with your
experience?
• Once you understand it, most
people what to be agile
12. Fake Agility - 2
User
Stories
SAFe
Sprint
Scrum
Planning
Poker
Story
Points
Product
Backlog
Scrum
Master
CI/CD
Pair
Programming
Kanban
Product
Owner
LeSSDo Scrum!
13. What does it mean to be agile?
Steve Denning’s Three “Laws” of Agile Organizations
• Law of the Customer
• Focus on customer needs, both existing customers, and even more importantly, new
customers and new markets
• Law of the Network
• Information flows without friction through the organization to seize opportunities or fix
problems
• Law of Small Teams
• Get business and technology working together efficiently to create customer-centric
products
17. Agility has become a topic for leadership
https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-you-agile-enough-for-agile-management-11565607600https://hbr.org/2016/05/embracing-agile
18. I’d like to share three examples of successful leaders and
reveal their secrets of agile leadership
Secret 3Secret 2Secret 1
21. “Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but
most of these were largely concerned with the movements
of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on
the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that
were unhappy.”
-- Douglas Adams
22. I don’t like how sugar makes me feel.
So I want to avoid sugar and carbohydrates.
25. Christmas represented a severe thunderstorm!
“They are good,
they are really good”
SugarPressure.com: Trader Joe's Milk Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups
https://www.sugarpressure.com/2010/12/trader-joes-milk-chocolate-peanut-butter-cups.html
31. How to create alignment among 400,000 people
Every member of the Apollo
mission knew:
1. We are going to the moon
2. It’s not going to fail because of
me
3. If something goes wrong…
Apollo 11 Ready for Launch
32. How to create alignment among 400,000 people
Every member of the Apollo
mission knew:
1. We are going to the moon
2. It’s not going to fail because of
me
3. If something goes wrong,
remember item 1
Chandrayaan 2 Ready for Launch
34. To get the right things done,
master three basic skills
Doing Work
QuestioningSetting Priorities
35. Scrum defines a role to address each aspect
Solves the Problem – Development Team
Voice of Common Sense
Scrum Master
Voice of the Customer
Product Owner
36. For individuals, Head, Body and Heart
must cover all three Doing Work
Body
Questioning
Heart
Setting Priorities
Head
37. Personal Agility is the gateway for people who don’t work
in teams (like executives)
38.
39. Tip:
Get Clarity on What Really Matters and
Communicate it right away
People will notice the difference right away
Clarity Can Be Transformational
40. Three secrets of agile leadership
Secret 3
Create clarity
on
what really
matters
Change is easy
if you want to
do it
47. Six months later…
• “We accomplished everything needed
to achieve our initial goals.
• “Half of our initial ideas proved unnecessary, so we didn't do them.
• “We were able to achieve all our goals with ½ the work & ¼ of the time
• “And the the results are already visible in our finances!”
-- Walter Stultzer, Executive Director, Futureworks AG
48. How Walter’s team did it
• “I committed to making this a
success
• “I communicated WHY, then WHAT
• “We applied Scrum to improving
the company
• “Every three weeks or so, my
management and I got together…
• “Personal Agility was the most
important part of all
52. Impact means doing what matters
Stuff That
Matters!
Waste
Capacity
Demand
“to do’s”
53. What are the top agile practices used in Development?
• Daily standup
• Sprint/iteration planning
• Retrospectives
• Sprint/iteration review
• Short iterations
Source: VersionOne, 12th Annual State of Agile Report, 2018
54. As part of their job to improve your organization,
does you manager…?
Practice
• Daily standup
• Sprint/iteration planning
• Retrospectives
• Sprint/iteration review
• Short iterations
% of development teams that use
• 90%
• 88%
• 85%
• 80%
• 69%
Source: VersionOne, 12th Annual State of Agile Report, 2018
56. 1 week
20 weeks
Speed comparison
This is you working on five things at once
1
2
3
4
5
57. There is a huge potential
to improve company performance
by eliminating excessive multitasking in management.
58. Tip: Start with Yourself
Apply Techniques from your Dev Teams
Apply Agility to Leadership
59. How to apply these three secrets of agile leadership
Apply Agility to
Leadership
Create clarity
on
what really
matters
Change is easy
if you want to
do it
60. Would you like to be the next Futureworks?
Walter Stulzer, Executive Director
62. How to become an agile leader?
Leadership
Product Development
Apply Personal Agility
to everything you can’t delegate
Executive
Action Team
Product
Team
Product
TeamProduct
TeamProduct
TeamProduct
Team
viral, invitation, not commanded
64. Would you like to be like Walter?
• Peter Stevens
• Co-Founder
Personal Agility Institute
• peter@saat-network.ch
• @peterstev
Walter Stulzer, Executive Director