People and interactions
Every time I need to do a training session to explain what values are in agile I find it an extremely tough exercise because it’s hard to make a real impact after the end of a training course.
We know that training must be associated with some behavioral change. When we participate in a good training programme we aim to achieve a new way of understanding, and a willingness to be responsible for our perceptions of the new reality we are discovering.
How many of you have heard about the phrase ‘agile is a mindset’. What is mindset then?
I would rather call it awareness and consciousness of our collaborative power.
We’ll see four values in the following minutes, and we’ll start with something called ‘people and their interactions over processes and tools’, which is the first value of the agile manifesto and the pillar of what we usually call ‘mindset’. So let’s start to talk about this.
What one of my mentors Mike Beedle said to me some years ago was the following, Agile is about people.
Why are processes and tools important but not as important as people and interactions?
For me the keyword is intelligence. What do we understand by the word ‘Intelligence’?
The emphasis on people and interactions can fit into the relations we’ll have between teams or any other collaboration among other people in the organization to create this collective intelligence, the purpose is to put the focus on people and their energy, innovation, and ability to solve problems.
When we talk about changing a mindset, we especially talk about people and their interactions.
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How well do we listen to others? How open are we to other ideas? How inclusive are we when someone else is different? Do we have a proper level of humility in order to be able to learn from others? How well do we communicate our ideas? How good are we at creating a safe space for a deeper conversation? and so on.
According to ICF coaching, communication and interactions can be seen as corporality, emotionality and language. Think about this model, how important are our emotions for collaborating, how important is our nonverbal communication, and how important is our language when we communicate.
Let’s create some awareness and build a better space by asking ourselves some questions I used in my last workshop:
How much (In what way) do we value people?
In what way should we value people?
What kind of communication do we use in order to have effective interactions with others?
What kind of interactions work and what kind are not so effective?
Why are processes and tools important but less important than people and interactions?
How could we value people more than processes and tools?
What does it mean for you to value other people?
Do you want to know how I used these questions to design a piece of learning based on training from the back of the room? Just ping me.
What do you think about these questions, please let me know
