Make Safety a Prerequisite — Modern Agile

Let’s start with Make Safety a Prerequisite, this is an absolute MUST for teams and organizations to get right but inevitably fail at. A good action item for creating a safe environment is by creating a working agreement within the team. A working agreement helps to guide the team in their daily interactions while promoting discipline and safety.

For a complete transformation of the entire organization making safety a prerequisite is something that can happen over time by the team modeling the right behaviors. Think of the organizational policies you adhere to and sign off on when you work in an organization (large or small), these policies can always be changed to make the organization a more safe environment.

Is the team and/or organization making safety a prerequisite? A good working agreement or policy that outlines how they intend to this would define whether or not they are making safety a prerequisite.

Next we’ll look at making people awesome. This also falls into the lean thinking model that Toyota developed for their organization. It specifically calls out that respect for people is one of the pillars that contributes to having a lean/agile organization. Modern Agile draws from this and says that there are an unlimited number of ways you can make people awesome. You can make your team awesome, your customers, your organization, etc.

Make People Awesome — Modern Agile

Is the team or organization continuously trying to make people awesome? It’s very easy in an organization to try and be selfish by touting one’s attributes over another. When your culture is so selfless that everyone is trying to make other people awesome it starts to look like a beehive of sweetness and others take notice. The key to making people awesome is the right mindset.

Ccontinuous Improvement is the other pillar of the Toyota lean thinking model. What if your organization just did the same thing they’ve always done without trying to improve anything. Would they still be in business? Who would want to work at a place like that? This is something that may come easier for individuals, teams, and organizations. For some people continuous improvement might mean trying to simplify a process but it absolutely starts with a shared understanding of “this is what we are going to do together”.

It’s very hard to try and improve something by yourself, that’s why psychologists, coaches, mentors, and your team are there to help. A shared understanding for what needs improvement helps guide the steps you take to foster change.

Experimenting and learning rapidly is the next value of an agile culture we look to measure. At a retrospective you take into account how the iteration went and may come up with a plan for experimenting. This could come in the form of a training session or learning opportunity but doing nothing as a team or organization says that you don’t value experimentation or learning.

A good driver for experimentation is that the world of technology changes rapidly. You as an individual team member must take this into consideration if you want to stay relevant with the times and help make your team and organization awesome. Experimentation walks hand and hand with innovation as does learning and not just learning but learning rapidly.

Learning 3.0 is a group that is pioneering the way we learn. They are trying to merge the concepts of theory and practice.

“The product of learning is no longer defined by experts. It emerges when faced with new conditions and challenges in the real world. The process of learning is inclusive, promoting discussion with multiple perspectives. It’s the foundation of emergent learning. It’s where if you want to learn, you have to share.” — Learning 3.0

And finally, delivering value continuously. This modern agile value highlights the importance of continuous value delivery. In lean, the process of eliminating waste and discovering what the customer knows to be value is the foundation. Once we know this, we can strive to deliver this continuously.

Is your team or organization delivering value continuously? Do they know their customer and what they value?

Sometimes one of the hardest parts of delivering value is how it’s defined. The marketplace will undoubtedly let you know whether something is of value or not. An efficient and responsive feedback loop is important to achieve this.

So what does an agile culture look like?

As we have gone through the modern agile values I have provided some examples of each value and ways they are to be understood. When you look at a team or organization and can see these values “live out” through the mindset of the people. You can easily tell whether it is an agile culture or not.

So what’s next?

The next evolution in what an agile culture looks like is by relating it back to the Teal Organization model. Teal improves upon agile as a green layer and highlights values such as Distributed Decision Making, Higher Purpose, Self Management, etc.