Applying an agile mindset and ways of working to improve your Personal Agility
Ekipa Consultancy in Malaysia co-hosted a webinar with Amiruddin Yusoff, Paul Hutton and myself Gretel Darby in April this year on the topic of “improving personal agility”.
Traditionally in Malaysia, the fasting month of Ramadan is especially challenging for working parents and spouses who are rushing to prepare for the daily family Iftar and juggling work. It therefore seemed opportune for Amir, that the topic of how to strike a better balance between work and personal life by improving your personal agility was the focus for this session.
We started the session with a quick personal assessment of our own agile practices to assess where we were on our agile / agility journey. You can try out a version here.
But we really wanted to explore how we could take our agile ways of thinking and working and improve our personal agility.
The following is how Amir has done this for himself, complete with four steps to increase your personal agility.
Foundational Stuff: Start with your Mindset
….It all starts with your outlook towards life and the world: adopt a growth mindset — be open to possibilities, be open to exploration, be honest with yourself and what you know, and generally just ask lots of ‘what-if’s and ‘may-be’s… and it’s ok, to not know, but to say you are exploring that…
What made sense for Amir was to shift from a scope / plan driven perspective — “I need to do these 10 things today” — to vision / value driven perspective — “I need to do the most valuable things first in my 10 things to do today”.
This way, you are starting any activity by asking what are the reasons why you want to do this — what value can I get out of doing this — and then you can pivot and adapt accordingly.
So, once I had got my growth and possibility mindset engaged and ditched my fixed mindset… Amir suggests…I am ready to start taking on the rest of the personal agility tips for improving my balance in work and life .
There are four steps and their order is important:
1) Reflect
2) Prepare
3) Inspect
4) Adapt
