THE BUSINESS AND PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE

There are very few people in the world of business coaching who can take a complex situation or challenge and turn it into a simple series of options or solutions. Belinda manages exactly this by working agile. Many of the big names in the agile story are better marketers than real agents of change. Belinda is different, in many ways. She has a truly original message and a wonderfully light-hearted style of delivery, in her book and in her workshops. The way she guides people through what they see as a maze, to that ‘wow!’ moment of clarity, is fun to observe. This is partly a product of her high level of skill and practice, while also an indication of who she really is as a person.

I first met Belinda some years ago when we started working as part of a team of business coaches and mentors for high-growth start-up and small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). We were coaching business entrepreneurs and established organisations’ directors and their senior teams on a one-to-one basis, or in workshops. A few years ago, Belinda introduced us to the world of agile, until then used almost exclusively in the software industry. By adapting this to regular businesses and using her way of cutting up challenges into bite-sized chunks, and looking at the world of complex project management and flipping it to use ‘low tech’ sticky notes, she helped directors, managers, entrepreneurs and individuals to find that breakthrough ‘Aha!’ moment, fast. She opened up a new way of quickly planning, reviewing and changing, short iterations, saving time once wasted in (long . . .) pointless meetings.

In her book, Belinda shows you a fresh new approach; a faster, more visual way of checking, proving and validating all those things that too often we juggle inside our (over) busy head. Using her book to navigate the easy and fun process of getting control of any situation, she guides you through better uses of time, tools and methods. The benefits are quickly measurable by how much you embrace what you read and put into practice, both in your business and personal life. Belinda makes it effortless to get it, from the basics, to the more in-depth cultural changes that many strive to achieve, but few will reach without using Belinda’s agile roadmap. A small investment in time and effort to read this book will enable a profound change for the good in how you work in the future.

We all collaborate in one way or another and, again, Belinda shows some winning ways for sharing information, allocating workload fairly and clearly and enabling everyone to feel a valued team player. Belinda has assisted me greatly with my clients and I always look forward to working with her or co-facilitating agile sessions with new or established businesses. I use the whole agile way of working with both business and private clients. No more need for complex, computer-based project management tools, hidden from view and taking hours to recalculate when the inevitable unexpected changes take place, on a regular basis. Now I ‘get it out of my head’ and, with Belinda’s agile visual tools and methods, I look at it from a variety of perspectives and can share or ask for help from whoever is in my virtual team. Learning this is easy, for all ages and experiences.

If you want to save time, that precious commodity, avoid waste, communicate on workload and resources with friends or colleagues, get reading – short bursts and put it into action – the agile way.

Good luck with your book, Belinda, it will help many others as it has helped me and all my clients to date. The future looks much clearer . . . agile.

William T. Cairley, business and personal coach, Master Business Practitioner NLP