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Agile characteristics

What does being agile mean to you?

A word or two may spring to mind, or perhaps you picture an agile person, thing or situation. A gymnast, a rock climber, a race horse, a racing yacht, lifeboats, operating theatres, the All Blacks rugby team and a Formula 1 pit stop team are all examples of being agile.

Agile can be defined in a number of ways depending on the context in which they are used to describe someone or something that is responsive, flexible and fast. There are equally numerous ways in which you can apply and adopt agile and lean behaviour.

One simple and easily sourced key tool you need when initially adopting the agile methodology is sticky notes.

The great thing about sticky notes is that they are in themselves very agile.

By their nature sticky notes are flexible and easy to use, you can quickly capture and share information. If you record things on sticky notes they are wonderfully visible and tactile, groups of notes can be easily reviewed and moved around to reorder and restructure them without having to rewrite everything.

Sticky notes aren’t permanent or fixed either so you can easily change, swap, add and remove individual notes without impacting other notes.

Sticky notes

The first agile tool is a very simple one: sticky notes (eg Post-it notes or other similar self adhesive notes) are often used for reminders and messages in the office and at home.

Sticky notes are a great tool for adopting an agile approach to get information out of your head and the heads of your colleagues. Use them for ideas, thoughts and expectations, and to break things down into manageable chunks of work that can be reviewed.

Personally, I used to be a real list person, except often it would get to the point where I was so busy or so much was happening that I would spend an inefficient amount of time writing, rewriting and reordering lists. Since adopting sticky notes, the only lists I write these days are shopping lists and, admittedly, even those are always written on a sticky note, as I use agile within my personal and professional life! So, if your list often gets too long, I wholeheartedly recommend buying yourself some sticky notes and giving the method a try.

When mapping out the notes, just let your thoughts flow onto the notes in whatever order they come to mind. The first step is to get your thoughts out of your head and onto paper. They may be linked to a particular topic or goal and, at this point, the notes do not have to be in any particular order or size; the emphasis is on getting things out of your head, and it seems that, in most cases, our minds seem to hold things randomly and not in any particular order.

Each thought should have its own sticky note. If you find yourself writing lists or multiple items on the note, separate these into individual notes. Once you feel you have everything out of your head, then you can begin to order and group your sticky notes into a structure or format that helps you to organise and map these into something that makes sense. The exercises and tools provided in this book provide a number of options for mapping a volume of notes into structures and formats that allow them to be qualified, validated and actioned.

Defining agile

What characteristics do you associate with being agile?

Using your sticky notes, or the following blank diagram, start capturing any words or images that you associate with the word agile.

• Start with a sticky note and write the word agile in the centre.
• Whatever comes to mind, capture these in single words, images or short phrases and write them on more notes, one per note, and place them around your central note, building up a map of associations.

Allow your mind to freely connect to another thought and capture these, too, on separate notes. These could lead you to specific situations relevant to you. Capture occasions where you feel you were agile or lean in your actions or approach, and identify the feelings, values and behaviour in that scenario.

Once that thought is captured on paper, return to thinking of the word ‘agile’ and see what else comes to mind.

Try not to pause, hesitate or dismiss any thoughts, just write them down as they come to you, one per sticky note; you can always discard them later if you wish. If you do not have any sticky notes yet, use the blank diagram below to capture your thoughts.

Figure 3.1 Agile characteristics map

The map you create is unlikely to be the same as another, although it may have some commonalities.

Once you have captured your thoughts, study your notes and see if there are connections or themes among them. Look for patterns and relationships and move them around to reflect this. Group similar words together to form key themes.

The meaning of words is unique for every one of us. While there are commonalities, we all perceive and process things slightly differently to the next person. This is a good thing because once we know what we believe to be the definition of something, we can share this with others to ensure there is clarity between ourselves.

The next maps of agile definitions have been created from a number of sources, including group discussions and definitions found online (Figure 3.2). Some almost everyone will say, others are one-offs, and there most certainly are others that are not included here. Figure 3.3 shows key themes, chunking them into seven key agile characteristics.

Using sticky notes with your team, your manager and your customers can be incredibly valuable in ensuring understanding between all parties. The activity of mapping ideas and discussing them supports communication. Communication is a two-way activity: we talk and we listen. To improve your listening skills, active listening is a great technique for helping to ensure you are listening and clarifying what others are telling you.

Mapping definitions

A successful restaurant owner, Andrew, had plans to open a new restaurant. His current restaurant was based in a seaside town and the new restaurant was linked to a local city farm development. His finance manager, Teresa, enthusiastically had taken a lead on producing the initial business plan, and there was informal involvement from his existing marketing manager and non-executive directors.

There were a number of different options for the style, market and product that would model the businesses vision. One particular idea from Andrew was for a diner-style restaurant which, in Teresa’s mind, conjured up ideas of a motorway service cafe.

Equipped with the sticky note mapping method and sticky notes, Teresa was armed with a collaboration game to help the team come to a shared vision where an appropriate style, market and product were identified to take forward, or at least differentiate, the number of options that had been suggested.

Figure 3.2 Example of an agile characteristics map

Figure 3.3 Agile characteristics

As they began to explore each idea further, Teresa facilitated this using active listening and clarifying questions such as: ‘Can you tell me a little more about this one?’ To her relief, when the CEO started to talk about a diner, it became very clear that he was imagining a French bistro, following a recent holiday, fine dining and wonderful surroundings.

After a short time, the team had a number of solid ideas that would work together and that they could explore further. Throughout the conversation, queries were raised and actions set to research and develop each idea further.

The simple activity of mapping out the ideas and discussing them provided a visual aid to promote communication and develop a shared language within the team, so that everyone had a shared understanding of the definition of the goal.

Active listening

‘Active listening is a communication technique used in counselling, training and conflict resolution, which requires the listener to feed back what they hear to the speaker . . . to confirm what they have heard and moreover, to confirm the understanding of both parties.’

WIKIPEDIA – ‘ACTIVE LISTENING’, 2014. (Available under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike License.)

It is good to ask open questions that help to clarify and understand the topic being discussed:

• What is the goal?
• What do you want?
• What do you not want?
• How would you describe the current situation?
• What is currently stopping you?
• What would work for you?
• What benefits would you like to see?
• What problems need to be solved?
• What would success look like?
• What other options are there?
• Is there anything else?
• Can you tell me more about that?

Use sticky notes to explore your thoughts and perspective.

Key characteristics of agile are:

• accurate;
• efficient;
• lean;
• flexible;
• aware;
• fast;
• balanced.