Definition of Progress

Agile Disrupted

Is failing fast effective or reckless, especially without understanding the pattern that led to the failure to begin with?

We create goals. We call them outcomes. We call them objectives. We measure key performance indicators on reaching these goals. We reach these goals to continuously improve. We continuously improve to reach our personal vision. We recruit others to join us in a shared vision. We get there together. We arrive. That’s the plan, right?

Are we more susceptible to enrolling into someone else’s personal vision of the future in avoidance of our own introspection of what we really want?

Are we more susceptible to being compliant, or even apathetic, towards a shared vision that’s forced upon us?

Sometimes we formalize our goals at work and sometimes we disregard them in our personal lives. Every day, we wake up to a blank canvas of possibilities and obstacles towards these goals. Every day is a lottery, ‘because cause and effect is not closely related in time and space,’ as Peter Senge explains it in Laws of System Thinking.

Time isn’t as linear as much as we understand it to be, and yet it is our impulse to respond accordingly. It is our impulse to create solutions for yesterday’s problems. It is our impulse to diagnose symptoms, so that we might avoid the hard truth of the patterns behind ‘the structures that might hold us prisoner.’

Given the limitations of cognitive load, our mental model alone can’t possibly contain every element of the butterfly effect. But the commitment that comes with seeking the truth means we discover how we are co-creating our own reality today and what we’re willing to do to generate the results we want.

So, ask yourself. What progress have you made this year?

• Is progress more focused on reaching your goals based on the set of conditions you designed for yourself in January or compounding interest on your learning milestones?
• If you were to do innovation accounting on your goals for the past five years, what would that teach you about your patterns?
• If an Agile team were to do innovation accounting on the products and services they support, what would that teach them?
• If holding creative tension towards a personal vision is difficult for the individual by default, what might that look like for an Agile team holding creative tension for achieving their Product vision?
• How often does an Agile team have a Product vision that is connected to the shared vision of the company?
• How often is an Agile team allowed the opportunity to understand how the company operates as a business, in order to create meaning out its shared vision?
• If a shared vision for an Agile team means each person sees the same picture of success for their Product, how might an entire company of employees share a vision together?
• What happens when the vision of the Product, the vision of the Portfolio/Program, and the vision of the company are three different pictures?
• What happens when the incentive structure for the employee, for the Agile team, for the Portfolio/Program, and the company as a whole don’t match?

Is learning how we co-create our own reality a source of limitation or is reality simply a medium that we are bringing to life each day through our choices?

Find out with the return of guest speaker David A. Brown, and our newest guest speaker Patrick Mercurio.