A lot of people focus on what it is you need to do to be agile, not realising it’s about the way that you approach situations and act rather than any one particular thing that you do. If you want to approach things differently, here are some recommendations.
Prepare to make mistakes
No one in the world is perfect. No one is great at everything. It’s even rarely to be good at something immediately. Therefore prepare yourself not to hit do everything you set out to do exactly the way that you do it. Remember that you only truly fail if you do not do the following….
Learn something
Forget about being taught. Every situations always presents an opportunity to learn. Successful situations provide an opportunity to understand why something was successful. Less than successful situations offer opportunities to do something differently if find yourself in the same situation. Note that this is different from avoiding a less than succesul situation.
I try to tell others that even when you’re teaching, you have so many opportunities for learning. You have the opportunity to learn how to communicate ideas differently. You have the opportunity to understand the limits of your own understanding. You have the opportunity to learn the contexts in which your ideas may actually be harmful instead of useful. You have the opportunity to practise listening. All of these let you…
Do things differently
Incrementing means building upon something that already exists. Iterating means doing the same thing over and over again. Iterating gives you the opportunity to prove the lessons learned actually work. They let you test ideas. They give you opportunities to experiment and try new ideas. Find real opportunities to truly iterate to let you do things differently.
Work in small cycles
Small cycles creates safety. Larger cycles encourage fear as you have more to lose as time goes by. Fear of failing encourages information hiding and deferral of issues.
