Adopt the Agile Mindset

In this part, we’ll explore the Agile Manifesto and how you can apply it in your team’s daily work. Each chapter draws on one of the manifesto’s values, building a comprehensive guide to agile ways of working.

Cultivate the Growth Mindset

The first chapter deals with the Agile Manifesto principle: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.  

This speaks of the importance of focusing on how the team works together, encouraging diverse inputs, and creating an environment where everyone can do their best work.

Think back to a time in your career when you were the most motivated or felt that you did your best work. Which circumstances made you feel this way?

Chances are, you are thinking about a time when you felt challenged, your contribution was valued, you could make decisions, see the impact of what you were doing, and you were learning a lot. What you are describing is an environment that fosters a growth mindset.

Stanford Psychologist, Carol Dweck, originated the concept of fixed and growth mindsets from her research on how children and students learn. Check out her talk to find out more. Dweck has defined some key differences in how we view our personality and learn and deploy strategies for success. 

• A fixed mindset is founded on the view that our inherent capabilities limit what we can achieve. Those with this mindset are more likely to stick to what they know, give up when frustrated, and expect constant rewards. They may be wary of trying new things since they want to look smart at all times. 

• In contrast, a growth mindset sees challenges as an opportunity to learn and failure as an opportunity to grow. People with this outlook are interested in learning new things, inspired by others, and recognize the need to work to improve. The goal is always to learn.  

Improve

• You  must welcome constructive feedback to learn and improve.

• Encourage one another to believe that you can constantly improve something if you try.

• Always ask yourselves, “What can we do better next time?”

• See challenges and setbacks as an important opportunity to review and get better. Remember the Battleships game from earlier? When you dropped a bomb and it didn’t hit any ships in the second round, was it a failure or an opportunity to learn and try again? 

Learn

• Believe that it’s never too late to learn, and make sure your team learns from failures and successes. 

• Support learning from each other and a wide variety of external sources.

• Learning should never stop, so think of the team as lifelong learners.

• Embrace uncertainty, be bold, and try new things, but learn from experiments and tests. 

Collaborate

• Believe that the team can achieve remarkable results if they are determined enough.

• Focus on developing positive habits and relationships that can support mutual growth.

Are there any other behaviors you can think of that might help your team embrace a growth mindset? Write your ideas in the corresponding section of the log book.  

Foster the Culture of Collaboration

You’re probably thinking about working together harmoniously towards a common goal or something similar, and you wouldn’t be wrong.

Google conducted a famous study about the keys to a successful team to understand the specific attributes of collaborative, high-performing teams. The research covered 180 active Google teams and looked at over 250 different attributes. It found five key dynamics that characterized high performance rather than team member skills, personality, or even team longevity. These dynamics included having clear team goals, dependable team members, and the feeling that the work is purposeful and matters.  

However, the most crucial factor in high performance was psychological safety, which Harvard professor, Amy Edmondson, defined as "a shared belief held by team members that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking." 

The team environment should enable members to feel comfortable contributing and saying what they think without fear of retribution or blame. They should also feel trusted and empowered to try new things and experiment.

A good way of describing it is the combination of comfort with dissent and mutual trust and respect.

• The comfort with dissent helps a team have healthy debates, solve problems better, and get ideas and contributions from everyone. 

• Mutual trust and respect help reduce politics and enable a team to learn better and make decisions faster.  

Both are critical in enabling teams to adapt and learn iteratively about the best way to solve problems. The graphic below shows how combining those two factors influences the workplace.

Indeed, some Agile tools can help foster a collaborative environment. For example, remember the Kanban board mentioned in Part 1, Chapter 4 ? When you break a large project into smaller tasks, you can visualize these tasks on a virtual or real whiteboard. The columns (or “lanes”) on the board represent the steps in the process, such as work to do, work in progress, work shipped, etc. It can help track work progress and allow the team to see that tasks are being completed and the team is making progress. In addition, tools such as these can help team members understand what everyone else is working on and feel motivated by the progress. 

Now, back to your experience. Which quadrant of the psychological safety graph would you place your team in? If it’s not in the “true collaboration” quadrant, what could you do to reach it? Write the ideas in your log book.  

Your Turn!

Imagine that you’re part of a team working at the well-known business-to-business software company, Softtel, on a market-leading piece of software-as-a-service (SaaS) called Softtel Prime. Other organizations use your SaaS to help teams communicate and collaborate well. Suddenly, your biggest client lets you know that your key competitor, Bigtel, has just launched a version of their similar software called Bigtel Premium, which incorporates sophisticated AI technology. Their version is much better than yours since your software does not yet have AI capability.

You are the Product Owner for Softtel, responsible for developing and improving the service. Your team needs to learn about the opportunity to introduce AI technology into your service and launch an updated version rapidly. How would you respond to this challenge in a way that is truly collaborative and supports maximum learning?

Write down 2-3 ideas that can respond to the following challenges:

• How can team members learn about the new technologies?

• How can they test what they can do with them?

• How can they share their newly acquired knowledge?  

• How can they overcome the fear of making a mistake or seeming incompetent? 

✅ Solution: You might have come up with other ideas, but here are some suggestions. 

Let’s Recap!

• A growth mindset can empower a culture of collaboration, enabling a team to make fast decisions, get diverse perspectives, and move quickly.

• Always focus on learning. It allows the team to try things out and experiment and encourages continuous improvement. Learning from successes and failures is key.

• Creating a psychologically safe team environment helps build trust, encourages healthy debate, and supports good problem-solving.  

We’ve examined some important agile team mindsets and behaviors in this chapter. In the next one, we’ll build on this by learning about some critical approaches to delivering real value for customers and the business.