Positive thinking a reflection idea

I was reading an article on positive thinking today and how it helps create great leaders. I especially liked this quote.

true positivity is grounded in realism and action. It’s the difference between just hoping that you can achieve something – and actually taking the necessary steps to achieve it.

Which got me thinking. Everyday I focus on the top 3 things that will make today great. Every night as a family we talk about the greatest part of your day. What challenges you faced and how you got around them.

It made me think about the Agile mind set and continuous improvement. Always looking for was to improve. Taking a situation be it negative or not. Evaluating it and thinking creatively what actions you can take to improve it.

We had a retrospective today and one of the challenges was negative energy from negative people. It’s a hard one to address as you can’t change others.

I know these simple techniques have helped me think more positively and it’s something I would love others to enjoy the benefits if as well. You are in control of your life. Take control and do something to make it better.

Minimise the risk.

I am currently listening to an audible book.  The Journey to enterprise agility  One of the topics that they have discussed is about managing risk and how listing all the risks and working out how to mitigate them has a cost in regards to the time it takes to investigate and work through them. The authors also mention that many of the risks that really sink a project or company are not the ones on these lists, they are the ones that no one has thought about.

Agile practices help us to limit the risk through running small iterations to test our hypothesis.  We are best to look at the big picture and list high level risks and then work out what small steps can be made to safe guard against it.  Another good practice is to  advocate for  your quiet or not represented stakeholders think about what their opinion / view is, what concerns they would have. It is these extreme outliers that can greatly impact our risk probabilities.  By completing personas for your stakeholders and keeping these visual, you can help the team think about those odd situations that might occur and sink the project.

Or thinking about risk in regards to being able to deliver when you say you will on a mini project, The next task you action might be huge in comparison to all the other tasks that you have mapped out and have been working on and throw out your timeline completely.  So in Risk Management understand that these little unknown risks can completely throw your plan out the window.  Inspect and adapt and most importantly be transparent with your stakeholders about these changes and adjust your project wall to show these big things, be transparent.  Take that big item and run a spike to research more information on a risky assumption.

The Review session at the end of each iteration or  stage also helps to minimize risk.  It allows your stakeholders to give their feedback and keep you on track, be willing to share your work in progress and rough work so that you can collaboration between stakeholders. By them being part of the work and decisions you gain them as a supporter of the work and their buy in will help to ensure success.

Co location and cross functional teams mean people are working together and learning off each other so that if someone does what I did a few years back and injures themselves and needs to be off work for 6 weeks, the project can continue as the rest of the team know what is required to be done and have the skills to complete the work.

“Reexamine your perceptions of risks and what they are. – Risk are outcomes of a situation where we can calculate the probability of it happening.

Uncertainty is where we don’t know enough about the situation to understand the odds. ” Daryl Kulak and Dr Hong Li

Transparency

I was a away on a holiday for a couple of weeks and when I got back I was that little bit out of the loop in everything.  Though I don’t think it would have mattered if I had been here the whole time as no one really seemed to know what was going on.

There have been some interesting conversations floating around which sounds like I am going to have my work cut out for me in my new role as Agile Coach.   I am very grateful that the team i have moved into are transparent, it’s really refreshing actually and really highlights the difference in leadership.  My new director might not have all the information but what he has he shares with us even if it changes day by day.  He also says when he doesn’t know something.  He is willing to try and get feedback and collaboration.

On my first day back I had a quick catchup with him to get up to speed.  It has made starting this role so much easier and reduced the stress I was feeling about where to start.

On the other side the previous Director is making decisions behind his door and not sharing anything with my old team.  They are learning more from me and they don’t mind at all that it changes day by day either, at least they are being told something and can work with something.  When you are not told anything people’s thoughts run away with them.  I’m going to have to think about ways of encouraging people to share more information, a lot of people still see knowledge as power and don’t want to share that power or they think that they can’t share it until they have it all perfect and right.  The only problem with waiting for perfect is, who’s perfect is that?  Where is the collaboration and team / stakeholder engagement.  When do people get a change to Inspect and ask for changes or adaptations.

Transparency, is the first of the 3 pillars in scrum and I think it will be where I start with the change.

Personal relationships

I have joined a new team.  I don’t know them very well at all.  Happily I opened my inbox today and there was an email about Personal Maps – It immediately appealed to me as you can be very creative while doing it. Personal maps link

Totally going to give these a go sometime soon and think they could be useful at home and with friend networks as well.  Should help with improving my memory with names as I will have more of a map in my head for the person.

Growth mindset

I have been exploring this topic a bit lately.  It’s a hot topic, especially around Agile.  So how do you know if you have a growth mindset or a fixed one and what do you do about it.  Turns out I need to read the book by Carol Dweck

So I checked out her TED talk the power of believing you can – Where she talks about the power of the word YET  and praising yet so people see that by keeping on trying they can get to their goal, one step at a time.  The the brain is like a muscle and by pushing it you can make it stronger.

and found a you tube video on her book. video here  – it’s a very good summary.

Unfortunately she doesn’t have an audible book but you can get it on kindle here

In another book I am reading, it talks about how everyone has a fixed and growth mindset, it’s all about which one you are letting lead at any moment in time.  Choose how you will look at the situation,  can you learn and grow from it?

It made me think about when I was away on holiday and things went to custard, what mindset was I in during that point in time.  I didn’t give up and leave it to someone else to sort out. I went full steam ahead facing the challenge and sought out a solution.  In the end we ended up with what we needed.