- What is a mindset? How is it different to an #agile mindset?
- How is it different from a growth #mindset?
- What needs to shift to build an #agilemindset?
- Which do people find the most challenging?
- Can you shift your mindset? How does this happen? What gets in the way?
- How might you recruit someone with an agile mindset?
Natasha:
Welcome to Casa de Cambio. On this episode of Casa de Cambio, I am so thrilled and delighted to be joined once again by Lena Ross. Welcome, Lena.
Lena Ross:
Hey. Hi, thanks, Natasha. Thanks for having me, and hello.
Natasha:
Thanks for coming back onto the podcast. How’s your week going so far?
Lena Ross:
The week is going well. Melbourne weather is turning it on quite nicely, I think this week. We’re in summer, of course. So, yeah, and we’ve got a public holiday this week.
Natasha:
Oh yeah. I keep forgetting about that. I’m going to be doing Casa de Cambio things on that day.
Lena Ross:
I’ll probably be working too, but it’s a nice bit of respite, isn’t it?
Natasha:
It is, it is. And the weather’s been great. It’s been about 27, 28 every day. So, it’s like warm but not too hot which has been lovely. Yeah, lovely.
Lena Ross:
Very nice.
Natasha:
And today we’re going to talk about the agile mindset, but before we do that, there’s a couple of questions I ask every guest that comes onto the podcast. And the first one is, what are you currently reading, watching, or listening to?
Lena Ross:
Because we’ve just come out of summer holiday break here in the Southern Hemisphere, I did have a nice time to catch up with some books in my backlog and some things I wanted to watch. I had a small obsession with the Tudor era which I was able to explore a bit more during my break. I started watching Becoming Elizabeth late last year, and then got into the four seasons of The Tudors, which then got me back into reading historical novels like The Other Berlin Girl and The Berlin Inheritance. Then as I started, this was really fascinating because then when I went into the documentaries that they had, more on SBS and things like that, one of the documentaries featured a stakeholder map, and I thought, “This is a stakeholder radius,” and it was the influencers in the court of King Henry VIII, and I thought, “Oh, I can see similarities with this,” except the big difference luckily for us these days is if you don’t get on with your stakeholders so well or you need to manage them more closely, at least it’s not going to cost you your life, right?
Natasha:
Yeah, you won’t be thrown into a gross prison cell, beheaded.
Lena Ross:
You had to be a lot more careful with your stakeholder management and who you were seen talking to and not talking to at that particular time. So, that’s been interesting just to kind of escape a little bit as well but learn a little bit about history, understanding that some of it is historical fiction too that I’ve been watching and reading.
But on a more non-fiction tangent, I read a book called Brain Hacks, which was a really easy little book to read. It had 200-plus ways to boost your brain power, and I’m actually creating an infographic on my five favorite ones to post over the next couple of weeks. But what I really liked about that, Natasha, was because we’re still in January and everyone’s setting themselves New Year resolutions and stuff like that, a lot of those resolutions can be unrealistic or quite audacious, really big goals, and the good thing about this book, Brain Hacks, was you can do really small things that will make a big difference to your cognitive function or your brain power or whatever you want to call it.
So, I really liked that and thought it would be worth… I picked out some that I liked, like eating a few more nuts each day, for example, and learning while you walk, it boosts your brain power because it meshes the physical with the cognitive function and that really powers up your learning capability or your learning absorption. That was something that really resonated, especially at this time of the year. We’ve come out of a period of overwhelm, and then we all want to set New Year resolutions, but I don’t really know whether we have the cognitive capacity to take a lot of those on. Yeah.
Natasha:
Yeah, very good. Very good. Now, I know you shared career advice when you came onto the podcast last time, but do you have any more career advice that you received that you thought was really helpful that you would like to share with the listeners?
Lena Ross:
Yeah, I can’t even remember what I said last time, so I hope I’m not repeating myself.
Natasha:
Yeah, I think it was nearly three years ago.
Lena Ross:
Yeah.
Natasha:
Yeah, it was in 2020, yeah.
Lena Ross:
Oh gosh. Okay. Hasn’t that gone? I think some really good career advice I got was a long time ago and it was one of my managers who said to me, and I sometimes play this back to other people, he said to me, “He who angers you conquers you.” So, that really helped me with emotional regulation and not responding, I guess, to emails or comments or things in the moment when you know you’re kind of probably in threat mode and you respond with the emotion rather than with logic. So, the best thing out of that was, and it was very hard because I like to get things done really quickly, but the key takeaway there was sleep on things. My best response now if I don’t want to respond is, “Let me give that some more thought and I’ll get back to you.”
It was really, really hard to do, but it was quite empowering. I felt like I was losing power by not responding straight away or losing control, not power, but more control of the situation. But what I learned over time was that it actually gives you, it empowers you and gives you back that control, and it’s really good for self-regulation. I just loved that quote, what he said to me, he who angers you conquers you. It’s so true.
Natasha:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because you’re letting people… Another one is letting someone live rent-free inside your head. That’s [inaudible 00:06:10].
Lena Ross:
Oh, totally. Yeah, totally. So, if someone’s listened to my podcast from three years ago, and that’s the same advice I shared, I apologize in advance. I think I must delete it.
Natasha:
I’ll go check. I’ll go check. I should have relistened to that I should have in preparation to have you and Jen on. But we’re talking about different topics, but I’m sure it wasn’t. Maybe that wasn’t something that was front of mind for you at that time.
But I do agree, if I feel a no bubbling up, if I feel like someone’s requesting something or their request annoy me in some way, or I think it’s a terrible idea, I’ll just go, “You know what? Yeah, I’m going to sleep on it.” Particularly if I’m having a bad day or I’ve got a lot going on, and then I’ll decide how I want to respond because I think there’s some times where maybe you’re towards the end of your rope, and it may not be anything to do with that situation, but you may just type up and be like… And then you come back the next day and you’re like, “Ooh, geez, what I typed, that was terrible. I can’t believe I was going to send that.” Particularly if you’re having a negative response, just wait because you probably won’t be mad about it the next day.
Lena Ross:
Yeah, and look, I’ve had too many moments afterwards that, “Oh, I should have said that, or I should have said… Why didn’t I say that?” The gift of hindsight and time.
Natasha:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you don’t need to respond immediately to things, and you don’t need to respond at all.
Lena Ross:
That’s true.
Natasha:
Yeah. I’ve got one sitting in my inbox, I can say what it is, that I’m like, “I don’t know if I’m going to respond to that one.” It was very cheeky. So, there was a conference that I thought I might have a go at seeing if I could become a speaker at that conference, and I had tried to contact the conference through their website and didn’t get a response. And so, I sent them a couple of emails to their email address, and I finally got a response weeks later, and it was something… Actually, let me read it out. No, I’ll find it. And it was I thought a little bit cheeky. Where is it? It said, “Thank you for your interest in becoming a speaker for X event. We decide whom to contact almost two years in advance as we expect to make the final details and arrangements for them. However, there are some great networking opportunities. We invite you to take a deeper look as it can make sense for Casa de Cambio Consulting to be a sponsor and partner of the conference. We’re able to discuss this opportunity with you. What is your availability?” And I’m like, “No, I don’t want to sponsor your conference. Thanks.”
Lena Ross:
Yes, I know.
Natasha:
So, I’m like, “I might just ignore you, just not reply.”
Lena Ross:
Yeah, like read the room.
Natasha:
Okay, I’ll just buy a ticket. I’ll just be a punter. That’s fine.
Lena Ross:
Yeah. Cheeky, isn’t it?
Natasha:
But then obviously I don’t know the right people and I’m not part of the in crowd, so I can’t be a speaker. But I read it and was like, “Oh, you can’t be a speaker, but you can sponsor. That’s a little bit cheeky, isn’t it?”
Lena Ross:
Yeah, you’re good enough to be a sponsor though, right?
Natasha:
Anyone can be a sponsor.
Lena Ross:
Yeah, yeah.
Natasha:
But yeah, I will go as a punter. So, for the listeners, if you see me posting pictures on LinkedIn sometime this year at a certain conference, you can wonder which one it is, which one did that. But yeah, it was interesting and also interesting because when I spoke at AgileAus, they have an extremely democratic expressions of interest process because they’re all about fresh content and making sure that the speakers are good and the content is interesting. And so, I was interested to learn that it’s a don’t call us, we’ll call you situation. So, that’s probably a lighter one. Obviously, I wasn’t mad, but I did have a giggle at that that and went, “Oh, don’t respond now, because you might come off looking like an arrogant a-hole. We don’t want that for Casa de Cambio Consulting.”
Lena Ross:
Or you respond in about a month and say, “Oh, I just came across this in my inbox.”
Natasha:
Yeah, I’ll just buy a ticket and I’ll sponsor you that way.
Lena Ross:
Yeah, yeah.
Natasha:
Still going to go. I’m still going to go. But that is really good advice. Now, onto the topic of today. So, today we are going to talk about agile mindsets. Now, before we get down into the weeds of that, I want to just ask you, what is mindset, just starting at the very beginning?
Lena Ross:
Yeah, mindset, I mean, I guess at a very broad brush level would be a mindset is your set of filters and attitudes and beliefs. That’s how we process information that guides how we operate and what we do. So, it’s shaped by influencers around us that we believe to be true and that resonate with us and that make us feel comfortable with who we are and how we’d like to live, work, and operate. So, an agile mindset, I mean, interestingly, going back probably around 10 years when agile started to become a thing, it occurred to me anyway that to operate or to think in an agile way was very important to doing agile, as well as being agile. So, I started to see agile, if you like, as a mindset and a skill set as well as a set of rituals and ceremonies and so forth.
But the agile mindset, one of my early definitions goes like this, it’s a mindset that demonstrates the ability to recognize failures and challenges as opportunities, and they would be opportunities for learning and improvement, along with the resilience to evolve and adapt to meet changing requirements. So, in a more simple way now, with the work with Agile Change Leadership Institute and The Agile Mindset online course that we’ve got, we would say now it’s a… We just say it’s a mindset that we need for agile environments and environments where there’s ongoing change and really deep uncertainty. So, the definition in itself will evolve over time, depending on what… We’re going to contextualize it with the challenges of the time so it has relevance with people as well. Does that make sense?
Natasha:
Yeah, yeah. And how is this different to a growth mindset?
Lena Ross:
Yeah. Look, that’s a really good question that we get asked a lot. The growth mindset, building on the great work of Carol Dweck, of course, I would say it builds on the growth mindset. I mean, Carol Dweck describes the growth mindset in her book as one that is prepared to step outside of your comfort zone and one that’s prepared to take risks and stretch herself. What we believe the agile mindset does is it builds on that by making a clear connection with agility and help people make sense of agility and what type of mindset you need to operate in that environment. Now, whether it’s a work environment in most cases, because our focus is on work environments, but there’s also benefits of thinking in an agile way for personal changes and personal situations as well.
Natasha:
Yeah, yeah. Can people change their mindsets? And this kind of follows on from growth because it’s either you have a fixed mindset or you have a growth mindset. I often feel like you can have a fixed mindset, but you can change it. You can change anything, right?
Lena Ross:
Yeah. Yeah, of course. I’ll probably talk about the five mindset shifts, we cover that in a little while, and it’s important to know that it’s not a binary thing either. It’s not like I’ve either got a fixed growth mindset or a growth mindset. We think of it as a continuum, and the five shifts are a continuum. You know the agile manifesto, we value the items on the left more, but we still value the items on the right. It’s a bit like that. There are some aspects of your mindset which would be fixed and that’s situational as well, and it’s a little bit like try and do things to shift you towards the growth mindset or towards having a more agile mindset because they will equip you quite well for the environments we’re in now, which again, like agility, high uncertainty, and things like that, and help you build your resilience and so forth.
You can shift your mindset. Even a fixed mindset can be shifted. But what happens with mindset shifts, and there’s a lot of skeptics who say you can’t shift your mindset. At a neuro brain science level, we know you can because we know about neuroplasticity and things like that and building new neural pathways. If we just take it away from that type of brain science and just talk about what happens when a mindset changes is things happen in life, things happen at work, some we don’t like and some we really embrace, and sometimes when things happen to us, there’s organic shifts in our mindset. We start to see that different ways of thinking or doing things serve us quite well or serve us better than what the old things did. So, gradually, we start to move towards thinking that way or doing things that way.
When we have a mindset in a particular space, we do also look for things that support our beliefs and attitude. So, this is the cognitive bias or confirmation bias. I believe this, so therefore I’m going to look for all this data that supports what I say and that’s going to give me stability and confidence in what I’m thinking and doing. And then at some point, as things change or as things shift, or over time typically, or some things happen quite quickly, you will find that there’s data to support different attitudes, and then you’ll start to think and you’ll see more and more about that. So, you’ll start to, over time, and as you try new things or do things differently, or you see people around you doing things differently, you’re guided through that mindset change. Sometimes you need to be guided through the mindset change with the help of a professional or a peer or a development program, and sometimes you do it organically.
So, that’s why it’s that continuum where today I might have a really, my mindset might be all about I’m going to experiment. If I fail, that’s not going to bother me. I’m okay with that. And then tomorrow I might be doing something, let’s assume I’m a surgeon and I’ve got to perform surgery, no, I don’t really want to fail today. Today is a day it’s important that I will aim to be perfect. And that’s a good thing because in certain, you need to ring-fence areas where sometimes you can’t do things or you want to take less risk.
Natasha:
So, in the work that you’ve done with Dr. Jen Frahm, and this is around the agile mindset, is it a micro credential? Is that what you’re calling it?
Lena Ross:
Yes, yes.
Natasha:
Yup, yup. You’ve identified five shifts that are required to build your agile mindset. Can you tell us what they are and how did you and Jen come up with the five shifts?
Lena Ross:
Yeah, sure. Let me talk through the five shifts first.
Natasha:
Yep.
Lena Ross:
If you see any of our work or any of our blog posts, you’ll see that they’re like a line. So, I spoke about the continuum, so it’s not binary. So, the five shifts will be going from engagement to empathy, and when we say that, we don’t mean just stop engaging with people and just go all empathy. We mean engaging with deeper empathy because a lot of engagement is tick-the-box engagement. I’ve run a town hall, I’ve had my [inaudible 00:18:17].
Natasha:
Any questions? No? Okay, I’ll move on, great.
Lena Ross:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that’s right. I’ll take questions on notice, oh, and they’re the only ones I’ll answer, but I haven’t really answered anything. We’ve all seen that. “But I engaged with people. I did what was on the change plan.”
Natasha:
Yeah.
Lena Ross:
We say engage with empathy. That’s deeper engagement. The second one is letting go of an expert mindset and thinking more like a beginner. Our expert mindset has, without a doubt, served us well for a long time. It’s got us to where we are. But to grow and to think in an agile way, it’s also about embracing things differently. So, one of the things we talk about there is if you get a reverse mentor, it might help you see things from a different perspective because it is really hard to park judgment. I mean, I think you have to be very mindful about, oh, I better not judge. I know sometimes I have to check myself and go, “Don’t say anything, Lena, just wait and see what they’ve got to say,” and park your judgment and listen to that other view or listen to that new thing or whatever.
Natasha:
I think this is the one that I personally struggle with the most because it’s hard.
Lena Ross:
Okay, okay. That’s interesting. Yeah.
Natasha:
Yeah, and I think I verbalized that because you guys had a Zoom, it’s been a while ago now, a few months ago when you launched this course. I think as change agents, well, I don’t think I’m alone. I’ll speak for myself. I won’t speak for everyone, but I feel like I’ve always got to have the answer and be the expert in change. As you get more and more senior, I find it hard to just not present as the expert, but also, that’s so often what’s been expected of me in a lot of environments. People want you to say, “This is the answer and this is what we should do.” I love a good co-design. I’m not a monster, but I definitely, I’m all about co-designing and certain things, but yeah, I do find it hard, especially that example you just gave where people are talking and I’m already sitting there going, “Oh yeah, it sounds like this.” I’m thinking, “Oh, I can see exactly how this is going to go.” That’s all going on within my head, but it’s really hard to shut that down, very difficult.
Lena Ross:
Yeah, yeah. It’s a tough one because we’ve been rewarded for it. We’ve been defined by it. Like you said, we are recruited for it. That’s why people get us on board, particularly for consultants. When you think about it, this is the one that a lot of senior execs also struggle with. They’re expected to know everything. So, it’s about having strategies to open up. It comes with that vulnerability, doesn’t it, and that safety to be able to say, “Look, I don’t know everything in this space. I might just need some help with this.” And this, of course, we cover in the course. Each little micro-module is on one of these as well as a few other things, like how do you change your mindset. So, the questions you’re asking are really good. So, that’s the second one, going to an expert [inaudible 00:21:29]
Natasha:
Sorry, I interrupted you.
Lena Ross:
No, no, no. No, not at all, not at all. I’m not just going to rattle them off without a little bit of a narrative, so feel free to jump in.
Natasha:
Okay.
Lena Ross:
That’s what helps people make sense of it too and unpack it a little bit and think about their own experience with each of the shifts. The third one, I think it’s one of the ones that… People struggle with all of these in varying degrees, but the one about letting go of perfection and focusing on getting things done. Again, this is a little bit like the expert. It’s like, “Oh, but I’ve been rewarded by this in the past and this is what I’m good at.” You hear so many people say, “Oh, you know I’m a recovering perfectionist.” It is very counter to agile if you want to open up, if you want to share, you want to work out loud, you want to share, especially the whole thing about iterating and not getting things right the first time is important in agile, and then using the retrospective to find out what didn’t go right, and this is another one that is really predicated on having a safe environment to experiment.
So, with this one, as well as potentially the expert one, I know I’ve often used, I’ve often framed things like, “I just want to try something out. I haven’t done this before, I haven’t done this a lot, or I haven’t done it in this environment, so I’d like to experiment and see how we go and get your feedback.” So, you kind of set a little bit of a safety net for yourself. You’re managing your stakeholder expectations and give yourself… You can forgive yourself a little bit if it’s not the perfect outcome you wanted.
Natasha:
Yeah. One’s another tough one because I feel like I’m personally comfortable with MVPs. Although I remember I was like 70%, and I think I did one of your courses, and you and Jen were like, “Oh yeah, 50%.” I was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. 50% isn’t… Whoa, I’m being challenged by that.” But I feel like, again, change agent, I’ve been in environments where people demand perfection, yet they’re saying, “We work in an agile fashion,” and then you’ve got some conflicting instructions and some conflicting priorities there. It can be hard to, especially because we know that command and control leadership still has such a strong hold in the upper echelons of Australian companies, and it tends to tie in with that command and control style of leadership which, as we know, doesn’t go with agile, but there’s a lot of command and control leaders out there who are trying to say, “Oh, we’ve got to do agile.” They don’t know that they have to change too, blah blah, blah. It’s a whole other topic.
Lena Ross:
Yeah.
Natasha:
But yeah, you’re thinking, “Oh yeah, I’ve got the agile mindset. Yeah, you want to do agile, let’s do MVP for change. Let’s do sprints.” And then you do it and you can almost get your arse handed to you because they’re like, “Oh, I wanted this perfect change plan.” It does sometimes mean you’re not the right fit and you’re not what they wanted. I feel like a lot of change agents come up against that, not because of their own mindset, but because of the mindsets of others. Do you have any advice?
Lena Ross:
Yeah, this is why when we work with organizations, we want to work with the senior leaders as well because if they’re not modeling the mindset or understand the mindset that’s required to underpin building organizational agility, then they’re going to get in the way of agility. We are probably digressing a little bit here, but we know that a lot of organizations struggle with what agile really looks like and they’re in a hybrid state, or there’s pockets of the organization that are doing it well and pockets that don’t, and we know pretty much what the enablers are and the blockers. One of the big blockers is if the leader doesn’t really understand what the behaviors and mindset are. It’s not just about getting the agile coach to come in and do the practices and do the ceremonies and things.
Natasha:
The sprints, yeah.
Lena Ross:
And then they tick the agile box, we’re doing agile, yay. No, you really need to think about what thinking is required to do it and support it and model it, and then getting the right people on board when you recruit new people too who are happy to think differently or open to thinking differently. So, the perfection is one that we say do this incrementally. Do small things that you know can take risks in, and then as those small things start to work for you and you get the dopamine hit from not being perfect as opposed to being perfect. Perfection’s not real anyway. It’s a subjective notion anyway. What I think is perfect [inaudible 00:26:06]. We use things like that to kind of help people get around it. Yeah.
Natasha:
Okay. Okay, good.
Lena Ross:
And we say “You can be accurate, but it doesn’t have to be perfect.” If I’m an accountant, I can be accurate, but my spreadsheet might not look perfect. So, we also draw the difference between perfection and accuracy, because some people get caught up in that and think, “No, I can’t, I cant do that. It’s my job. If I mess up, it’s going to have this impact and that impact.” Are you talking about accuracy? Because that could be a little bit different too.
Natasha:
Yeah, and if you’re a change manager and your slides are accurate but they’re not perfect, then just go see Sharon Connolly.
Lena Ross:
No, exactly right.
Natasha:
She’ll sort you out.
Lena Ross:
Yeah, there’s a tools out there that can help you with that.
Natasha:
So you don’t have to spend your time on that. Okay. Was that three?
Lena Ross:
That was the third one, yeah.
Natasha:
That was the third one. What’s the fourth one?
Lena Ross:
Yeah, thanks for getting me back on track. Okay. The fourth one is failure avoidance and moving towards a mindset that actually looks for failure. This is a good one borrowed from the practice of design thinking. The notion of failing fast, if you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough because you really need to find those failure points in your product or service so they will be right for the user and they’ll be human-centric. A bit like perfection, this is so hard. All through our schooling, if you didn’t do well, you failed, and fail was not good, and you didn’t want to bring home a report card that had an F on it, counter to our social conditioning of years and years. So, this is a tough one as well.
So, again, we need to say to people in organizations, “Where can you fail?” Because they say, “We can’t fail, we can’t do this.” We go, “Well, where can you fail?” Ring-fence again the areas that you think it might be safe to fail and experiment because this is what’s going to give people confidence to not just do it, but to talk about it openly in a retrospective. There’s a lot of organizational cultures that still, you wouldn’t feel safe to do that, say, “It was me, I messed up, but this is what we learned and this is what we need to do differently next time.” There’s some good examples of organizations that reward the biggest stuff up, if you like. So, it’s called out and it becomes a lesson for the whole organization.
Natasha:
Do you have one of those examples at the top of mind? Because I’ve personally never experienced that. It’s another one that I love the concept, but I consistently find myself in environments where you can’t fail, and also, this includes celebrating, killing off bad ideas, not throwing them into the market, seeing what happens. Do you have an example [inaudible 00:28:57]?
Lena Ross:
Yeah. In one of our courses, the Certificate of Agile Change Leadership has got fail fast, learn fast as one of the modules, one of the lessons, if you like, in the agile module. Just so people know that you can make this real, we did work with an organization that applied this same concept and they did it as a monthly award. So, Etsy is an organization that has their three sleeve sweater award, I think it’s called. There’s information online about it. If you google Etsy and their three sleeve jumper, or they call them sweaters over there, I’m pretty sure. Anyway, but that award, they actually win a sweater that’s got three sleeves knitted into it, right? So, they win this imperfect thing as an award, and people clamor now to get this award because it’s such a prized thing.
But it started when there was a coder or someone working in software development that made a mistake that brought the whole site down, and Etsy, for those of you who are not familiar with Etsy, it’s an online retailer. This was a while back. I think this occurred back in 2015, so it’s not a new story. The coder felt terrible, and they said, “It’s really now we got to focus on what we learned from this. We don’t want the site to go down again, so we need to talk about what happened. We need to admit to it so we can get onto it straight away.” This really defines their culture now, and like I said, everyone wants to win the Etsy award. They put in nominations for it.
When we worked with a team, actually a group from the States, it was their HR team, they wanted to go agile, and we talked about you need to have like a what are my major stuff ups and start slowly, start talking about them in meetings through retrospectives and then gradually introduce it as the month, the stuff up of the month or the mistake of the month or the failure of the month was this. We say to people, if failure is an F word that they want to avoid, you can use different words around this. It can be things that didn’t go so well if you really want to couch it in a way that people are more comfortable with. They were able to introduce that, and then it became a thing where regular retrospectives talk about what didn’t go well, what do we need to do differently, people starting to own up to them and talking about them openly. So, it created quite a shift.
Natasha:
Great. Thank you for sharing that.
Lena Ross:
Retros are a good tool for it because you introduce that in a safe environment I think first. You set it up. It’s a nice forum to do it.
Natasha:
Yeah, and there’s so many different ways you can do a retro, so you can tailor it.
Lena Ross:
Absolutely, yes.
Natasha:
You can do the simple what went well, what didn’t go so well, what should we do next, or there’s one I’ve been using with a client I just rolled off of, the acronym is FLAP. I think it’s future, learnings, what puzzles us, but yeah. I use a tool called TeamRetro. I use it for all sorts of things because you can do team health checks on it, but if you go onto there, there’s so many different… They have the Spotify ones and the ones that big companies use, and you can tailor it to maybe if there’s some sensitive feelings in a particular area, you don’t feel like we can directly talk. There’s so many different ways you can do it. I think the retro is probably, yeah, one of the cornerstones of agile practices really because you can do [inaudible 00:32:42].
Lena Ross:
Yeah. I’m glad you said that. I wanted to ask you what your favorite retro was.
Natasha:
Oh yeah. You know what? I’m going to look up that acronym because it’s bothering me because the FLAP one was good. I changed the retro because I think I was doing the… We started off with a what went well, what didn’t go so well. I like what puzzles us. That’s one of my-
Lena Ross:
Yeah, I love that.
Natasha:
Because there’s a lot of, “Why did we do that? I never understood.”
Lena Ross:
It’s a safe way too, isn’t it? It’s a safe question to ask.
Natasha:
Okay, so FLAP, future considerations, lessons learned, accomplishments, and problem areas.
Lena Ross:
Nice.
Natasha:
So, you don’t have to say, “This didn’t go well.” You can say, “This was a problem, or the lessons and problem is.” So, I changed to FLAP after getting some feedback from my client saying, “Oh, I want to talk about this,” and I was like, “Okay, let me see what retrofits this.” And I went, “Okay, I’ve completely redone it. It’s a new retro.” So, that one’s a good one. But yeah, there’s so many. Yeah, I would say it’s that or it’s just the basic what went well, what didn’t go so well, what shall we do next time. They’re probably the two that I use the most. What are yours?
Lena Ross:
And I mean, we could make some up. I mean, there’s no reason why… If there’s a particular thing that’s unique to that organizational culture that they’re having trouble talking about, you could make up a column or something on the quadrant or whatever tool you’re using to bring out that conversation in a safe way. And when you do it with a tool, it’s a lot more comfortable. It’s not you really doing it.
Natasha:
Yeah. And you can do it anonymously. TeamRetro allows for anonymous, so you don’t have to be like, “Who said that?”
Lena Ross:
Yeah, yeah, totally, yeah.
Natasha:
Or even if you’re doing it in person, unless you’re watching people like a hawk, you’re not really going to know who’s put which card up on the board, and then it becomes, that takes a layer of making it personal out of it as well.
Lena Ross:
Totally. Yeah, totally.
Natasha:
What was your favorite retro?
Lena Ross:
We like the four Ls.
Natasha:
Oh yes, yes.
Lena Ross:
Like, love, learnt, and longed for. Longed for is a nice one too-
Natasha:
Yeah, that’s a good one, yeah.
Lena Ross:
… because it’s like what was missing. I like that because it opens up, it makes it safe to talk about maybe emotions or what people are feeling. Yeah.
Natasha:
Yeah, yeah. So, I think, yeah, that’s a piece of advice for the listeners. If you’re doing a retro, go and look at all the popular retros because there’s probably, I don’t know, well over 30 kind of very established ones, and just pick the one that you think is going to best suit what you’re trying to do or the situation, because you don’t have to go with the straight up what went well, what didn’t.
Lena Ross:
And don’t be frightened to experiment, and maybe don’t be frightened to mix a couple up together to get what you think that situation needs at that time.
Natasha:
Well, yeah, and that’s the same as anything. If it doesn’t already exist, make it. I make up my own agile canvases all the time. I google them first. I’m like, “Oh, there doesn’t seem to be one.”
Lena Ross:
Yeah, same, same, yeah.
Natasha:
I’m like, “Change resistance canvas. Change T-shirt in canvas.” I should eventually start putting these up for sale on my website
Lena Ross:
Yeah, or get them onto Miro so everyone can share them and see them.
Natasha:
Yeah. That’s a good idea. So, do we have one more mindset mindset shift?
Lena Ross:
Yes, we do, we do. Thank you. Thank you, Natasha, for keeping us on track with the five mindset shifts.
Natasha:
It’s all good.
Lena Ross:
The fourth one, which is quite important and I think underpins all of them, and interestingly is the one that people struggle with the most, as shown by the agile mindset quiz that we have online which is a free self-assessment tool. I can just send you the link to that if you need anything [inaudible 00:36:19].
Natasha:
Great. I’ll put it in the show notes, yeah.
Lena Ross:
Yeah, is self-judgment to self-compassion, how judgey we are of ourselves, and we impose a lot of these things on ourselves, and when you think about it, things like perfection is something we impose on ourselves or the need to be the expert all the time, and if we’re not, we go, “How could we not know that? How stupid, I felt…” Blame and shame with yourself to self-compassion and being kind to yourself. So, the key thing there is asking yourself the question is would you be… You know that inner voice in our head that is really harsh on us?
Natasha:
Yeah.
Lena Ross:
We say to people, “Would you speak like that to a friend or a loved one the same way you speak to yourself?” And probably not.
Natasha:
No.
Lena Ross:
We’re very hard on ourself. Yeah.
Natasha:
No. Yeah. Yeah, that’s a really good one. So many people struggle with that one.
Lena Ross:
So, on that, if you wanted to do a quick self-assessment which is a free self-assessment tool, we have that agile mindset quiz, keeping in mind, of course, that any self-assessment tool could come with a little bit of personal bias. We could overrate ourselves, underrate ourselves, a bit of a Dunning-Kruger effect may play out. But nonetheless, it’s an interesting one with some thought-provoking questions.
Natasha:
Yeah. No, I’ll make sure that’s in the show notes. Thank you, Lena. And then I think we kind of touched on this, and I’ve talked about my personal challenges, but which do people find the most challenging, I guess both change agents and also out there in clients and companies and leader?
Lena Ross:
Well, because we’ve got data through the agile mindset quiz now, it confirms what’s happened through observation, and when we run these sessions with leaders, we also, we get them to self-assess just themselves, and then we ask them at the end, what did you find most challenging. We’re not getting conflicting data. It all seems to be quite consistent. So, the one that is the most challenging for a lot of people, and practitioners and leaders alike, is the the self-compassion. That’s the most challenging. The least challenging seems to be the beginner mindset, which is interesting because that’s the expert to beginner. It’s just interesting because you called that out as a challenging one, but the data shows that’s probably one of the least challenging ones.
Natasha:
I’m so unique.
Lena Ross:
You are unique. You know what? Just bask in the glow of being unique. The second one that’s challenging is done is better than perfect. And look, we understand a lot of these interplay with each other. They’re not mutually exclusive. Empathy over engagement interestingly is the third most challenging. Failure and empathy are pretty much on a par. When I do the sessions with people face-to-face or virtually, like in real time, for me personally, failure comes out over empathy and engagement as a challenging one.
Natasha:
Right?, yeah.
Lena Ross:
I think they’re close. They’re close on the track, yeah.
Natasha:
Mm-hmm. So, how might you look to recruit someone with an agile mindset? What sort of questions would you ask them if you wanted to bring people into your organization who had agile mindsets?
Lena Ross:
Mm-hmm. I have some questions here that I ask, and I think recruiting is really important because I think I mentioned earlier how important that is for leaders to model or people to model the mindset and the behaviors that support that mindset. But if you don’t get the right people on the bus as you recruit them, you could slow things down. Now, there seems to be a focus, there’s a strong focus on recruiting for culture fit, and I think what might be missing sometimes in recruitment is recruiting for the culture fit of the future, rather than the culture fit of the now. The other thing that’s challenging for recruiting is it’s a candidate’s market. So, sometimes recruiters just get excited if they get a candidate or more than one candidate to fill the role, rather than I can pick and choose here and be really picky. It’s the candidate at the moment who can be picky. But look, things change, and it doesn’t mean that you can’t ask questions to get an idea of where people are at.
The other thing is recruiters will often look for skill first and then mindset second, if at all, and that that’s will skill matrix that I really like is you’ve got to get the balance of skill and will, and will is the propensity to thinking differently and being willing to do things differently. So, some questions to ask which are real giveaways, I think, are what are you doing differently to what you were say doing a couple of years ago to see if there’s been a shift and asking why. I mean, there’ll be some interesting responses coming out now with the pandemic and working from home and things. There’ll be some interesting ways that people frame that and talk about that.
Natasha:
Yeah, because the answer that immediately came into my mind was more of a personal shift than something in change management. I’ll tell you what it is because I’ve spoken about it on a couple of weeks ago episode. I’m not a New Year’s resolution person, but it is something I’m trying to do is I want to stop drinking alcohol when I’m at home by myself because I got into the habit of doing that during all the lockdowns, because as you know, you’d get to the end of the day and be like, “Oh, well, I can’t go anywhere. I can’t do anything. I’ll have a glass of red and I’ll have a nice piece of cheese.”
Lena Ross:
Hear, hear, I’m here with you on that.
Natasha:
Yeah, that’s what we were all doing, but it’s a habit that’s stuck and I’ve kept on doing it. It’s not healthy to do that, to drink alcohol every single day. So, I felt like if I can stop doing it when I’m at home by myself, if I have people around, that’s fine, if I’m out and about doing social things, that’s also fine, but it would reduce my alcohol consumption and hopefully therefore reduce my risks of getting some cancers and all of that sort of stuff. So, I am having to make a mindset shift to make that happen because you can’t just break a habit that you’ve had for nearly three years and just stop, otherwise I would’ve done it already.
So, I’m reading lots of books. I’m reading, and I’m actually trying to associate what habits go with that, and one of them is watching TV and that’s another bad. So, I’m like, “Okay, I am going to just read books.” I’m not going near the lounge because I’ll get my dinner and then after dinner I’ll go and sit on the couch, and that’s when I think, “Oh, a glass of red would be nice.” So, I’m trying to stop that associated activity, and almost like… Yeah.
Lena Ross:
It sounds like you’re looking for data to support that shift, which is what we talked about with the mindset shift.
Natasha:
Yeah.
Lena Ross:
You’re looking for data to support a different way of doing things. That’s good. I think in that question, Natasha, what are you doing differently, the recruiter could also, if the recruiter isn’t getting maybe what they want say for a work situation, then you can always dig a little deeper and say, “What about work?”
Natasha:
Yeah. Maybe I shouldn’t say in an interview, “Yeah, I’m trying not to just drink alcohol every day.”
Lena Ross:
No, no, no, no. No, no, it’s important though because being mindful of a mindset shift is important and that’s what you’re doing. You’re being mindful that it’s a mindset shift. So, that’s critical. You’re labeling it. You’ve been aware of it. So, no, not at all. It’s really relevant. People going into interviews need to think about that before they… It’s always good to prepare for an interview, as we all know.
Natasha:
Yeah, but I think people often prepare the technical stuff. So, when you start asking them about their mindset and their attitude, they go, “Mm.” I heard some feedback, it was somebody that I had interviewed for a role and then I put them to the second interview which was with the project director and I think a project manager, and they asked that person, “What gets you out of bed in the morning?”
Lena Ross:
Yeah.
Natasha:
They struggled to answer it.
Lena Ross:
Yeah, that’s a good question, isn’t it? You’re right. I think we used to get asked those questions more like a few years ago, and then for some reason there’s been a trend towards a lot more technical questions. I think that’s because the market is more gig workers and stuff like that, and it’s about filling a gap quickly and for shorter term pieces of work. But another one that I ask is, “How do you stay ahead of the curve to stay up to date with best practice and emerging practice in your field?”
Natasha:
Oh, that’s great. Yeah.
Lena Ross:
Yeah, that gives you an insight into are they just complacent or are they really going out of their way to learn beyond what an organization…
Natasha:
Yeah. Did they do one certification 10 years ago and they just keep rolling out that same tool and methodology and thinking they can apply it to every single role?
Lena Ross:
And it doesn’t have to be formal paid learning. It can be like, I read books, I listen to TED Talks. There’s so much out there.
Natasha:
Podcasts, yeah.
Lena Ross:
Yeah, yeah.
Natasha:
Following certain creators.
Lena Ross:
[inaudible 00:45:35] your podcast. I mean, I’d be impressed, if someone turned up to my interview and said, “I listen to Natasha’s podcasts,” I know that they’re open to a lot of new ideas and really casting the net wide to get an idea of what change is about. So, yeah, totally.
Natasha:
I like that question because I’m always wanting to be the best, most modern change practitioner that I can be. Everybody knows I’ve got boards. My office is full of just sticky note, it looks like a crazy person lives here. But I’ve got a professional development section, and every year I go, “What’s my professional development going to be? What do I think I’m going to do?” And this year I’ve probably got maybe four or five things that I’m looking at, and I’ll try and do one, at least one kind of major learning piece a year. And then there’s other things like the books and the podcasts, and I follow people. You can just follow someone, like somebody who’s writes a blog. There’s people who write blogs. There’s people who do podcasts. And you’re right, you can hear all these ideas and you can learn, or you could go to an ad hoc workshop that someone’s running. I’m thinking about Kathy who came on. She did her Prehab for Change workshop and she’s doing another one in April.
Yeah, it doesn’t mean formal certifications that cost several thousands of dollars and take a week, although they can be useful in the right time. But yeah, I think if you can show that this is how I’m developing my practice and this is where I’m getting ideas, and it doesn’t always mean… There’s so much free content out there, but I do think, I would hate for somebody to think, “Oh god, she’s so nineties, she’s using these crusty old templates and she’s talking about stuff that’s just so over.” I’d be mortified if people thought that, and it means that I’m always looking at what should I do, and yeah, if somebody says, “Oh, I haven’t done anything.” And it’s like, well, how do you learn? Who are you learning from?
Lena Ross:
That’s right.
Natasha:
That’s a good one. That’s a really good one.
Lena Ross:
If they’re stuck on that, they’re just not curious enough. I mean, I have a story from when I worked years ago at, one of the big banks, and I published or I released some stuff about, I was running internal workshops at that time on the SCARF model and the neuroscience of change and stuff like that. Someone emailed me and said, “Oh, I’ve never heard of the SCARF model. What is it?” And I’m thinking, “Are you serious? You cannot get on google yourself and check it out? I’ve got to find the link, that you are not curious enough. Sorry.” I thought, “How could people just not be curious?” But anyway. I’m sitting [inaudible 00:48:24] judgment.
Natasha:
My DMs are full of people who are, well, they’re not full, I’d say maybe 40% of my LinkedIn DMs are things that could just be googled.
Lena Ross:
Yeah.
Natasha:
I don’t know why people feel like they have to ask a person something they could google. That’s an ongoing, and again, it comes back to that I don’t want to be rude to say, “Oh, this lady who seemed so nice on her podcast was just so rude to me when I sent her an unsolicited message on LinkedIn asking her to provide all of her IP to me for free.” I have done it once. I have said, “Oh, have you tried googling this?” “No.” It’s like, maybe you should do that before. And it’s people I don’t even know. I don’t know these people.
Lena Ross:
I know.
Natasha:
They’re strangers.
Lena Ross:
I know. Yeah, I know.
Natasha:
Don’t get me started on that.
Lena Ross:
You can uncover them in an interview too. And the other one that I ask is, and this is one about bounce back resilience and a bit about that agile mindset is, “Tell me about a time something hasn’t gone well for you.” So, this is where you would uncover the perfectionist or the person who’s probably not really adaptive. And then asking how they bounced back from it is also important because everyone’s going to have things that don’t go well for them so it’s not so much the thing you’re trying to uncover here. It’s what they did about it.
And then the red flags that I hear in interviews are things like, I’m hearing this less, but we’ve heard these platitudes before, it’s important to get it right the first time, or failure isn’t an option for me or fail to plan and then you plan to fail. The other one is I don’t focus on problems, I go straight to focusing on solutions. We’ve all had the manager who said, “Don’t come to me with problems. Come to me with a solution.” But this is such an antithesis to, say, the principles of design thinking and human-centered design where you have to really unpack the problem first before jumping into solutions.
And then the other one is, this is a really interesting one because I don’t know if people ask these questions anymore, but sometimes we would ask strengths and weaknesses questions way back. But if you hear someone say, “I’m a perfectionist and take pride in my work,” and they position that as a strength, this is where a good follow-up question would be, “Tell me about a time when something hasn’t gone so well for you.” So, it’s mixing and matching the questions up a bit, or listening for the red flags. Sometimes I’ve heard people say, when you ask people talk about their weaknesses, some have talked about their perfectionism, if you like, as a weakness and how they’ve got to overcome it, that that’s probably a good thing because it means that they’re aware that that could be something that could be helpful.
Natasha:
Those questions are hard because you got to find something that’s like a weakness, but it’s also not going to make you unemployable.
Lena Ross:
I know. And saying chocolate isn’t good enough anymore, and I used to [inaudible 00:51:12] that one.
Natasha:
Yeah. You can’t say, “Oh, I yell at everyone when I get angry.” I think my answer to that question is sometimes I just take on too much work because I think I can do it all and then I can get a bit… Well, that’s not a true one anymore though. I’d have to think about how I answered that.
Lena Ross:
What about something like, because this is a weakness of mine and you’ve mentioned it, is learning when to park my expert mindset.
Natasha:
Yeah, yeah. I just said I always want to be this.
Lena Ross:
And knowing when to bring it in and knowing when to let go of it. Sometimes I just really have think hard about that.
Natasha:
Yeah, that’s a good one. Thank you, Lena. Thank you for identifying the weakness that I brought up earlier in the podcast.
Lena Ross:
No, well, I didn’t mean to frame it like that.
Natasha:
No, no, no.
Lena Ross:
That helps protect you too. So, if you get the job, you can say, “Well, I said I didn’t have to be the expert all the time.”
Natasha:
Yeah, I said that was something I’m working on. No, that’s great. So, where can people learn more about your Agile Mindset course?
Lena Ross:
If you jump on our website which is aclinstitute.com-
Natasha:
I’ll make sure that’s in the show notes.
Lena Ross:
Yeah, and also in the show notes for you, Natasha, I could get you the link that goes straight to the Agile Mindset course which we host on Teachable, but there’s obviously links on our website to that. For people who are curious to do a self-assessment or might want to do a self-assessment first, I can get that link to you to the quiz.
Natasha:
Excellent, excellent. So, you can go to the Agile Change Institute’s website. You can also buy one of Lena’s multiple books. What do we got? Change Management: The Essentials, I’m looking at my bookcase, Hacking for Agile Change, Agile Change Playbook, along with Jen Frahm.
Lena Ross:
Yeah, which I co-wrote with Jen. Yeah.
Natasha:
Is that it, just those three books?
Lena Ross:
I’ve got an book-
Natasha:
The ebook, yes.
Lena Ross:
Which is the ebook, Design Thinking Meets Change Management. That’s through my website which is lenaross.com.au.
Natasha:
Great. And follow you on LinkedIn.
Lena Ross:
And follow us on LinkedIn, and also follow the Agile Change Leadership Institute on LinkedIn, because that’s where we post a lot of stuff on this too.
Natasha:
Yeah, yeah. Well, there’s a lot of places you can get in touch with Lena. If you’re not already, you should be. Lena, thank you so much for so generously sharing all of that information about the agile mindset and for coming back and being a guest on Casa de Cambio.
Lena Ross:
It’s been nice. Thank you.
Natasha:
It’s been a pleasure. And for the guests, I’ll be back soon with another episode. Bye.
