Personal Agility – Align What You Do with What Really Matters with Peter Stevens

Peter Stevens – Author, Executive Coach, Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Trainer, and Founder or co-Founder of the Scrum Ambassadors, Agile Executives.org, and the World Agility Forum.

He’s also a Chief Agility officer of a startup company in Zurich and the Creator of the Personal Agility System.™

In this episode we covered:

• How agility can help organizations achieve alignment through clarity of purpose, build trust and getting things done

• What are the 6 questions under The Personal Agility System Stakeholder Interview Canvas that helps organizations identify problems, create alignment, produce results and achieve their goals faster.

• Understanding The Personal Agility System and many more.

TRAILER TRANSCRIPT 

The process of building alignment, I actually find works much better to have, like, one on one interviews with the stakeholders, each of the key stakeholders.

And again, here, it depends on the context.
And this is a problem at an organization.

You’ll see this at the board level.
You’ll see that at the management level.
You’ll see this at the operational level,

Everybody’s got stakeholders, and they’re always have different understandings about what we’re trying to accomplish.

And so what you do is you kind of sit down with each of them individually.

And the funny thing is, most people are they’re afraid of not being heard.

So you can kind of see they’re trying to push their ideas through. And then you see the select. They don’t even let each other finish their sentences.

Yes, I know what you’re gonna say.
Now let me say my thing.

And the problem is if you want people to listen to you, the first thing to do is to listen to them.

Okay.

So kind of one of our guidelines in puny invite context.
Listen, before you talk, it’ll work with your teenagers, it’ll work with your board.

Listen, before you talk, ask before you tell.

So what I do is I’m starting out in a new contact.
The first thing to do is to interview each of the key stakeholders.

First question is, who are you? What do you do?

Next question is, what’s the mission? Why are we here?

Then we get into understanding the problem, what is our immediate goal and what’s making this difficult?

So that’s kind of the technical challenge.

Then we get into the more emotional stuff.
This is the stuff that people fight about.

What are you afraid of?

Because these are often the elephants in the room.
And sometimes you have to tease out the answer to this one a bit,

because a lot of people.
And again, here, it’s also very culture dependent.

Are they willing to talk about what they’re really afraid of?
It you kind of tease out these concerns.
You find out what the real issues are in the situation.

So these are worries and risks looking forward.

And then the next step is to say, okay, what frustrates you?
What’s getting on your nerves?

Where do you feel like you’re not being heard or where the other people don’t want to cooperate?

So we call this challenges fears and frustrations.

And then we go to the definition of awesome.
What would be the best possible outcome for what we’re trying to achieve.

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