Motherhood and Agile Leadership
A recap and summary of a series of BLOG posts I have written in May 2021
Pictures: Breaking an Agile Mindset down AND Modern Agile
I had a discussion with a colleague today, who will be going on maternity leave tomorrow for her second child. She did ask several colleagues for feedback about her strength, weakness and latest accomplishments. During my answer I did remember my BLOG post series from 2021 about the Motherhood and Agile Leadership topic.
A good time to recap and summarize the content, because I had to change my BLOG hosting company in Dec-22 and the old links are not working anymore. Luckily I have all my BLOG posts as yearly eBOOKs for free download. You can either check the 2021 eBOOK and the 07-, 08- and 20-May-21 posts or read the key messages below, up to you. I will also share some helpful links.
How Motherhood Makes Many Women Better Leaders (Dan Rockwell)
Motherhood and Leadership: A Powerful Combination Shaping the Future
Force of Nature: What motherhood taught us about leadership of tomorrow
Video: 5 Parenting Styles and Their Effects on Life
Now the summary of my BLOG posts:
Rock your components ... (07-May-21)
I am an engineer by studies and we guys prefer smart reuse over starting from scratch, what makes even more sense, when the development cycles are getting shorter and shorter. So "Steal with Pride", "Copy and Transfer" and "Rock your ideas" --> throw different components together, mix it, check the result, mix it again until a promising idea comes out. Great approach, especially when the room for really disruptive new ideas is limited, as in the current times.
Mother Day is coming up on Sunday. Having a mother, being the brother of two sisters with kids and being the father of three daughters, I do have some ideas about and insights into motherhood and, what it means today and has meant during the last 50 years. Only one argument to join the webinar yesterday. Another one was that I am always looking for new interesting topics.
After the webinar I did go out for a short walk, to have a little movement after a long day in home office, sitting at my desk for the most time. Fresh air and using some other muscles did bring me to the following idea. Going beyond the webinar topic - What motherhood taught us about leadership of tomorrow - and looking for the overlaps between motherhood and an agile mindset. 😉
Let's jump into the topic right a way and look into the Agile Manifesto as a starting point 🤔:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools --> learning by doing
Working software over comprehensive documentation --> get things done quickly
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation --> kids go first and know it
Responding to change over following a plan --> every day is a new day
Just a 1st quick check of commonalities between Motherhood and the Agile Manifesto. More similarities that quickly came to my mind during the walk yesterday:
Agile Scrum is proposed for complex environments, with a lot of unknowns and no previous experience - e.g. the time before the 1st kid is born
Mothers always connect the dots and loose ends, run iterations to improve, do regular reviews and retrospectives with friends and other mothers
They build communities of practice with women they connected to during the childbirth preparation class for example
When more kids arrive mothers start to run several workstreams in parallel with a lot of dependencies in between, kind of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
When you read the description of a Scrum Master in the Scrum Guide, you will find a lot of overlaps with the picture on the left - the attributes of mothers wordcloud
Agile 2! A second iteration of Agile that understands and seeks to address today’s
challenges.... - brings Leadership back into the picture, what fits perfectly to the webinar topic from yesterday and is closing the circle for today 👍
More to come as this topic has a lot more potential ...
P.S.: Thanks a lot to Eve Simon for coming up with the motherhood and leadership thoughts and the webinar content, always a pleasure to participate in your journey.
Motherhood and Agile Part II (08-May-21)
"Modern Agile is a community for people interested in uncovering better ways of getting awesome results. It leverages wisdom from many industries, is principle driven and framework free." -- Joshua Kerievsky, CEO, Industrial Logic
The statement above and the 4 principles have a lot in common with, what mothers are doing on a daily basis:
Make People Awesome -- the plan that mothers have for their kids anyway
Make Safety a Prerequisite -- the key motivation of parents, when they have kids
Experiment & Learn Rapidly -- there are no training classes for parents, learn fast is key
Deliver Value Continuously -- for the kids and with the kids on a daily basis
Another one I have seen today is - There’s a New Kid on the Agile Block — FAST Agile. The article picture is referencing The Cynefin Framework:
The central idea of the framework is to offer decision-makers a “sense of place” to view their perceptions in dealing with a situation or problem. Not all situations are equal, and this framework helps to define which response is required for a given situation or problem. It is an excellent model to help categorise the situation and assists in setting out how we can approach these different situations, explaining the characteristics of each category to help us recognise and define the current situation.
There are so many decisons to be taken every day, when you are a mother, a father or parents. Good to have some helping hands and ideas. More to come ...
TED Playlist: How to sustain meaningful relationships (near and far)
Building workforce skills at scale to thrive during—and after—the COVID-19 crisis
Help your employees find purpose—or watch them leave
"Being a mother is not a 'bug or penalty' in business, but a key-feature for future leadership and success" -- Eve Simon. Happy Mother's Day
Agile mindset and principles ... (20-May-21)
As follow up to my two BLOG posts about Rock your components ... and Motherhood and Agile Part II, I had an interview with Eve Simon yesterday. We did record a 15 minute session around the topics motherhood, leadership and the relation to agile for a Summit that will be coming up later this year. Eve was looking for a father opinion and asked me, as I was the only male participant in her latest workshop and we know each other from previous Future of Leadership Salon events.
It was a lot of fun and I have seen the result today. Always interesting and surprising to see yourself on a video, especially when this is not happening very often. I have realized some areas for improvement and my wife mentioned some topics as well that I should be rethinking for the next time. But in summary open, honest and authentic, what was my main focus and driver. 😎
With respect to Agile Mindset see the picture on the left, for more details about Agile Principles, see the 12 Principles of Agile Poster as one example. When you review the pictures in more detail and keep Motherhood and Kids respectively Family in mind, you will realize a lot of similarities and commonalities. Just give it a try. 🤔
“The longer we listen to one another - with real attention - the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.” — Barbara Deming
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When you made it until here with your reading, some comments, feedback or opinions would be very much appreciated!!