A strategy – but also a mindset
In addition to strategy, many agile practitioners believe being agile is also a mindset. What is an agile mindset? A consortium of agile practitioners developed this definition. Others, however, point to Dr Carol Dweck’s research-based definition of a growth mindset.
“A growth mindset is an approach to life in which an individual believes that their talents, intelligence, and abilities can be developed further. People with a growth mindset seek opportunities to learn, gain new skills, and enhance their existing skills”.
Dr Carol Dweck
Both definitions offer insight in the context of developing agile talent. Together they point to organizations, leaders or individuals that:
- Believe in continuous learning, improvement, innovation
- Actively challenge the status quo by pursuing more value
- Are open to new and different ways of doing things, skills and capabilities
- Expect to collaborate and stretch across boundaries
"Agile practitioners are said to have an ‘agile mindset’ when they are preoccupied - and sometimes obsessed - with innovating and delivering steadily more customer value, with getting work done in small self-organizing teams, and with collaborating together in an interactive network. Such organizations have been shown to have the capacity to adapt rapidly to a quickly shifting marketplace."
Denning, Understanding the agile mindset, 2019
How agile is your approach?
Is your current approach to developing talent sufficiently agile? The developing agile talent wheel can help you reflect on where you are now – as a business, a team, or as an individual.
As we know, agile working is all about bringing together the best people to tackle a piece of work – so, why not begin as you mean to go on. You could bring a diverse group of people together, or gather their perspectives, to help you gain a better snapshot of where you are now.
Here are some key reflection questions to get you started...
You can also use the wheel itself to help you build a plan to develop your agility. How you do it will depend on the nature and maturity of your business as well as your current approach.
For example, if your business is relatively mature and well developed, you may already have actions in several segments – so your next step could be to adjust or align activities, clarify outcome measures, and dial up focus in a few priority areas. If your business is less mature and developed, you may need to work through all nine factors step-by-step – why, what, how and where.
Conclusion
Developing agile talent manifesto
Boosting agility is a commercial and business agenda, not just a people agenda.
Most talent is already employed, so developing existing employees, teams, and leaders is core to any agile talent strategy.
Developing agile talent requires agile learning design, evidence-driven innovation, and a focus on ‘why’, ‘how’ as well as ‘who’ and ‘what’.
Becoming agile challenges long-held assumptions, offering new risks and opportunities. It is an inclusive agenda – where everyone has talent and is expected to stretch and grow.
Ten principles of developing agile talent
- Organizations, teams, and individuals need to grow their agility to survive.
- We only succeed if we can meet the needs of both the organization and our people.
- Defining future skills and capabilities is more important than assessing current skills.
- We do plan - purposefully, frequently, and responsively.
- Investing wisely involves reskilling, upskilling and broadskilling more than bringing in new talent.
- Real evidence drives our investment decisions – blending data and the human experience.
- Teams that learn together thrive together.
- Hybrid design is not the same as face-to-face or virtual. Digital is first, but not only digital.
- Agile talent is all talent. Everyone has talent, the question is what for, how, when and where.
- All learning must excite, engage, embed and evolve. If it doesn’t, it needs re-designing.