Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations

Simon Hayward is an honorary professor at Alliance Manchester Business School in the UK and author of The Agile Leader and Connected Leadership. He is also Global Lead for Leadership and Culture at Accenture's Talent & Organization/Human Potential practice. In this episode, Hayward outlines challenges before leaders who seek to engage people in radical change – often the case in large-scale agile transformation. COVID has undoubtedly had a hand in worker expectations, and it offers leaders the opportunity to move their business from being just connected to becoming “omni-connected.” “When organizations combine the digital and technological with the human and cultural, then that combination becomes particularly powerful. And leaders have a disproportionate impact on the way the culture operates and the behaviors in the organization.” Accenture's William Rowden hosts. Learn more: - Accenture Research "From Always Connected to Omni-Connected" https://www.accenture.com/cr-en/insights/strategy/organizational-culture

Julian Mancia is interested in helping humans get out of their own way, specifically when it comes to business innovation. As a Director of "What If! Innovation," part of Accenture, Mancia is excited by nebulous projects that might terrify others. For example, helping companies break into the competitive snack market or doubling growth in five years. How does he do it? With adaptive strategies. Accenture's Allia DeAngelis hosts.

Lisette Zounon is passionate about building quality into everything she does. A quality engineering leader with over 15 years of experience, Zounon is agile at work and at home, whether she's planning her wedding or helping teams deliver excellent products. Her stories inspire the person in each of us that wants to make the world a better place in big ways (e.g., bringing breast cancer care to rural West Africa) and small (e.g., mentoring a young female professional on the verge of quitting the industry). Accenture's Ryan Keawekane hosts. Learn more: - https://www.zsquare4thecure.org/ - #UpYourConfidence podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/upyourconfidence/id1518304276

The world of work has irreversibly changed. As the CEO for Institute Agility, Neville Poole is actively making space for people-centric work experiences. Physical workplaces now serve to bring people together to do what they cannot do remotely: connect, align on values and be creative. What's more, people want their work to be meaningful, especially the next generation of workers. Neville shares her experiences both as an executive in Tech as well as a mother of two teenage girls with big dreams. “This generation places a lot of value on impact… and impact doesn't mean increase revenue by 20% or work 40 hours a week.” Accenture's Ryan Keawekane hosts. Learn More: • “Getting to Equal: Gender Parity in the Workplace” with Neville Poole https://open.spotify.com/episode/2mptreWZWjhtiBlYMQdMid?autoplay=true • https://instituteagility.com/

Agile began in software but has evolved to impact every part of the business. Now business agility is seen as a way for organizations not just to create better products but also to run more effectively overall — regardless of what comes their way. Our guests discuss the evolution to business agility as we see it today. Jason Novack is the global lead of the Accenture Business Agility practice (formerly Accenture | SolutionsIQ), and Evan Leybourn is the founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute. They share what they are seeing in the world both from a business perspective (a greater interest in bringing agility into governance and portfolio management) and a human perspective. As Leybourn puts it, “We spend more time working than any other part of our life … If work isn't one of the best parts of our life, that's a waste of human potential.” Accenture's William Rowden hosts.

Who do you turn to to celebrate or to commiserate? When Apriel Biggs started her career 15 years ago, she didn't have a community of agilists who shared her experiences, other Black and Brown people to share her highs and lows with. So Biggs started Blagile, an organization dedicated to elevating Black and Brown voices in agile. In this episode, she shares her journey and the help she got along the way in hopes of inspiring young agilists today. Accenture's Alalia Lundy hosts. Learn more: - Blagile.com - Reach out to Apriel Biggs if you would like to guest on the Blagile podcast at hello@blagile.com.

Abiodun “Abby” Osoba has tirelessly been creating a community of agilists based primarily out of Lagos, Nigeria, through her commercial and non-profit efforts. Osoba is the founder of the Agile Advisor Africa, co-founder of the Remote Agile Workspace (RAW) as well as one of the creators of the Agile Contracts Manifesto. She shares her journey, her experiences and her vision for business agility in Nigeria and beyond to Africa and the world.

There isn't a single playbook or recipe for success, but one thing is certain: while scaled agile done well can turn into business agility, they aren't the same thing. In his new book "The 6 Enablers of Business Agility," Karim Harbott shares his experience helping getting people and clients to think beyond just (software/team-level) agile to business agility. Harbott's six enablers highlight the multifaceted, holistic approach required for business agility. Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Allia DeAngelis hosts. Learn more: https://www.6enablers.com/ - karim@karimharbott.com

Self-identified “agile unicorn” Jackie Chambers de Freitas rarely sees others like her in her work as a VP of technology transformation and executive coach. In this episode, she shares how her uniqueness as a Black woman working in agile can be both a boon and a burden. Mixed in with her own challenges are the general challenges involved with bringing business agility to organizations. De Freitas mentions the “dirty little secret in agile”: agilists are champions of change – but change is tough. It can take a toll on your mental health, both those who are changing and those who are helping to change. Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Allia DeAngelis hosts.

Facilitation involves “removing obstacles to contribution, connection and equity.” This is at the center of our guest Adam Kahane's book “Facilitating Breakthrough.” Kahane argues that facilitating isn't just trying to get people to do things. He discusses what he calls “transformative facilitation” – facilitating in ways that brings in both individual and collective perspectives to move forward together without leading to fragmentation or rigidity. Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Allia DeAngelis hosts. Learn More: - Facilitating Breakthrough: How to Remove Obstacles, Bridge Differences, and Move Forward Together (https://reospartners.com/facilitating-breakthrough/)

Accenture | SolutionsIQ alumna and former Agile Amped host Leslie Morse is our guest in this episode. Serving as Product Owner for the Professional Scrum Community with Scrum.org has put Morse on a journey to help agilists “drink their own prosecco.” She is finding new ways to improve integrity, empiricism, and what she calls “change fluency” in the agile community. The goal is sense of personal agility that makes us all better able to serve others. “If we can become fluent in change the same way we are fluent in language, what new might be possible in the world in terms of personal and organizational agility?” Accenture | SolutionsIQ's William Rowden hosts. Learn more - Seven Transformations of Leadership by David Rooke and William R. Torbert: https://hbr.org/2005/04/seven-transformations-of-leadership - Women in Agile podcast series: https://womeninagile.org/podcast/ 

In his book “Agility: How to Navigate the Unknown and Seize Opportunity in a World of Disruption,” Leo Tilman offers a comprehensive definition of the word “agility.” According to Tilman and co-author former NORAD commander General Charles Jacoby, agility is “the organizational capacity to detect, assess and respond to environmental changes in ways that are purposeful, decisive and grounded in a will to win.” In this episode we unpack the loaded definition and discuss how (tactical) agile practices and mindsets as we know them in the industry fundamentally address risk – and how agility can help address other types of risk in the world including global climate change, nationalism, and populism. Accenture | SolutionsIQ's William Rowden hosts.

This special episode celebrates the Pride month of June and features the hosts and producer of Agile Amped as the guests. Alalia Lundy (she/her/hers) is a Business Agility Enablement Manager; William Rowden (he/him/his) is a Business Agility Practice Development Associate Director, and Ryan Keawekāne (he/him/his) is a Marketing Associate Manager. We all work at Accenture and also happen to belong to the LGBTQ+ community. We share our stories of being LGBTQ+ in a business environment, some of the “roses and thorns” of our experience, as well as what we are amped about.

Kayton Bhatia is a Senior Leader in Digital Product Management at Kaiser Permanente. For Pride Month, he is sharing his story about bringing his whole self to work. As a gay, Indian man, Bhatia's path to leadership is anything but typical. Despite changes to laws in both the US (where he lives and works) and India (where he was born and raised), there's more to do. He offers advice to leaders and LGBTQ professionals and is an example to those who happen to be both of how to live and lead authentically. “I'm quite aware of the weight I'm carrying as if I'm representing several communities.” Accenture | SolutionsIQ's William Rowden hosts.

Sandy Beky is the founder of two companies whose work, at first blush, seems unrelated. The first is HeHop, a nonprofit that uses blockchain technology to empower victims and witnesses of domestic violence to capture and store tamper-resistant evidence for use in court. The second is Kyosei Solutions Lab, through which Beky helps leaders of France's biggest companies evolve their mindset and approach to leading organizations. In this episode, we learn how Beky sees her work through both organizations as contributing to a greater whole, to furthering humanity. “Human transformation is what is going to trigger the business transformation.” Accenture | SolutionsIQ's William Rowden hosts. 

Colleen Kirtland is on a learning journey, and in this episode, she shares her passion for and commitment to learning as much as possible from nature. Pointing to many resources and examples of biomimicry, economics, and above all systems thinking, Kirtland invites us to think about creating systems that not just grow linearly but thrive. She argues that “resiliency is built over a very long time,” and the same can be said for agile. “As I'm unpeeling life itself, I'm learning to be a better leader and a better coach of teams…” Accenture | SolutionsIQ's William Rowden hosts. (Stick around until the end for some more insights and fun interaction.) Learn more: • Jeanine Benyus, biomimicry.org (https://biomimicry.org/janine-benyus/) • Kate Raworth, Donut Economics (https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/) • John H. Miller and Scott E. Page, Complex Adaptive Systems (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CTLFPNK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) • Mariana Mazzucato, “The Value of Everything” (https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-value-of-everything) • Linda Hogan, Dwellings (https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393322477)

Adam Burden is Accenture's Chief Software Engineer and a senior managing director leading Technology services for Accenture in North America. In this episode, Burden shares how Cloud helps break barriers to agility. One barrier is legacy systems. While package solutions have become popular in the last few years, Burden says that the “renaissance of custom” today may make it more practical for businesses to customize their legacy systems. The result often is greater agility. “If I want to get more out of Agile, I have to change my culture. And Cloud is … the catalyst that helps to make that happen.” Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Alalia Lundy hosts. Learn more • “Breaking the four barriers to Cloud” (https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/cloud/cloud-technology-adoption) • “Why the renaissance of custom is here to stay” (https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/software-engineering-blog/adam-burden-custom-systems)

What happens if you put $1 billion dollars in the hands of students to invest collaboratively? Luke Hohmann is Founder and CEO of FirstRoot, which wants “to get $1,000 into a million schools so that children are in control of $1 billion or more of capital by 2030.” Hohmann shares stories of how real school students have invested in their schools and communities – with surprising results. It's all in an effort to help cultivate civic responsibility in youth and grow the next generation of impact investors. As our guest puts it, the circular economy and impact investing “are the mechanisms by which we can make positive change occur through the normal structures of business in a very powerful way." Accenture | SolutionsIQ's William Rowden hosts. Learn more at firstroot.co.

What does it mean to put customers at the center of everything you do? For Riot Games, the brand behind League of Legends, it means “making it better to be a player.” Our guest Michael Robillard is the Principal of Enterprise Agility for Riot Games, and he shares how business agility unlocks their ability to make good on that promise. One outstanding example of what Robillard calls “customer-centric business agility” happened at the 2018 League of Legends World Championship in South Korea, where a fictitious, VR Kpop group took the real stage to rave reviews from fans around the world. Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Ryan Keawekane hosts.

Johanna Rothman, a.k.a. the Pragmatic Manager, is author of 18 books and frequent blogger on the topic of product management and more. Rothman shares with us insights about her latest three-book bundle on “Modern Management Made Easy.” These books are full of “the kinds of questions I keep hearing from my clients.” Each chapter begins with a question followed by a popular myth and then many different options for managing oneself, others, and one's system to be more effective at work. “We are now in the hard work of trying to help entire organizations change their entire cultures… An Agile approach is not a new lifecycle: it's a culture change. And managers hold and refine the culture for the organization.” Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Alalia Lundy hosts. Learn more about Johanna Rothman at jrothman.com. 

Diversifying Equity with Agile for Humanity Self-defined Soul Craftswoman April Jefferson applies her experience in coaching, crafting experiences, and conference speaking to help “bring up new voices.” Jefferson shares her story of striving to increase equity of the Black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) community in Agile. One way is the Agile for Humanity group and conference – or, should we say, “unconference.” Jefferson is aware that much of how conferences operate create obstacles for diverse voices to participate. She focuses squarely on “how do I unlock others' potential?” Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Ryan Keawekane hosts. Learn more: • https://www.agileforhumanity.org/conference/ • https://www.agileforhumanity.org/future-search/ 

Rajesh Nerlikar is chief product advisor at Prodify and the co-author of the book “Build What Matters: Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management” with Ben Foster. Nerlikar highlights a few of the ten dysfunctions that the co-authors had seen in their experience advising product management teams. The book focuses on the four core tenets of vision-led product management that strikes a balance between “iterate your way to success” and “game-changing innovation.” Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Alalia Lundy hosts. Resources • “Build What Matters: Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision-Led Product Management” by Rajesh Nerlikar and Ben Foster • Virtual resources: https://www.prodify.group/resources/book/checklist • Users Interviews: https://www.userinterviews.com/

Nick Horney is an organizational psychologist and founder of Agility Consulting. He spent 23 years in Special Operations in the U.S. Navy, before building a career in the agile space. Horney joins us to discuss his ideas and experience in leadership agility and anticipating change, focusing on 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. He uses the concepts of “After Action Agility” and the “Leadership Agility Profile 360 Assessment” to gauge how well organizations anticipate and respond to change. “The whole purpose of doing assessments is not just self-discovery: it's what do you do with that? How do you convert that into your own individual development plan?” Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Chris Murman hosts. Learn More: • agilityconsulting.com • Leadership Agility Profile 360 Assessment (http://agilityconsulting.com/leadership-agility-profile-360-assessment/#:~:text=The%20Leadership%20Agility%20Profile%E2%84%A2,such%20as%20clients%20or%20customers.)

Alicia McLain is a small-business owner, executive leadership coach, public speaker and co-founder of the Agile Coaching Exchange North America. McLain shares her experience speaking on the topic of “Coaching, the Secret Sauce to a Culture of Accountability.” Building on the Agile Coaching Institute's Coaching Competency Model, she shares what coaching is and is not. McLain highlights how an ICF-certified coach builds accountability into the arc of the conversation by asking powerful questions to help the coachee commit to a change. “I think the best way to understand coaching… is to get coached.” Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Alalia Lundy hosts. Keep Learning “Coaching, The Secret Sauce To A Culture of Accountability” (recorded talk) International Coach Academy (ICA) https://coachcampus.com “The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever” by Michael Bungay Stanier https://amzn.to/2JnfIkX “The Advice Trap: Be Humble, Stay Curious & Change the Way You Lead Forever” by Michael Bungay Stanier https://amzn.to/2Rdju5n Interested in becoming a coach? https://agilekata.com/interested-in-becoming-a-coach/ The International Coach Federation (ICF) - https://coachfederation.org/ More Podcasts with Alicia McLain: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/9-things-wildly-successful-agile-coaches-do/id992128516?i=1000493217872 https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/empathy-emotional-intelligence-in-organizational-transformation/id992128516?i=1000415679921  

Michael Spayd is the co-founder of The Collective Edge, which seeks to “transform the transformers.” In this episode, Spayd shares some of his thinking behind his new book “Agile Transformation” and reminds us of the difference between organizational transformation and what he calls “a big adoption.” Leaders are key to the chances of success: “If you’re going to transform [your organization], you’re almost certainly the first problem,” because “organizations are designed to get the results that they get.” Oh, and we take a tangent to consider the connection between quantum physics, integral theory and meditation. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s William Rowden hosts. Learn More: “Agile Transformation” by Michael Spayd - https://www.amazon.com/Coaching-Agile-Enterprise-Organizational-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321885317/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1602615915&sr=8-2 All Quadrants, All Levels (AQAL) - https://integrallife.com/five-elements-aqal/ Systemic constellations – https://www.the-collective-edge.com/systemic-consciousness Quantum Enigma -  https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Enigma-Physics-Encounters-Consciousness/dp/0199753814/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=quantum+enigma&qid=1602616136&sr=8-1

He walks us through the other five steps and discusses the importance of metrics that matter. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. Learn More: www.agilemarketingmanifesto.org https://businessagility.institute/learn/agile-marketing-metrics/

Corey Post is a Lean-Agile transformation management consultant with 20+ years of leadership experience developing large solutions, new products, and complex systems. Recently he authored two talks for the Agile2020 conference: ·       Use Product Value Streams to Rapidly Deliver Customer Value and Create a Learning Machine ·       What You Need to Know About Human-Centered Design and Hearing the Voice of the Customer Since the conference was canceled, we wanted to invite Post to discuss some key points from his talks including value streams and the importance of customer-centric organizations. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.  

Esther Derby has four decades of experience with organizational change and she’s a well-known author and thought leader in the agile space. Derby chats with us about her latest book: “7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change: Micro Shifts, Macro Results” While you’ll hear her 7-step guide to problem solving, we particularly dig into her guidance on attending to networks. Accumulating network drama due to widespread layoffs and stress that are affecting our peers is making people less resilient and less supportive of each other. Derby shares her tips for allowing for unstructured conversations and maintenance of our connections in our virtual work environments of today. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com 

Mik Kersten, author of “Projects to Products” and CEO of Tasktop, has seen a reoccurring theme. We go to conferences; we hear about all these fantastic things that can happen when we incorporate lean practices, continuous flow, and feedback. We come back pumped to start changing the way we work because we know it will improve our lives for the better. Then suddenly, the motivation gets drained out of us by all the internal systems in place that effectively prohibit change. Mik has boiled the reasons we face in these situations down to three things: Language differences between business and technology groups Change metrics are non-existent, broken or not relevant between groups Projects are considered cost centers Mik also takes a closer look at the concepts behind his book, including the value of product value streams, persistent teams, and organizing with the intention of reducing the number of dependencies. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Mirco Hering hosts at the DevOps Enterprise Summit in Las Vegas. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

In a former life, Marc Siles was a senior executive chasing a corporate career – until he had a near burnout experience. Originally from Spain, Siles has been living in Finland for the last 18 years, where he dedicates his passion and energy to enable companies around the globe to accelerate their strategic growth.  Siles shares powerful and personal stories about how he identified what matters in his life – his daughter, his family, and his passion for human growth. He offers tips for people who find themselves chasing after what he calls “empty goals” and who are so focused on their professions that they lose touch with their true life vision.  “I still focus on business growth, but via human growth… That is the only way to make things sustainable.” Do not miss the story he shares about his grandmother’s imprisonment in Franco’s Spain and how her life’s passion was key to her eventual liberation.  Accenture | SolutionsIQ‘s William Rowden hosts. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Jeff Gothelf helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. He is the co-author of the award-winning book “Lean UX”, “Sense & Respond”, and his latest, “Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking Work and Let Your Next Job Find You.” After waking up on his 35th birthday in a panic about the second half of his career, Gothelf knew he needed a change. So he created a content platform that brings work to him rather than him having to compete on the corporate ladder. He encourages others to approach the service that you provide and your career as a product. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Connect with us on social media! Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ 

How important is transformative innovation to your company and are you willing to invest in it? John Carter, a product development expert and inventor, shares his advice for how to nurture innovation within an organization.   He believes a governance structure that includes the following is a key to success:    Governance: Get the right leaders to the table and give them oversight of fragile innovations. They allocate capital from the pool of venture funds.  Process: Establish a process for receiving and selecting ideas; identify how to transfer ideas into development using clear entrance and exit criteria.  Finance: Create a specific investment for the strategic innovation portfolio and approve it in the budget year. Make it large enough to start at least three projects.     Carter emphasizes that for true innovation to happen, the employees focused on the project should be moved out of the organization into a protected space, away from everyday distractions and tasks such as Slack, email etc. “The biggest place where innovations fail is transferring out of this protected zone and into the company.”  Accenture | SolutionsIQ Alalia Lundy hosts.   The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: www.agileamped.com   Connect with us on social media!Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Alicia McLain is the co-founder of Agile Coaching Exchange (ACE) in North America, an organization with an intent to bring coaches together around the mission of building competency and community. She joined us to share more about ACE, as well as the nine things she has seen that wildly successful agile coaches do.  Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts.   Agile Coaching Exchange: http://agilecoachingexchange.com/    The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: www.agileamped.com   Connect with us on social media!Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/  

Evan Leybourn is the founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute, an international membership body to both champion and support the next generation of organizations. He joins us to discuss the key findings from this year’s Business Agility Report, their annual flagship research study revealing where organizations around the globe are in their business agility journey. Interestingly, this year’s survey responses were collected in the time period preceding and through the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, providing a unique view into the impact of a global disruption while it was happening. “Those companies that drop the ball now and don’t start making a difference to their agility, when the next crisis comes - and there will be another crisis - they’re going to be at square one. And those who keep it going, they’re the ones who will not only survive but thrive.” Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. Download 2020 Business Agility Report Become a member of the Business Agility Institute: businessagility.institute/join/ Accenture | SolutionsIQ is a founding member of the Business Agility Institute. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Connect with us on social media!
Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Bruce Nix is the Director of Business Agility at Vaco Memphis, a talent and solutions firm. He shares with us a wonderful example of agility: pairing up people impacted by the pandemic with non-profits in need of their talent. Listen to this case study that began with two people taking action and hear Nix’s recommendations for organizations as they to emerge from a crisis. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. Read case study on Business Agility Institute’s website. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: https://www.solutionsiq.com/podcast/    Connect with us on social media!Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

Jardena London’s mission is to help organizations become healthy, productive and fun. She is founder of Souls@Work, a movement to help bring soul back into the workplace.  She explains to us the concept of Structural Agility and how it can help businesses achieve true agility and survive the challenges posed by the changing environment.  Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts.   Read London’s paper on Business Agility Institute’s website: https://businessagility.institute/learn/structural-agility-using-structure-to-enable-the-flow-of-value/  The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: www.agileamped.com   Connect with us on social media!Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/  

Michael Hamman helps organizations grow their inner capacity for leadership agility. He joined us for this “geek fest” of an episode on the topic of agility and transformation. Hamman delves deep into a discussion on how people must shift their mindset in order to deal with the complexity surrounding them, before a company can reach “outer agility” – the agile practices. He describes his method of working on a perceived problem as a trojan horse for introducing agile concepts into their work processes.   Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s William Rowden hosts.   The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: solutionsiq.com/podcast Connect with us on social media!Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/

In this special episode, we offer a broad overview of portfolio management that uses lean and agile thinking and approaches. Our guides are Evan Campbell and Kat Conner, who together have 50 years of experience in portfolio, budgeting and funding.    “Agile portfolio management is matching limited supply to unlimited demand to maximize business outcomes,” say Campbell and Conner.    You'll hear five parts:  Introduction to agile portfolio management   The supply side  The demand side  Matching and governance  Funding and budgeting  This is a deep dive into the topic and it’s the full-length story behind our Agile Portfolio Management video series. Watch and share these 5-minute educational videos with your customers and colleagues and watch the recorded webinar to hear real-world examples from clients and coaches in the trenches at solutionsiq.com/apm.    Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts.    The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.    Podcast library: www.agileamped.com  Connect with us on social media! Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ 

Complex systems are in a state of continuous failure. Resilience is the ability of the system to maintain its performance characteristics when failures occur. Benefits of resilience include high availability, quality, scalability, and improved business KPIs.  But, high level of resilience is hard to achieve and requires a combination of technical, procedural, and organizational approaches. In this episode, Stas Zvinyatskovsky, a managing director at Accenture, covers what it takes to achieve resilience in software systems.   Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts.  The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: www.agileamped.com   Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/  

The drive for virtual meetings that are efficient and goal-oriented can often cause us to lose sight of the fact that we are people, needing real connection. Without the visual and often unspoken cues that normally surround us, our virtual interactions can be an uninteresting and lonely place. Morgan Legge, a speaker at the 2020 Business Agility Conference, shares three ways to grow meaningful and connected virtual teams and meetings.    “Pandemic work is not virtual work. I encourage people to remember that someday, we won’t be working with our kids and family all around us.”  Accenture | SolutionsIQ Alalia Lundy hosts.   The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: www.agileamped.com   Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped  

How do you know that you’re achieving the goals of your change? How do you know that large dashboard of OKRs and metrics will show you what you need to see? It’s not easy. Many organizations tend to measure the results of a long process, rather than the levers that drive the results. John Carter, product development expert, inventor, and founder and principal of TCGen Inc. shares his predictive metrics expertise using the example of agile at scale. Whether you’re about to begin a big change initiative, or you have one in progress, John Carter will inspire you to take a fresh look at your metrics. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: www.agileamped.com   Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

How will agile at scale change in an increasingly virtual world? SAFe Fellow Scott Frost and SPCT Shawn Lowe – both business agility consultants at Accenture | SolutionsIQ - discuss the best approaches and mindset for success in a virtual setting. While the world has been working virtually for some time, 2020 has pushed us into a new frontier that can be uncomfortable for large-scale transformation and training work. While it’s not business as usual, you can still make sustainable change within your organization. As Frost puts it: “When things change radically, we can survive. We are more adaptable than we thought we were.” Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: www.agileamped.com   Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Sandra Davey is founder of and product coach at Product Space in Australia. She also serves on the board of several Australian companies, including CHOICE. She shares her experience as the board chair for a consumer rights organization that she helped take through an agile transformation:  “The business plan that the board was signing off was full of operational tactical details of when’s and how's rather than why’s and what’s.”  Listen to this episode to get a great perspective into agility from a board of directors’ standpoint. You’ll learn why more agilists should join boards and how to encourage other board members to adopt an agile mindset.   Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts.  The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: www.agileamped.com   Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Gil Broza is the author of three acclaimed books including his latest “Agile for Non-Software Teams.” It was written to be practical and applicable for the roles “we always forget in transformation,” like marketing and HR. Each chapter is a step along a personal agile journey and ends with “Here’s what needs to be true until you move on.” Further, rather than prescribing an off-the-shelf agile framework, Broza wants to provide guidance so teams can design their own process, measure progress, and inspect and adapt – an agile approach to an agile journey.   Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. Buy the book: Agilefornonsoftwareteams.com Keep Listening: https://www.solutionsiq.com/resource/agile-amped-podcast/the-agile-mindset-with-gil-broza/ Learn More: 3pvantage.com

William Rowden is an executive coach and consultant here at Accenture | SolutionsIQ. His journey to leading transformation initiatives has piqued his curiosity in org development and adult developmental psychology. For the past few years he has been researching how these two inform each other – and how the focus of an organization’s leaders provides a good indicator for the success or failure of business agility transformation. He walks us through the different focuses that leaders – and indeed everyone – have: self-centric, group-centric, skill-centric and beyond. Drawing from the work of Robert Keegan, Chris Argyris, Bill Joiner, and more, Rowden provides useful information for agilists for dealing with leaders of many types – do they shoot the messenger or install feedback loops? Do they see agile as a process or a means to an end? Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Bryan Stallings hosts. Listen to Rowden's previous episode: Adult Cognitive Development and the Agile Mindset References: - Bill Joiner and Stephen Josephs, Leadership Agility (2007) - Susanne R. Cook-Greuter, "Making the case for a developmental perspective," in Industrial and Commercial Training (2004) - The MAP Institute, "The Leadership Maturity Framework." - DevOps Research and Assessment, “DevOps Culture: Westrum Organizational Culture” - Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization (2016) - William R. Torbert and Steven S. Taylor, "Action Inquiry: Interweaving Multiple Qualities of Attention for Timely Action" The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: www.agileamped.com   Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Tony Bonfante is an agile coach who shares his recent experience setting up an internal coaching office at a Fortune 50 corporation. The first step in the process is to fill the roles of coaches with individuals who are called to serve others.   Next, Bonfante teaches the coaches how to really listen to others because “you can’t change someone’s mind if you don’t know what’s in them.” The five levels of listening he walks everyone through are:  Ignoring – making the conscious choice to either ignore or not ignore others.  Pretending to listen – using listening signs like nodding and sounds while focusing on something else.  Selective listening – paying attention to cues such as your name to refocus.  Comparative listening – filtering what you hear by what matters to you.  Empathetic listening – truly paying attention and wanting to learn the other’s worldview.   This episode is chock-full of practical guidance, including what kind of coaching stand to take in each domain of the Cynefin framework and more.  Leslie Morse hosts.  The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: www.agileamped.com   Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped    

Jessica Guistolise is an experienced leader, consultant and coach at Accenture SolutionsIQ. For the past few years, Guistolise was part of a dedicated Dojo team at a major US-based insurance company, where she learned how to scale dojo experiences and even virtualize them.  From a few remote teams operating as one to bringing Dojo to a completely distributed team in the Philippines, Guistolise is learning that the benefits of Dojo can still be achieved. It just takes more time. Further, as working from home becomes more normalized, people will see into others’ lives, and that opens the door to build trust even faster.   And a new working agreement structure – and humanity - can help. “It takes practice to not apologize for those very human things” like eating and taking breaks. “It’s a lot easier to shut out life when we’re in the walls of an office.”  Favorite take-aways: Smartest person in the room (SPITR) and “stand up and wiggle.”  Accenture SolutionsIQ’s Ryan Keawekane hosts.  Check out our other podcast on “How to Dojo” also with Jessica Guistolise. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: www.agileamped.com   Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped

Melissa Boggs and Howard Sublett, the Chief Scrum Master and Chief Product Owner respectively at the Scrum Alliance, return to tell us about their own organizational transformation. Throughout 2019, the pair completely restructured the organization into cross-functional and community-centric teams that are empowered to deliver on the needs of their specific community.  Hear practical examples of how these changes were implemented, as well as success stories that are emerging as a result of the ongoing transformation.   Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Emilia Breton hosts.   The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.   Podcast library: www.agileamped.com   Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped  

This is a special episode. After our blog (with the same title as this podcast) blew up on LinkedIn, the post’s author Evan Campbell was featured on a webinar Q&A hosted by Gene Gendel, organizational design specialist, agile/lean coach and trainer, and consultant. This episode is the audio from that webinar. Watch the video recording, or read the blog that started it all.

In this episode, Agile coach Joe Fecarotta hosts, interviewing Caro Paduch who is currently leading the agile transformation for Learning & Leadership Development at Accenture. Fecarotta has been coaching Paduch for the last 18 months in a remote setting, as Paduch is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Over the course of such a long relationship at a distance, the pair and the wider team have learned some valuable lessons about remote collaboration and agile coaching, including: Patience and flexibility are important. Virtual is real too, although because you don’t overlap in person, you may have to force people to open up a little about who they are, their families, and hobbies. When people don’t put their video on in a video call, it can be a sign of lack of trust, comfort, and transparency. And as Paduch puts it, “When [you] start to trust, that’s when the magic happens.” “Personal connection at a distance is so critical,” says Fecarotta. Accenture SolutionsIQ’s Joe Fecarotta hosts. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Connect with us on social media!  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agileamped/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AgileAmped  

In addition to both being professional Scrum trainers with Scrum.org, Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller also co-author the new book “Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems.” While the book has scrum masters as its primary audience, the authors know that anybody working on or with the scrum team can get value out of it. They share their stories, failures, and successes over their combined 40 years of experience. The duo agrees that some of the worst Scrum anti-patterns arise when the scrum master fails to act as an effective servant leader. Gems: - Todd Miller on meaningful business metrics: “During sprint planning, the idea isn’t just to fill up a plate of work and then everybody disappear and do it, and then if you did all the work, you’re successful.” - Ryan Ripley on the three aspects of an effective scrum master: “The scrum master has to love their team… want[s] them to be wildly successfully… and finally [has] to have zero tolerance for anything that gets in the way of [the team] being successful.” Leslie Morse hosts. The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility. Podcast library: www.agileamped.com Connect with us on social media!Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/solutionsiq/Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped