Discoveries Through Personal Agility

Discoveries Through Personal Agility

Raji Sivaraman
Michal Raczka
Discoveries Through Personal Agility
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 Abstract
This book explores the nuances of different aspects of agility on a personal
level. Agility brings personal value, leadership navigation, managing the
tides of knowledge, and putting on the captain’s hat of resilience. As the
winds change and the tides swell high, the Personal Agility Lighthouse
(PALH™) model in this book will guide you to safe shores. Navigating
through the seven colors of agility such as education, change, emotional,
political, cerebral, learning, and outcomes agilities, the anchor is dropped
effortlessly. It is built on these seven competencies, and by using the In-
dividual Personal Agility self-analysis assessment (see Appendix), swaying
personal visions leading them up to organizational goals.
Taking personal agility as the future competency with an agile mind-
set is a crucial starting point to transform yourself. Focusing your per-
sonal agility journey on outcomes and end-to-end customer experiences
ensures value delivery. Especially within the elements of the VUCA envi-
ronment where revised goals are the norm. Driving changes in the right
direction leads you to the stable grounds of your personal vision. It pre-
pares you to tread the long roads of transitions/transformations, which is
a vital requisite for changes in any organization. Measuring performance
metrics aptly is the rudder of strategy management and stability.
Organizational goals and personal development are the strong pillars
that will steer you to your organizational agility, getting you ready for
opportunities and changes when your company trademark needs it. Agile
practices and perspectives cut through impact and quality of personal and
group knowledge. Take a journey on a Personal Agility Boat to visualize
options, alternatives, and opportunities. Visualization is the way to your
shore’s lighthouse.

Keywords
personal agility; stable adaptability; innovative thinking; agile mindset;
empathy; future competency; re-skilling; organizational transformation
 Contents

Preface...................................................................................................ix
Introduction...........................................................................................xi
Acknowledgments.................................................................................xvii
Foreword.............................................................................................. xix
Foreword.............................................................................................. xxi

Chapter 1 Perspectives Through Personal Agility.................................3

Chapter 2 Education Agility.............................................................11
Chapter 3 Change Agility.................................................................19
Chapter 4 Emotional Agility.............................................................29
Chapter 5 Political Agility.................................................................37
Chapter 6 Cerebral Agility................................................................47
Chapter 7 Learning Agility...............................................................57
Chapter 8 Outcomes Agility.............................................................67
Chapter 9 The Eighth Flavor—Discipline.........................................77
Chapter 10 Put on the Captain’s Resilience Hat..................................89
Chapter 11 The Personal Agility Lighthouse™ Brings Us
Safely to the Shores..........................................................99

Appendix—PALH™ Self-Analysis Index................................................105

Notes..................................................................................................107
Suggested Further Reading....................................................................113
About the Authors................................................................................115
Index..................................................................................................117
 Preface
In this book, we are going to describe how we embarked on a model for
honing Personal Agility. It details the nuances of how the agile mindset of
an individual transcends all the way from Personal Agility to Organiza-
tional Agility. We probe into how the behavior and understanding of the
agile mindsets and various agility flavors are directly proportional to the
disruptive business world we live in today.
A Singapore citizen Raji Sivaraman meets a Polish citizen Michal
­Raczka at a conference and the chat takes its turn toward the “agile mind-
set.” All of the problems we faced in the tech, project management, sup-
ply chain, logistics, and a number of other fields world seem to stem from
one cause, which is the way people’s mind is set. This then brought us
to think about what we can do to change mindsets and why we need to
do this. We pondered, researched, and read about many agile theories,
looked for answers by talking, interviewing, and asking academia folks
their take on this. Everywhere and anyone we interacted with, within and
outside of our work and academia world, there were seven agilities that
came to the forefront all the time. They are Education Agility, Change
Agility, Political Agility, Emotional Agility, Cerebral Agility, Learning
Agility, and Outcomes agility.
Since we were repeatedly hearing the same seven agilities come up
over and over again, we figured these must be the most important to hone
personal agility within an individual and an organization. In our minds,
a project is all about the complexities in today’s fast-paced, competitive,
and dynamic environment. It does not matter what kind of projects we
plunge into. It could be any industry: small, medium, large, or mega. Be-
sides there are a lot of ambiguity, we need to deal with human behaviors.
From our perspective, personal agility with its seven flavors can positively
influence the ability to manage complexities and this can be considered
as an ultimate goal to deliver the expected projects’ and organizational
outcomes.
x PREFACE

We decided to write research and academic papers and papers for

conferences where we could validate the need and the importance of the
seven agilities that we found quintessential. We asked organizations to use
it and they have written articles from different countries (such as Poland,
Indonesia, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, to name a
few). They were from different industries as well, for example, Palm Oil,
Academia, Consulting, etc. Articles were written about the use of this
model on varied subjects like portfolio management, data analytics, and
green effort as samples. Some of these examples are quoted in this book.
This encouraged us to reaffirm that these are the seven that we should add
to our model. The reasons are because these were the seven that almost
all of them found a need to hone in their work and academic space at all
levels.
Many believed that personal agility is too advanced for practitioners
to absorb as of today. Leadership skills and its talks and theories have
been around for many years, but when it comes to personal agility, it
is still a new concept. People mix up the theories and what leadership
skills and personal agility skills are all about. Leadership is about leading
and making sure that everything goes well whether there is a change or
not. Whereas personal agility talks about how one can ride the waves of
change specifically. Some people said that agile cannot be soft. To them
we said, Agile is about the thought process and the tools, processes, and
methodologies are about how you do manage and deliver projects and
ultimately the organization.
All of these questions prompted us to come up with the self-analysis,
which we normally give at the beginning of the Personal Agility workshop.
This is where the message got across in a solid way. It showed whether
personal agility can make you more agile. Once the participants in work-
shops took the self-analysis, they started to understand what agilities they
needed to hone. They themselves started telling us that personal agility
makes them more agile. Finally, we decided on the name of our model
as the Personal Agility Lighthouse model because of what a lighthouse
stands for and its symbolism to our topic: personal agility became more
and more synonymous. This is explained in our introduction.

Let’s set sail!!

 Introduction
From an organization’s perspective, personal agility is very important es-
pecially in this current era where business is changing at a very fast pace.
There are many seminars, workshops, and exams for tools and method-
ologies in every organization. There are various models to develop people
in a collective setting. Nevertheless, when it comes to the agility at a per-
sonal level, not much is out there to address in this arena. Therefore, to
enhance the business agility in any given company, institution, or entity,
an individual’s agility in many facets needs attention and honing.
“Enterprises must embrace a more fluid way of working to compete
effectively—one that quickly allows for new technologies to be assessed,
tested, analyzed, and acted upon. This ‘fail fast, succeed faster’ mentality
requires a fundamental shift in work culture and behavior.”1

“Strive for progress not perfection”

(unknown)
This quote personifies the Personal Agility Lighthouse (PALH™) model2
shown below in Figure 1 wholistically. This is one of the reasons we refer
to the lighthouse as the goal. What does a lighthouse stand for and its
symbolism to our topic Personal Agility? Lighthouses are constructed to
withstand powerful storms and are frequently depicted as symbols of
strength. They are also used to symbolize shelter, protection, and peace
for the same reason. Lighthouses expose the connection between inani-
mate structures and human emotion in a way that few other buildings
can. Equipped with powerful radio transmitters and lights bright enough
to penetrate the darkness, lighthouses serve as maritime and aerial naviga-
tional aids. They are often used to symbolize true guidance and steadfast-
ness in relationships, teams, and organizations, encapsulating their ability
to weather any storm. Lighthouses have also been used to represent the
determination to achieve goals, no matter the challenges. They are almost
always erected in desolate places because that is where the guidance is of
xii INTRODUCTION

utmost importance. That is the symbolism that the seven agilities hold
where individuals and teams hone their personal agility to achieve project
and organizational performance excellence.

Figure 1
A lighthouse’s strong design and aura of imperturbability are used to
depict strength and virility to withstand the strongest storms. However,
lighthouses do not always evoke positive feelings. Because lighthouses
tend to be located in isolated areas, they can symbolize fear, desolation,
and death. Additionally, since their blinding light has occasionally guided
ships to their destruction, lighthouses can represent deception and be-
trayal. Escape from inside a lighthouse is virtually impossible; for this
reason, they have also been employed as symbols of bondage. Personal
agility is no different with its ups and downs. Finding a way through these
travails is what the seven agilities are deployed for.
The preamble to implement the model is to have an agile mindset. The
framework will work only if the conviction is attuned to this outlook. The
skill sets needed to tackle tomorrow’s possibilities is by charting a plan for
self-improvement in our minds. The solutions for the challenges of tomor-
row have its foundations in the experiences of today. We plan, sell, com-
municate, collaborate, and network globally across all cultures. We must
embark on an honest reflection of what we do today and make conscious
improvements. This process coupled with continuous learning will lead to
the skill sets to break the paradigms and tackle the possibilities of the future.
 INTRODUCTION
xiii

To elaborate further; the VIBGYOR (Versatility, Ingenuity, Bridging,

Gold Plating, Yield, Originality, Resilience)3 concept where management
is shown as pursuing behaviors of management in various disciplines that
engages and develops originality and creativeness for exceedingly suc-
cessful outcomes and performances. Here management can be seen as
a multicolored rainbow, where Versatility is stated as dependencies that
link the management chain without breakage, but at the same time these
dependencies need a versatile approach for easy collaboration and execu-
tion. This concept holds water in the performance of teams where each of
the seven agilities is to be groomed as well.
We feel it is important that high performance in an organization is
imperative. Perspectives of these seven flavors of ours are the sails that
need to be directed appropriately for an organization to have its per-
formance at its peak in our minds. Indeed, the search for competitive
advantage is driving much of the rapid development amidst various di-
mensions. By improving the decision-making capability of managers and
teams, management can help an organization enhance its competitive
position in the market and be a high performer with profitability hand
in hand. M ­ cClelland4 contended that three dominant needs underpin
human ­motivation. The following three are the needs:

• Needs for achievement

• Needs for power
• Needs for affiliation

McClelland believed that the relative importance of each need varies

among individuals and cultures. We feel that to understand this the seven
agilities are to be embedded in the veins.
We take this theory a couple of steps further with the seven agilities
of education agility, change agility, emotional agility, political agil-
ity, cerebral agility, learning agility and outcomes agility that we feel
show the guiding light to the intended shore. High-performing organi-
zations, those we call champions, develop the capability to continually
finding your feet, adjusting, and innovating. To further this thought,
­Victor Vroom’s Expectancy Theory5 states that the intensity of a tendency
to perform in a particular manner is dependent on the intensity of an
xiv INTRODUCTION

expectation that the performance will be followed by a definite outcome

and on the appeal of the outcome to the individual.
Discoveries through the journey of all the agilities brought us to the
conclusion and research plus interviews unearthed that there is certainly a
logic and segue so to speak for these seven agilities to have a distinct value
chain. The value stream mapping is shown below.

Logic to the sequence for the seven agilities of the PALH™ model
to transform individuals

The end goal is to get better at what you do, which can be enabled by
ideation. According to Wikipedia, the word “Ideation”6 is the creative
process of generating, developing, and communicating new ideas, where
an idea is understood as a basic element of thought that can be visual,
concrete, or abstract. Ideation comprises all stages of a thought cycle,
from innovation, to development, to actualization.
“Ideate” is simply a tie into learning agility, education agility, and
cerebral agility, which aligns with personal agility. Engaging these three
supports the three concepts of personal agility, namely political agility,
emotional agility, and change agility, making the ideation come to life.
 INTRODUCTION
xv

This brings about the perfect outcome intended, bringing the outcomes
agility into the right beam of light. One needs to have change agility to
ideate and engage.
As we go from personal agility, all the way to organizational agility,
we sail through the seven principles given below that clear the path to
the lighthouse. In the chapters that follow, we are going to elaborate the
principles of our model given below.

Principles of the PALH™ model

1. We need to constantly keep advancing ourselves to reroute our capa-
bilities—Education Agility
2. We need to relearn ourselves to improve competencies—Change
Agility
3. We have to treat others with deference—Emotional Agility
4. We need transparency for organizational growth—Political Agility
5. We need to focus on organizational goals not the impediments of
alterations—Cerebral Agility
6. We need to have the courage to say “I don’t know”—Learning
Agility
7. We need to commit to excel in the outcome that is foreseen—Out-
comes Agility
 Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the support of our publishers, Business
Expert Press.

We are deeply grateful to Ricardo Viana Vargas and Robin Speculand

for writing the forewords for us.

We would like to thank IRIS for their partnership, in particular

Douglas Heikkinen, Cofounder, Publisher, and Editor of IRIS, USA
for publishing the articles written by many of the international experts.
We express our immense gratitude to all of them. We thank Marguerita
Cheng, CEO of Blue Ocean Global Wealth, Washington D.C., USA, for
introducing us to IRIS and contributing to the subject as well.

The following contributors have also been quoted in this book.

Thomas Martin, CEO, Forward Intelligence Group, Singapore/

Philippines/Germany
Patrick N Connally, Director, Teradata, Philadelphia, USA
Professor Linh Luong, Program Director of M.S. in Project Management,
University of Seattle
Rafael De La Rosa, Project-Portfolio Management Consultant, Indonesia/
Spain
Paul Hodgkins, Executive Director, Paul Hodgkins Project Consultancy,
United Kingdom
Makheni Zonneveld, Future Readiness Coach, the Netherlands
Joanna Staniszewska CEO, You’ll Ltd., Poland
Gaurav Dhooper, Program Manager, RPA & Agile Practitioner at
Genpact, India

We would like to thank Brian Richards for the long hours spent in
conceptually and logically designing the front cover.

Last, but not least, we would like to thank our colleagues, families,
and friends for giving us the time and space to do the research and put in
the hours of dedicated stretches to get our book on its final sail.
 Foreword
By
Robin Speculand
Author of Excellence in Execution and Digital
Implementation Specialist

An expression that has become very common is that today’s leader re-
quires a digital mindset. But what does that mean? It means they need
to recognize that the way they conducted business yesterday no longer
guarantees results tomorrow. It means letting go of power to empower
employees to make rapid decisions as they participate in different events
such as hackathons, design thinking and customer journeys. It means dra-
matically reducing the bureaucracy in the organization while eliminating
silo mentality and it also means being personally agile.
Raji and Michal beautifully explain what this means and demonstrate
how leaders can achieve this by adopting the Personal Agility Lighthouse
(PALH™) model.
Implementation for organizations is becoming tougher with my own
research revealing that over two-thirds fail. Adopting digitalization fails
even more - 80 per cent of the time, according to various research. A key
reason for the high failure rate is that leaders require a different mind and
skill set to lead today’s organization. By being personally agile leaders are
more conscious of the shifting strategic landscape, quicker to respond to
customer and market requirements and more open to transforming their
leadership style to lead in this new way of conducting business. But this is
not easy to achieve. My 2019 research revealed that one of the top three
reasons organizations fail to adopt digitalization is because of – leaders’
mindset.
Raji and Michal address this head on and explain how leaders can
achieve high performance in this turbulent time. In organization agil-
ity, customer pain points are identified. In personal agility leaders iden-
tify their employee pain points and rectify them and the Personal Agility
Lighthouse (PALH™) model provides the guiding light on what to do.
xx FOREWORD

As an implementation specialist I am always aware of how knowing

what to do and doing it are two different things. Just consider the high
number of doctors who smoke, or how many people are trying to lose
weight or get fit, with the emphasis on trying. I am always excited by
peers who continuously develop new tools and techniques to continu-
ously support leaders. The Personal Agility Lighthouse (PALH™) model
with its seven agilities allows leaders to assess themselves and identify
where they need to personally transform. This is critical because before
you have organization agility you have to have personal agility.
The Personal Agility Lighthouse (PALH™) model guides leaders in
their own personal transformation and prepares them to guide their orga-
nization at a time when every organization has to, to different extremes,
transform to adopt digitalization. With so many new technologies all
evolving at the same time, leaders are revisiting what their customer want
and need. Why do we start with the customer? Because technology is
not disrupting business, new customer requirements are. Technology is
the means to deliver the new requirements. It’s not about having a digi-
tal strategy but implementing a strategy in a digital world and Raji and
Michal; the Personal Agility Lighthouse (PALH™) model guide leaders
through the tricky and rocky path ahead where so many others are com-
ing ‘washed up.’
Enjoy your own Personal Agility transformation journey!!
 Foreword
By
Ricardo Viana Vargas
Executive Director of Brightline Initiative
https://www.brightline.org/

How can you be successful in a world of permanent change and ever-

growing challenges? In order to be truly successful and collaborate well
with others, we need to develop a solid understanding of Personal Agility.
Personal Agility it is not just about using the agile methodology. Being
agile really starts with adopting a mindset that values urgency, having the
emotional intelligence and leading in a way that recognizes that you are
responsible for making your vision a reality.
The Personal Agility Lighthouse (PALH™) Model talks about seven
sets of competencies and behaviors that each of us need to develop as
effective leaders: Education Agility, Emotional Agility, Change Agility,
Cerebral Agility, Political Agility, Learning Agility and Outcomes Agil-
ity. When I first came across the Personal Agility Lighthouse (PALH™)
Model created by Raji Sivaraman and Michal Raczka, the founders of
AgilityDiscoveries, I immediately drew a connection to Brightline’s Peo-
ple Manifesto. The Brightline People Manifesto puts the focus back on
the power of leadership in driving positive outcomes. It begins with you,
the leader. It begins with your ability to be able to lead and step-back
based on what the situation demands. It begins with your capability to
craft the right mix of capabilities and skillsets, to architect a culture that
is built on collaboration, transparency and accountability. A truly agile
leader needs to continuously strive to create conditions and dialogs to
make changes individually desirable and at the same time aligned with
the broader interest. Organizational change starts with change at the indi-
vidual level, and leaders do need to accept, live and embody this change.
If you are interested in being a successful leader, to become better
at leading people, then developing Personal Agility should be on your
xxii FOREWORD

agenda. This book is a great addition to the body of work on leadership

and truly guides leaders on how to grow and develop others.
I am sure you will enjoy reading this book and apply it in practice just
as the 10th principle of the Brightline Initiative says “Celebrate success
and recognize those who have done good work”!!
“A project is complete when it
starts working for you, rather
than you working for it.”
Scott Allen1
 CHAPTER 1

Perspectives Through
Personal Agility

In our minds, a project or an organization is all about the complexities

in today’s fast-paced, competitive, and dynamic environment. It does not
matter what kind of projects or organizations we plunge into. It could be
any industry: small, medium, large, or mega. Besides there being a lot of
ambiguity, we need to deal with human behaviors. The biggest impact
is on leadership skills that are talked about in the Project Management
Institute article, Navigating Complexity.2 From our perspective, personal
agility with its seven flavors can positively influence the ability to manage
complexities and this can be considered as an ultimate goal to deliver the
expected projects’ or organizations’ outcomes.
In an ideal world, projects are linear and the project or the organiza-
tion’s performance is easy to measure. Keeping in mind our definition of
the project/organization, the project or the organization’s performance
is in a predicament as projects are empirical and nonlinear endeavors.
We cannot simply use measurements from the project management triple
constraints (scope, cost, time).3 We need to do a deep dive into more
meaningful measurements, for example, stakeholders’ and in particular
customer’s satisfaction, project team or an organization’s happiness, just
to name a few. In order to succeed as an organization or project team,
we need to have a sense of purpose. This is not confined to projects only.
In this context, we need to be aware of unfinished projects where we
care about long-term products and value for customers, which encom-
passes the whole organization. The success for a team or an organization
is to build great products and maintain sustainability. This can lead to a
long-term sense of purpose and high performance measurements.
A high-performing project or an organization reaches the final out-
come even though there might exist a myriad of complexities. It is all
4 DISCOVERIES THROUGH PERSONAL AGILITY

about achieving the highest level of outcomes agility. Complexity can be

mastered through other agility flavors. Teams and organizations that want
to master all or any of the agility flavors have much higher chances to
deliver a high-performing organization, project, product, or deliverable.
With its sense of purpose high-performing projects and organizations are
all about delivering value, which entice customers and bring long-term
satisfaction to the table.
Taking a look at the opposite horizon of the ocean, a low-performing
project or an organization can be considered as one where a team or an
organization is unable to deliver the ultimate goal, which is stakeholder
satisfaction. This is notwithstanding the achievement of the basic Key
Performance Indicators (KPIs) from the leaders’ and managers’ triple
constraints theory mentioned above. This is where organizational agility
needs to be ubiquitous for which the seven agilities will certainly chug the
boats faster and efficiently.

~Education agility
~~Change agility
~~~Emotional agility
~~~~Political agility
~~~~~Cerebral agility
~~~~~~Learning agility
~~~~~~~Outcomes agility

Teams need to have the courage to measure a project or an organiza-

tion’s performance that are under a great level of involvedness. Teams need
to constantly predict customer satisfaction or the Net Promoter Score,4
and this is only possible through feedback loops. This courage of an in-
dividual to obtain feedback is a soft skill, which is perfectly addressed as
an ability to hone personal agility flavors such as Learning Agility, Change
Agility, and Education Agility. Project and organizational performance is
undoubtedly all about Outcomes Agility.
One of the most important “game changers” in an agile organization
is how you manage your performance system. Do you want to have a
team or a group of people? It is very important how we manage goals and
performance appraisals in a company.
 Perspectives Through Personal Agility 5

What You Measure Is What You Get

WYMIWYG
The things that matter most at the workplace aren’t measurable. You can’t
measure directly the level of trust among team members or the members
of an organization at large, but that trust level powers everything that the
teams and the entire organization does. We can’t measure the degree to
which team members want to be doing what they’re doing but that ele-
ment is essential to an organization’s success. The same applies for personal
agility. Although you cannot measure it directly, it plays a very important
role when striving for performance. Personal agility is an understanding
of agile mindsets in today’s modern organizations. People say “be Agile,
don’t do Agile,” but how can you know if you are already Agile? How can
you measure it? You cannot improve what you cannot measure since a
number value cannot be calculated nor an indicative formula can be put
on the measurement of trust. The fourth point in a Forbes5 article says: “If
you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it.” This is why our model
is crucial in every sense—meaning 360 degrees.
A team or an organization is what you have when people have the
same purpose and goals. This is obvious to understand but rare in many
organizations. In most organizations, people and teams have individual
goals. The manager gives an individual a set of goals and then, after some
time, there is a performance appraisal. How, then, can cross-functional
projects succeed when we have a group of people with individual goals
from managers? Performance is a team sport, not an individual sport for
organizations. Even if the leader or the project manager builds a team
with a workshop defining organizational or project goals, this is not a
system change and by the time performance appraisal is done, people will
only think about their individual goals. This is because performance ap-
praisal is conducted for a single person and not for the project.
To alleviate this problem constant checks with your team members
about what their goals are need to be performed. This needs to be a regu-
lar checkpoint. To give a sample of why this is required, in the technology
industry, there are ongoing discussions between business and IT. Techni-
cal people do not understand business people and vice versa. It is not that
they use different language, but that each has different goals.
6 DISCOVERIES THROUGH PERSONAL AGILITY

Another important aspect of goals that impact performance is how

they are managed in a hierarchy. Strategy is realized through goals from
the top. The challenge is to connect these different worlds: leaders of a
team and members of other teams (e.g., the management team). We tend
to put our team goals first. It is natural but also dangerous for compa-
nies. Strategy realization plans should be transparent. Individual goals
and team goals should correspond to organizational strategy as written in
a PMI article.6 This correspondents to Outcomes Agility.
In our mind, honing the seven agilities of education agility, change
agility, emotional agility, political agility, cerebral agility, learning
agility and outcomes agility enlarges the probability of project and
organizational success and elevated performance. Based on extensive
experience and research the equilibrium in the seven personal agility
flavors is the way to achieve high performance. There are seven dif-
ferent flavors of personal agility. It is important to keep all of them in
balance. All the project team members need to know their current state
of personal agility in an organization. Here we bring a huge, unique,
and “one of a kind” value via the Personal Agility Lighthouse™ Index.
This is a self-analysis assessment (see Appendix) where every project par-
ticipant can learn more about himself/herself in an organization. To
find out which agilities are already honed and which should be further
developed, the project team members are provided with hints, tools,
and methodologies on how to learn and get better at them. Thus the
probability of achieving high performance increases for everyone in the
organization.
There is no one or right way to implement the seven agilities. It all
depends on the teams involved, the organizational structure, culture, ma-
turity, and the projects’ and the organizational goals. There are of course a
few “exceptions to the rule” aspects of implementation teams that should
be focused on. People with highly honed personal agility can create en-
hanced Organizational Agility. There are many people who are focused
on organizations and at the same time forget about individuals. Personal
Agility is all about focusing on those individuals who can and want to
change organizations. Misunderstanding or trying to address personal
agility via some other methodologies/procedures may or may not work.
There are no shortcuts in terms of mastering the seven agilities.
 Perspectives Through Personal Agility 7

One pitfall that should be considered and talked through is trans-

parency of measurements and metrics while applying and expending the
seven agilities. Another drawback is linked to the teams’ and organiza-
tion’s awareness of customers’ needs and wants. Teams need to distinguish
what will pay off and what is just a whim. If individuals hold on to their
beliefs, not wanting to grow with the organization in all the directions
that the wind may take you, then there will be an eminent downfall.
If individuals discontinue and not use their learning ability, which
happens to be a big part of the Personal Agility nuances, then it objec-
tively resonates with what the World Economic Forum (WEF)7 says
about “Learnability.” The WEF says: “It’s time to take a fresh look at
how we motivate, develop and retain employees. In this environment,
learnability8—the desire and capability to develop in-demand skills to be
employable for the long-term—is the hot ticket to success for employers
and individuals alike.” They further go on to explain in detail as shown
in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2

Projects get off track every time project teams and organizations forget
about clarity and continuous feedbacks. Without full self-expression and
unambiguousness, teams tend to have their own sense of performance
based on internal judgment of the project’s and organization’s KPIs (qual-
itative, quantitative, leading, and lagging). The organization and its teams
can just disconnect from the project’s stakeholders and thus can slip into
low performance. Teams need to work in full limpidity mode by show-
ing the product advancement and by measuring the KPIs together with
stakeholders. The short cycle of product development, coupled with the
constant availability of the services and products for customer evaluation
and feedback, makes close interactions possible between the organization,
teams, and the stakeholders. Although this will not prevent teams and the
8 DISCOVERIES THROUGH PERSONAL AGILITY

organization from pitching into a low-performance mode, it will unfold

the progress very quickly. It can also unveil each and every stakeholders’
involvement as they will want to give the feedback and their concerns
sooner or later. Then by continuous adapting and adopting, the teams
and the organization itself can have the possibility to get back on track.
Adapting, adopting, and then adapting. This virtuous cycle is never end-
ing for a high-performing organization as shown in Figure 3 below.

Figure 3
 Index
Achievement, outcomes agility and, industry applications by
68–70 International Practitioners
Adaptability, 16, 24, 32, 61 and Academia, 23–25
Agile 360, 52 scrum values, 85
Agile Manifesto value Cognitive improvisations, 29
cerebral agility, 49 Collaborative contribution., 37
change agility, 19 Complexity, navigating, 3
education agility, 13 Cook, Tim, 27
emotional agility, 30 Cynefin framework, 42
learning agility, 57
outcomes agility, 68 Decisions, politics and, 43
political agility, 38 DeGeneres, Ellen, 9
Agile mindset, 5, 39, 47, 73–74, 77 Denning, Steve, 68
Agility. see also individual entries Design thinking, 13, 51
cerebral, 47–53 Discoveries, learning agility and, 58
change, 4, 19–25
education, 4, 6, 11–16 Education agility, 4, 6, 11–16, 94
emotional, 6, 11 industry applications by
learning, 4, 12, 57–60 International Practitioners
organizational, 6 and Academia, 15–16
outcomes, 4, 67–74 scrum values, 85
personal, 3–8 8-fold factors of Buddha, 95–96
political, 6, 37–43 Ellison, Larry, 97
and supply chain management, Emotional agility, 6, 11, 29–34, 93
39 industry applications by
types of, 4, 6 International Practitioners
Allen, Scott, 1 and Academia, 32–34
Amen, Daniel, 69 scrum values, 85
Antifragile, 12–13 Emotional intelligence, 29
Empathetic agility. see education agility
Berteig, Mishkin, 38 Empathy, 11–12, 15
Birkinshaw, Julian, 48
BRD (Business Requirement Forbes, 5
Documents), 30 Future competency, 103
Brightline Initiative’s 10 Guiding
Principles, 69 Gates, Bill, 87
Buddha, 95–96 Governability, politics and, 43

Cerebral agility, 6, 47–53, 93 High organizational performance, 8

scrum values, 85 Honeycomb of modular/microservice
Change agility, 4, 6, 19–25, 94 architecture, 59
118 INDEX

Industry applications by International PALH™ model, 69–70, 74, 78,

Practitioners and Academia 81–83, 89–92, 95, 99–103,
cerebral agility and, 51–53 100, 102, 105
change agility and, 23–25 Pareto analysis, 77
education agility and, 15–16 Performance, organization and, 89
emotional agility and, 32–34 Personal agility, 3–8, 90
learning agility and, 61–63 application of
outcomes agility and, 72–74 to agile world, 90–91
political agility and, 41–43 to waterfall world, 91–96
Intelligence, defined, 100 importance of, 77–80
and organizational agility, 95
Kanban, 30 Peterson, Sandra E., 17
KANO model, 21 PMI Talent Triangle, 101
Political agility, 6, 37–43, 93
Last responsible moment (LRM), decisions, 43
20 governability, 43
Learning agility, 4, 6, 12, 57–60, 93 industry applications by
and discoveries, 58 International Practitioners
industry applications by and Academia, 41–43
International Practitioners for organizational agility, 40
and Academia, 61–63 rules, 43
microservice and, 58 scrum values, 85
scrum values, 85, 86 Proof of concept (PoC), 89
Lee Kuan Yew, 45 Psychological adaptability, 29
LRM. see last responsible moment
(LRM) Quarterly Business Reviews (QBR), 70

Ma, Jack, 65 Responsiveness, 31

Martin, Thomas, 99–100 Rohn, Jim, 75
Microservice, 58
Musk, Elon, 35 Scrum, 13, 16, 30, 33, 81–86
values, agility and, 85
Nadella Satya, 55 Self-analysis assessment, 6, 80,
105–106
Objective and Key Result (OKR), 70 Supply chain management, agile and,
OKR. see Objective and Key Result 39
(OKR) Sustainability, 39
Organizational agility, 6
and personal agility, 95 T-shaped persons, concept of, 13, 47
political agility and, 40 T-shaped skills, concept of, 13, 47
Organizational complexities, 78
Organizational success, outcomes Vision outcomes cycle, 69
agility and, 68
Organizational transformation, 33 WEF. see World Economic Forum
Outcomes agility, 4, 6, 67–74, 94, (WEF)
101 World Economic Forum (WEF), 7
industry applications by WYMIWYG, personal agility and,
International Practitioners 5–8
and Academia, 72–74
scrum values, 85, 86 Yin Yang, 84
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