Listen to this recording for new arguments on why an Agile Change approach is vital for AI-driven projects.
Ten years ago, when I developed Agile Change and published the Agile Change Management Handbook, I campaigned for the importance of knowing what we want to achieve. This is an important step in successful leadership – start with an end in mind.
I argued that understanding and being able to describe and explain the end goal of our changes at work is a critical skill for successful leadership. Why? Because Agile achieves the end goal but will flex and pivot to get us there. Don’t waste time trying to guess the journey, establish the destination and your success criteria to enable everyone involved to make their contribution. Start with the end in mind.
With the growth of Agentic AI (agents with autonomous decision making that get us the answers we need – flexing to achieve the goal we have set) the idea for planning the journey and starting with the end in mind has never been more important. If we are to direct the technologies available to us, we need to be specific about what we want them to do for us.
It is time to become an expert in describing our needs because technology can create the answers.
It’s not as easy as it may seem; setting a goal and defining criteria to describe what a successful outcome looks like is hard work. It involves a lot more analysis and innovation than creating a shopping list of things we want our change to include.
Specifying your goals and starting with the end in mind forces us to consider future possibilities for how we work, what we do and why we do it. This is difficult because it is working against the natural desire of our brain to concentrate on the present.
Within neuroscience research, there is a helpful phrase to explain this, which is “delay discounting”, where the further in the future we try to plan, the less urgent and valuable things feel.
Don’t believe me? Consider this week and the pressure and excitement you feel about all the things you are going to get done. Now, think about later in the year. Perhaps after the summer break, when you return to work rested and ready for the run-up to Christmas. Are you clear about what you need to do? Do you feel excited and anxious about the work you will be doing? Of course not; it’s too hard to think that far ahead. Too many things will have changed.
However, when we scope out the changes we are making at work we need to specify the future. We need to describe how we will work, what our priorities are, what we will achieve and how we will achieve them.
The Agile Change Agent course includes techniques for developing your skills for specifying the goals of your change. Of course, defining the end goal is a collaborative activity, to get it right requires a diverse range of opinions and the willingness to challenge these in a respectful but productive way. On the course we identify the open questions to ask along with techniques to imagine the future that help you with this vital skill.
Can you afford any weakness in your ability to define your requirements? Consider how much of a contribution you can make at work if you know how to lead your colleagues through a brainstorming workshop to define the end goal.
The time for getting lost in the detail of saying how things should be done has gone. Technology can pull many levers to create the answer we want, we must focus on specifying what that answer is, specifying your goals and starting with the end in mind is all part of this.
Develop your ability of specifying your goals of workplace change, and how to break it into smaller, more specific outcomes at my next Agile Change Agent course – see you soon!
