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 Organizational 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 mindset.” All of the problems we faced in the tech, project management, supply 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. Besides 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.
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 workshops 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!!