Creating a Painted Picture

The foundations of releasing agility

Hi and welcome to the first Masterclass email for paid subscribers - thank you so much for signing up - it fills my heart with warmth. I do hope I can serve you well over the course of our time together.

Each of the masterclass lessons deals with one single topic. There are around 130 lessons in total - so plenty to go at. As this is a new model for delivering content, I may get things wrong, or it may be too intense, or not intense enough - please let me know. Simply reply to this email or email me at rob@cultivatedmanagement.com to let me know what you like or what you'd like done differently.

At the end of each of these newsletters will be a help section. In here you will find a link to the Personal Knowledge Management System (which I aim to update each week), discounts on courses and/or books as they are released and further guidance to support today's topic.

Painting a Picture of the future

Let's paint a picture - the first step in Releasing Agility. It is a concrete first step but a painted picture alone won't give the absolute clarity over what you are trying to achieve - we will cover identifying obstacles, building a plan and communicating the strategy in future emails.

Agility (or agile as the mainstream may term it) is always in service of something else. Companies want to go agile to achieve something: typically better business results and retention of staff (by providing a more engaging culture). We covered this in the last Masterclass newsletter.

As such, it's critically important to understand what you are releasing agility towards.

I've seen many teams (sometimes award-winning teams) helping companies move smoothly and quickly towards the shipping the wrong things. They get better at shipping failed products, or they deal with failure demand better (we'll cover failure demand in a future lesson). Or they enable teams to provide poor service more quickly. Or they don’t really understand their purpose at all, and you end up with a mishmash of approaches. Often nobody can explain why a company is going “agile” other than it sounds plausible.

Releasing Agility is about getting better business results and retaining good people by overcoming obstacles. It’s therefore essential to know which problems are worth solving.

The reason painting a picture is so important is because there are always more problems in a business than we could ever solve.

Instead of simply solving every problem we encounter, and humans like to solve easy or interesting problems, we must be certain we are solving the ones that are stopping us on our path.

So, we must paint a picture that the path leads to.

If all we do is solve every problem we encounter, we may be solving the wrong ones. Many problems in business need to be left alone - otherwise we would need huge amounts of staff to simply overcome them all. We could spend all day everyday solving problems (and dabbling with agile methods) and not improve business results.

As such, it's super important to know what we want and where we are going - and this is where the painted picture comes in.