What I Like About Change - Agility

Dear lovely people,

 

For those of us on the question for success, you become familiar with trends that come...and they go. Agility is one of such which to me should remain within your strategy even if it soon fall of the ranks of the popular techniques. My sense of lessons learned tells me that even if the old techniques had any value at one time, they not still have some value? Let's take a quick look at one of them.

Management by Objective (MBO) - This is a technique for negotiating individual objectives, aligned with organizational objectives, with employees, in order to move the focus to empowering individuals with goals and accomplishments and moving away from micro-management. I loved this strategy during my early days of project management.

Once there is value in techniques such as MBO, there probably always is value - at least if you look at the core, and strip out the inessentials. MBO makes sense still! So now, what about Agility? Trust me I am not from the software tech world else I should be talking about ‘Agile’ not ‘Agility’ Bear with me, but it surely is a technique, and it has grown to have a steady following. Many organizations implement it but what about you? Is your life not a project just like a software development project? Trust me it is.

The word "agile" itself indicates the ability to adapt quickly and effectively to changing conditions. Too bad if you are the conservative type glued to the ‘specialist’ mentality, behold this will be a bad definition for you.

In your quest for success, you have to develop a knowledge of varietals - but at the same time, maintaining a generalist perspective. Why not, it’s ok to have a toolbox full of basic tools, with some specialist ones - but you just have to know when to use each! Having an extensive tool set, and knowing how and when to use - and how to think about it all - is often more of an art form...and is the ultimate in agility.

Need I conclude again that success is a keen dependent of agility? I think any high achiever must have an unwavering sense of his goal and an utterly agile approach of achieving it.