[00:00:00] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Hi, I am Andrew. Welcome to the Work Unraveled podcast. In each episode, we break down a piece of the workplace puzzle, providing practical insights, fresh perspectives, and actionable solutions to help you navigate the ever-changing world of work. 

[00:00:15] **Scott:** And I'm Scott, whether you are a leader, a professional, or simply curious about what makes organizations tick, this show offers strategies to think smarter, work better, and lead boldly join us as we turn workplace complexity into clarity.

One episode at a time.

[00:00:32] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** In this particular episode. We're gonna be talking about, uh, workplace efficiency, and I think some of the previous episodes we've talked about some of the challenges and issues in, in the work that we all do. But what we are trying to do in this episode, I think, is trying to help people that feel bogged down, that feel as though they're never moving forward and they're never sort of making progress. And the approach that. You and I are both big fans of, I know Scott, this is your thing, is the agile, the agile mindset.

And we wanna explore that in this podcast. And, and what I wanna do from a, a psychological perspective is just to emphasize that the more rigid we are with our plans and our processes, the more stress that can cause. So for me. From a psychological perspective, agile helps that sort of wellbeing and productivity thing.

So really Scott, this is your thing and as an expert in in in agility, what's your take on this, this approach, agile approach? I.

[00:01:26] **Scott:** So I'll start with something controversial because one of these, I mean, agile and agility kind of gets thrown around a bit in businesses, and I think it's important to get back to the basics and the core of it and what it is about and. I'd like to start with something I stole from a friend that's quite controversial and it's if you are doing something you've never done before, if you've delivered a project on time, on budget and on scope, you failed.

And the, the whilst that's quite extreme.

[00:01:55] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Mm.

[00:01:55] **Scott:** ethos behind that is generally if you're doing something new, there's always unknowns. There's always opportunities that you may want to seize. There may be challenges that you don't foresee coming.

[00:02:09] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah.

[00:02:09] **Scott:** And the waste project used to be done traditionally was making all the assumptions upfront, writing them down, fixing them, locking people away in a room for X amount of months and years sometimes, and then launching something and then wondering why it doesn't work

[00:02:26] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Mm-hmm.

[00:02:26] **Scott:** while the world around you is changing.

So agility is about saying, actually, you need to have flexibility. You need to be open to change, you need to be flexible, you need to be. Willing to take new opportunities as they come along. And that keeps you competitive in a world that, as we know is rapidly and always changing. So this, this kind of linear approach to projects and delivering work is, is really kind of old hat now.

There are still a place for that when you're doing repeatable things, things you've done before where things are predictable. But in a lot of work that we are talking about and our listeners are dealing with like knowledge work. You are not in a predictable world anymore. So what we're trying to give people here is the ability to have that flexibility.

Deal with all the demands that are coming at them and find a way through that and be highly effective. And just to give some stats around it, 87% of organizations report that adopting some agile mindsets and approaches have improved their ability to manage changing priorities.

[00:03:28] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Okay.

[00:03:28] **Scott:** That was going back to 2023 now. As I alluded to at the beginning, there's also a lot of bad agile out there. Um, and I'm gonna be a bit more positive on this episode and talk about the good stuff here. But what I'm saying is without laboring the point too much and as we'll co cover today, is it's not just about pro following processes blindly, it's having the right mindset, and that's what we're gonna explore in a bit more depth.

[00:03:53] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah, completely. And I think I, I came across Agile probably maybe 20 years ago, and for me, and perhaps for a lot of people listening to this, I thought Agile was this sort of system of. You know, processes and, and people, we'll talk about this as well later on, things like the daily standup. And, and for me, agile was very much at, at that time a series of, of habits and, and things you did through a sort of systematic way.

And what I realized, and this is what the literature talks about in terms of. From a psychological, uh, perspective is agile, and I know you are a big fan of this, Scott, is is a mindset, it's an attitude. It's, it's this approach to projects, it's this approach to your work that is not about ironically, being fixed in how you tackle things. And for me, the switch that happened for me is, and, and, and I would ask anybody listening to this, if, if you can think of any project that you've worked on. or a project that failed, maybe you had a more open culture, if you had a more trusting team, people who were communicating with each other and being flexible in their approach, would that project have succeeded or been more successful than it already was? And if you said yes, and I can't think of many people who would say no. We wanted less communication, less flexibility. More closed attitudes. If you think that yes, that would've been a good thing, then that's being agile. as I say, I think for me, the switch from Agile isn't just this set of, you know, sort of formalities and a set way of doing things.

Agile is that mindset really is. Is the core of what we're talking about. So, so Scott, if there are people who are brand new to this, if there are people who've never really heard Agile, because clearly you and I are, are big fans, can you sort of describe some of the sort of core values and frameworks of Agile for people who are new to this? I.

[00:05:48] **Scott:** so without the long history lesson, agile was born from software development in the software development space where developers were. Being told to follow the approach I mentioned earlier where I do all the requirements up front, lock yourself away, don't see the customer, and at the end, wonder why.

And statistically taking that approach in software development, up to 70% of features that are developed in that way do not get used by customers.

[00:06:13] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Wow.

[00:06:14] **Scott:** significantly wasteful. So. The concept they came up with is saying that we prioritize individuals and interactions with the customer and with each other.

We prioritize working solutions. So delivering stuff that actually matters quickly rather than just writing there's a documentation about it and thinking that's a comfort blanket . Collaborating with customers over negotiating, over contracts and responding to change, actually welcoming change, and that's the original Agile principles.

And someone I interviewed on one of my previous podcasts, and maybe we'll link to that in the show notes, was a guy called Joshua Ky, and he came up with something called Modern Agile, and it was a way of thinking about. Agility from a modern place that is applicable to pretty much any business, not just technical business.

And there are four key elements to that. The first one is make people awesome, which sounds a bit cheesy, but it's about everything we do, every piece of work we do, how does it make our customers or our colleagues' lives better? That is like the north style. That's your guiding principle to say, this piece of work we're about to do, how does it make people's lives better?

Second one is to deliver value continuously, so it's regular delivery of value rather than long, drawn out processes and projects that take ages. So actually being flexible to get value out quickly in small chunks, and then improving and learning as you go.

[00:07:35] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah, can I, can

[00:07:36] **Scott:** Third,

[00:07:36] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** I'm just gonna jump in there, Scott. Sorry.

[00:07:38] **Scott:** go for it.

[00:07:38] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** about my own experience with projects and before you carry on and, you know, I have worked on so many projects where I don't think we've delivered value at the end, rather than

[00:07:48] **Scott:** Mm.

[00:07:48] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** continue delivery of value. That's quite a new concept, I think, for me.

But

[00:07:52] **Scott:** Yeah.

[00:07:52] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** on. So.

[00:07:53] **Scott:** Yeah. Well that's, that's because as you, as we said, most of those projects, the assumptions made at the beginning about, oh yeah, you sit in a boardroom and you go, well, yeah, this, the customer will definitely love this thing. So we'll spend months and lots of money building it, and then you finally get it in the customer's hands and.

The customer hates it.

[00:08:09] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah.

[00:08:09] **Scott:** So this is about saying get early feedback often and iterate and say, do you like this? Test it out with a beta product or something like that. The third element is make safety a prerequisite. So that's safety for your customers. So what you build and deliver and give to your customers is safe for them, but also safe for the team to make mistakes, to learn, to challenge, and.

All the stuff that we've talked about in some of our previous episodes. So safer for the people giving the team the work to do, or the individual's work to do to say, actually, I don't think this is the right thing to do, or I think there's a better way to do it, so not being fixed. And then finally the fourth one is experiment and learn rapidly.

So that's being willing to fail. And I often quote the, um, Elon Musk, I know he's quite a controversial character, but with the SpaceX Rockets, I'm sure many people listening will know that. They were trying to reuse the rockets. That was one of the things they were trying to do. So they would launch a rocket and then land it back on a pad in the sea.

Quite often many of those would blow up. And what he didn't do when a rocket blew up was sack the team. They would say, actually, we, we failed. Now we've got data on what went wrong so we can now use that data to be better next time. As a very different mindset and approaching failure and thinking about how do we experiment, how do we get, how do we kill our.

Kill our project to find out what is the glimmer of hope. That still means there's something there so flipping on his head. So those are the four key things I think anybody can apply to their work and, and their kind of their business.

[00:09:35] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** I love the fact you said make people awesome. I think that many organizations, people don't feel awesome. And they feel as though that, you know, they're never good enough. And there's certainly some internal imposter syndrome, but certainly I think many organizations, and I've worked in a few where. No matter how, how, how much value you delivered as an individual, how much value you delivered as a team, it still wasn't good enough. So I love that. Making people awesome. And I was just reflecting as you, as you were talking about delivering constant value there and also that iteration thing. And this, as I said, is, is a mindset. I, I worked on a project a couple of years ago with a client, and it was a communications project, and they were so tied up in getting this perfect that we spent probably six to eight months and nothing went out of the door, so to speak. Nothing was actually created because the organization went round and round and round in circles talking to itself. Is this what we want? Is that what we want? And for me, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but Agile is about. Okay. We've got something that we can show to the world, whether that's either internally to the rest of the team, to my colleague, to the customer, particularly the customer. And, and it's good enough if you like, probably more than good enough.

Let's get it out there. Let's get it into the world, see what happens, get some feedback and we can keep on iterating. Am I correct in that, that sort of

[00:10:59] **Scott:** Yeah, ab absolutely. 'cause you don't know. You literally don't know until you get something to the customer's hands. Even on these websites, whether you're asked you, would you buy this product, click yes and subscribe. The percentage that actually then turn over and buy the product to the end of the day is, is really quite low.

And you just reminded me there of an example where, um, there was a. A chocolate, a new startup, building a new chocolate bar. I didn't have lots of money. And what would've traditionally happened in terms of how do we come up with the branding for the chocolate bar and the packaging, they would've spent hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands with a marketing agency to come up with different branding.

What they did was they printed out some designs. They wrapped them around. A competitor's chocolate bar. They didn't actually have the chocolate bar yet. They hadn't, hadn't made it, and they, it was like Gorilla Marketing. They then put them on the shelf, was in a supermarket. Whether they asked permission or not, I don't know, hid around the corner.

When a customer picked up one of their fake chocolate bars, they would then stop them and say, can I ask you, what attracted you to that, that packaging, for example? So that again, is just saying how can we then iterate and get it into the customers?

Get that feedback early, even before the product existed, is really powerful. As I said, complete opposite of what you've just described, where a company kicking something around for so long, wasting time and money, and the customer's completely oblivious. You're just not getting that feedback. Feedback is a gift, as they say.

[00:12:19] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Uh, feedback is a gift, and, and I think this is where, for me, from a psychological, psychological perspective, agile is that psychological safety thing that we've talked about on previous episodes. And for people who are not familiar with that term, psychological

[00:12:32] **Scott:** I.

[00:12:32] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** and you sort of touched upon this, is this idea that as an individual in the team, I'm bringing my best self to, to the workplace, but if I make a mistake, it's okay, because that's part of the learning.

I'm not, I'm not setting out. To make mistakes, but I'm gonna try my best. I'm gonna try something out. And sometimes it will work more than often. It will fail or it just won't quite land with a customer. But that's okay 'cause we're learning. So for me, agile allows people to try. Things out. It allows them to feel safe if they do make a mistake. Agile also, if you've got that mindset, we're delivering value and that can increase people's motivation. 'cause they can actually see, hey, we've been working for two weeks and actually something went out of the door. has got into the customer's hand. Or we've made a, a small change to an internal process.

And like I mentioned, I've worked on projects where they've ground on for like two years. I, I was working on a website project a while ago with a client, and I'm not kidding. It was probably two years of work and the website still hadn't been updated. I. It's astonishing. So yeah, as I say, agile, for me from that psychological perspective is, is a, is a stress reduction tool. It's an attitude, but, but going back to your practical applications, are there any sort of operational tools or tips or techniques that you could offer people that would help with that? You know, direct, tangible business benefits that people can do, you know, pretty quickly in the, in their individual work or their team processes.

[00:14:04] **Scott:** Yeah, so the first thing I say to everybody that I work with and, and learn the hard way myself was where the real value. Lay is getting work out in the open, getting it organized. Get it out of your inbox, get it out of your post-it notes, get it out of paperwork on your desk or in a teams folder somewhere.

Get it into a single pipeline, a single organized list that is flexible and will change over time, but is continually reviewed. And the thing at the top of that list is the highest value item. That, and the test is if you only had two weeks left in your job. What would be the best use of those two weeks?

And actually saying what would sit at the top of that list,

[00:14:44] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Hmm.

[00:14:44] **Scott:** and there will be lots of different elements to help you prioritize that. It'll be based on. Things like the highest value to the customer or the organization. It'll be how achievable it is. Is it too complex actually? Is it something that's too big?

And in which case you wanna break it down? Uh, do we have the resources to do it? Um, do we have the time? Uh, what are our competitors doing? There'll be lots of other things, but the first thing I would say is you need to get work out in the open. And there's so many benefits from that. One, it helps you.

And I'll let you touch on the cognitive benefits in a second, Andrew, but thinking about. Actually now I've got visibility in my work. I can, I can make decisions. I'm not getting like. Unsure what to do next. It helps me negotiate with my boss and stakeholders and say, actually, here's all the work we're doing.

Here's how we prioritized it. Work with us on how we prioritize that if needs be. 'cause we know that teams get bombarded with loads of work and if they haven't got the visibility themselves to be able to say, you're asking me to do too much. They just get into that burnout again. So visibility of work is key.

So that there's lots of things and we haven't got time to go into that in the whole show. But the first thing I would say is getting work out in the open and getting it into an ordered place where it can start to chip away. And obviously you'll know that that can bring some psychological benefits.

Andrew, Andrew.

[00:16:03] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah. Yeah. I think, um, what we've gotta be careful, I, if anybody hasn't heard of Agile is, and I'd be, I'd be keen for you, Scott, to share some of those frameworks that people may have heard of, but it's not a one size fits all. And in fact, the irony of of implementing Agile is Agile is not meant to be. This rigid way of doing things. It's about what's suitable for you as a team, what's suitable for you as an organization. So it isn't a one size fits all approach. It is about that flexibility again, but the most important thing for me, you have to have executive support. I've worked with teams that, yeah, we want to be agile. Our senior management team, they don't get it. They're very much more that sort of opposite approach, which is called waterfall approach, which is we do things in a very set rigid way. We've always done it this way, type, type attitude. So for Agile to be implemented in your team, in your organization, you have to have the senior people on board.

Would you agree? That's gotta be something that's gotta come from the top.

[00:17:03] **Scott:** Yeah. And, and I fortunately got that I was presenting a business case with my previous employer, when I. First, I just started to adopt this and I showed them exactly that, the waterfall approach and the agile approach for this project we're working on. It was a digital project and said, here's how we normally do change in the organization, and obviously the listeners will have to go with me on this.

There was a slide which showed that the value on the traditional way, the value didn't come to the end. So there's a big, you know, it showed month, month, month, month, month for like 12 months, and then the end was a big green bar that showed the value.

[00:17:36] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Okay.

[00:17:36] **Scott:** What it also showed you is the risk went up over time because you haven't got a product out there.

You're building something in the dark. You have made lots of assumptions. So risk goes up. And in the Agile approach was small, iterative green steps rising every month, value being delivered every month. And because you're getting that product out there and that value out there, your risk goes down.

[00:17:56] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yes.

[00:17:57] **Scott:** So I presented to this boardroom of about 50 senior leaders and I said, here's how we do change.

At the moment, here's how I now want to deliver this project. Can I have a show of hands? Which one you want me to choose? Unanimous. Everyone chose the Agile approach,

[00:18:11] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** course.

[00:18:11] **Scott:** the first way that was brought into that organization, and it was transformational. Um,

[00:18:17] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Uh, uh, yeah. I think it's so important that you, as I say, you've gotta get people understanding what Agile means, which is this mindset thing that we're going on about. I've also seen that Agile has been used, ironically, by the senior people to try and cut costs and to make people work harder. And one of the, if you like, I'll say semantics, one of the, the misunderstandings, I think that. often have about agile is you just need to be more flexible and work harder. You just need to do more with less. They don't actually want. The team to be truly agile. They don't really want the team to do things that test and learn and be iterative.

They just want the team to work harder. So we

[00:18:59] **Scott:** Yeah.

[00:19:00] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** be clear, anybody listening to this, that there is a, there is a, if you like, a, um, a, a, a proper way to do agile with, which is this iterative test and learn, get things out the door, et cetera, et cetera. But then there's that. Accusation that people make about each other or they should be more agile. And what often that means, if you like, if you scratch the surface of that accusation, accusation is you need to work harder.

[00:19:24] **Scott:** Yeah.

[00:19:25] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** at producing things rather than let's improve what we do. Let's improve the processes. just want you to work more.

[00:19:31] **Scott:** Yeah, and one of the, one of the biggest challenges where leadership lets this whole thing down is wanting the cake and eat it too. So say, oh yeah, we'll adopt agility, we'll adopt agile, and we'll drop some methodologies without the mindset. That's the first red flag. But actually leadership also, for this to be effective, need to push and trust the decisions down the chain.

They need to empower those teams to have the ability to make decisions without all the bureaucracy that traditionally, would go ahead. Because as I always say, the teams tend to be near the actual customer, so they need the flexibility and trust to be able to make those decisions on the fly in terms of how work is prioritized, how it's delivered.

And at the level I was at with my team, I would say to them, you are the smart people. I, you're smarter than me. You, you deliver it in the way you think it needs to be delivered. And I will support you. I'll give you the, the prioritization, help you with that. But how it's done, I'm not gonna dictate that.

'cause I don't know, that's not my skillset. And that's, that's absolutely where those, that leadership needs to support this through and through in terms of trust as well.

[00:20:34] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** I absolutely love that. I, I, I can remember a job I worked in many years ago where there was a process that was a, it was a series of forms, and I won't bore the listener with what forms we had to fill out, but we had to fill these forms out. And I'm not kidding, I was in that role for about three and a half, four years. That form, and that process did not change once in those four years, and everybody knew that the process was broken. Everybody knew we would even sit around in the team meeting going, yeah, this is terrible. Or I've gotta do the form. Everybody knew, but nobody had the authority, like you said, at the lower level to actually make any changes. we all knew as a team, people close to that problem. We knew how to fix it. We knew what we could do. We knew how we would change it, but there wasn't the executive support to actually get on and fix it. And then it just stayed as it was and it was inefficient and it was broken. It was painful. And going back to my thing, which is the psychological angle, it was incredibly demotivating because it was torturous, this form process.

It really was. And everybody hated it. And we knew we had to do it every single year. Yet we. We had no authority to change this process. So yeah, A Agile has so many benefits. But before we sort of get onto some really practical tips there, there may be a few bits of jargon that if anybody's heard of Agile that people may have heard of.

Could you just, and I know this, this is massive, but can you sort of clarify for me, certainly it may be anybody listening to this, some of the terms, there's things like Kanban boards, uh sprints, scrum. Do you mind

[00:22:09] **Scott:** Yeah.

[00:22:09] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** some of that sort of explanation of what those I ideas might mean or they do mean?

[00:22:14] **Scott:** Absolutely and the, the, I think that's the other thing that can alienate people with agile is they terms start getting thrown around and people don't really understand what they mean.

And again, if we get it back to basics, that's, that's how you can get people to understand this stuff. But yes, terms that people would've heard are things like, as you said, scrum. So it is one of the methodologies. Some people think Agile is just Scrum, it's just a methodology. That sits beneath those agile principles that we talked about at the beginning, and Scrum tends to be, uh, working in a fortnightly cycle.

And again, was born out of software development and I used that for a number of years before my team kind of evolved out of it. And then were kind of framework free because we just found a way to work and live to the principles. I think Scrum is good as a kind of training wheels, if you like, as a good way to start and get into it.

'cause it has some structure, it gives some trust for leaders who may be a bit w and you work in a fortnightly cycle where you say, right work is contained within that. Or a week. It depends, but fortnightly is what? Teams tend to settle on in my experience. You say, what are we gonna work on in the fortnight?

You work on it. The team is not allowed to be interrupted and change course management can't come in and go, stop doing that. Do something different. 'cause you've agreed collectively what you're gonna do. Uh, the team then problem solve. They do the work and at the end of that cycle, they present their work to stakeholders and customers and then move on to the next section of work.

And that might be something that's been developed during that fortnightly cycle.

[00:23:44] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Mm.

[00:23:44] **Scott:** There's other things in there called standup meetings that teams will have, whereas every day they will have a meeting. I think less standup meetings now due to hybrid working, but some people still do standup and. At home with, on their camera or they, or sit down meetings.

But the, the point of that meeting is to say, what, what are we doing today? Uh, are there any blockers to our progress today? It isn't a check-in meeting, so bosses can say to people, you are not working hard enough. It's a collaborative process, and the reason it's started as a standup meeting is. It's meant to be short.

It's meant to be no more than five, 10 minutes tops. If you're in a standup meeting, it's taking half an hour. Something has gone horribly wrong. The idea is you, if you're stood up, you are more likely to get uncomfortable. So it's helped. It's meant to help the meeting be shorter. I.

[00:24:29] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Hmm.

[00:24:30] **Scott:** obviously in the interest of time, we're not gonna go into all the detail of of Scrum, but another one you mentioned is Kanban.

[00:24:36] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah.

[00:24:36] **Scott:** And Kanban is similar, but it's more about a continual flow. So it isn't in a fortnightly cycle, it is just a continual flow where work just progresses, moves across. You get feedback as you go. Uh, it's quite common in like the manufacturing. Kind of world. I've helped some teams in the aerospace industry, uh, adopt this.

But it's about managing the amount of work in progress and minimizing the work in progress. You don't have too much work going on, and it's about a flow and pipeline of work. So there are two things that people may have heard of.

[00:25:08] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah. And, and, and you know, at the risk of contradicting myself, which I can do, I I've said that you don't have to adopt to these formal frameworks. They, for me, they're like training wheels. When I've worked with teams who are getting into Agile, they started with these sort of, if you like, traditional approaches and tools and frameworks like Kanban boards and Scrum and sprints and so on.

But over time they've developed their own version of it. But can I, can I offer you my take on this? 'cause you are the expert on this, so if. My understanding, and this can be as an individual again or as a team, agile is that mindset. It's about knowing what is value in terms of the processes that we are involved with as an organization or as an individual, what adds the most value. We are customer focused we understand the challenges and the issues faced by the customer, and we're focused on increasing customer. Customer value. And then as a team, we work as a team and we've got the right people in the team that can solve that problem. But we're not trying to take on too much work at once. We prioritize the work that we really need to tackle that has the highest impact, and then we work as a team. We're flexible and open and creative on how we tackle that problem, although that, that list of problems, we work for a certain amount of time and then we stop and re we reflect. We get the. Value out to the customer, perhaps, whether that's our boss or our colleagues.

We get their feedback and then every so often we look back and say, what's working in our processes? What's working well and what, what isn't working and how, how can we improve? Would that be a sort of very poor layman's description of an agile approach?

[00:26:47] **Scott:** I think you've nailed it.

[00:26:48] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Oh,

[00:26:49] **Scott:** Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:51] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Because I just want you and maybe could wrap

[00:26:53] **Scott:** I.

[00:26:53] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Scott, with, I mean, as I say, you are the expert in this field. If somebody wanted to try and bring in Agile, even into their own day-to-day or they wanted to encourage team members, could you give me a sort of breakdown, anybody listening a, a few steps where they could start maybe small and, and start being more agile in their, in their work?

[00:27:12] **Scott:** So, yeah. Uh, as I said earlier, I think the first thing to do is start to prioritize that work. And you can do this on an individual level. I mean, people take this approach on their personal work as well, is put it into a single place. There are tools like Trello that some people may have heard of, may have come across as a free tool, um, where you can have, it's basically columns.

It's like a virtual whiteboard with sticky notes on, so you can, the idea is you start on the left, you put your. To-do list on the left, if you wanna call it a to-do list, and your highest value work at the top. And then when you've started to do it, you move it across the board into different columns, like done or there's a blocked column.

Sometimes if you are waiting for someone else, you can put that work into a block column, leave it there, go back to the next item on the list. So trying to get that. Visibility of work is really powerful on a personal level as well as in a team level. So that's the first step I would do. I would say get that and start to test it out.

And if you're trying to bring agility into an organization, uh, obviously reach out to Andrew and myself. We are able to help you with that. But , you need to, as we've said, get that leadership on board. And the way not to do that is to come in. And I've seen this happen in companies before where they'll hire a, a trainer to come in and just talk about all the processes like Scrum and Kanban, and completely miss the mindset stuff that comes with it.

And I've seen that's where it goes wrong so many times where you people are asked to follow a process and they have no idea why they're following the process and without the mindset that comes with it, it just goes wrong. And actually it can make problems worse. 'cause people say, now we've got this bureaucracy added, that we just don't understand the value.

We don't see it. We're just being told to do it. There's jargon floating around. So cut the jargon. , All those principles that we talked about, I won't repeat what you've said, Andrew, you've summed out really nicely.

I. The first step is get that work into a single place and then start to develop it from there. Take that open mind, take that experimental approach, test and learn. Do that regular feedback. Does it work? Does it not work? What are we gonna do differently? And having that, that growth mindset, as you've we've mentioned before on the show, um, and that process of review that we've also mentioned on the show in other episodes.

To wrap up agility is a continual journey. You don't reach like pinnacle, right? We're agile now. That's it. You know, we need to apply that continual mindset and it isn't a magical magic bullet in itself. But it can help you think differently, organize work differently, become more effective, foster collaboration across teams, remove silo work, and there's so many benefits and I've seen it work so well, but I have to stress it has to be handled carefully and do not just think it's about following the processes.

Without the mindset, it just will fall flat on its face and you will never recover. I've seen that happen so many times.

[00:29:59] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Thank you for listening to the Work Unraveled podcast. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to subscribe to the show so you don't miss the next one. 

[00:30:08] **Scott:** If you'd like Andrew or me to help you or your business, whether it is for team productivity, leadership, coaching, or communication skills, our website addresses are in the show notes.

Thanks, and until the next time.