Alicia McLain is a small-business owner, executive leadership coach, public speaker and co-founder of the Agile Coaching Exchange North America. McLain shares her experience speaking on the topic of “Coaching, the Secret Sauce to a Culture of Accountability.” Building on the Agile Coaching Institute’s Coaching Competency Model, she shares what coaching is and is not. McLain highlights how an ICF-certified coach builds accountability into the arc of the conversation by asking powerful...

Michael Spayd is the co-founder of The Collective Edge, which seeks to “transform the transformers.” In this episode, Spayd shares some of his thinking behind his new book “Agile Transformation” and reminds us of the difference between organizational transformation and what he calls “a big adoption.” Leaders are key to the chances of success: “If you’re going to transform [your organization], you’re almost certainly the first problem,” because “organizations are designed to get the results...

He walks us through the other five steps and discusses the importance of metrics that matter. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. Learn More: www.agilemarketingmanifesto.org https://businessagility.institute/learn/agile-marketing-metrics/

Corey Post is a Lean-Agile transformation management consultant with 20+ years of leadership experience developing large solutions, new products, and complex systems. Recently he authored two talks for the Agile2020 conference: ·       Use Product Value Streams to Rapidly Deliver Customer Value and Create a Learning Machine ·       What You Need to Know About Human-Centered Design and Hearing the Voice of the Customer Since the conference was canceled, we wanted to invite Post to discuss...

Esther Derby has four decades of experience with organizational change and she’s a well-known author and thought leader in the agile space. Derby chats with us about her latest book: “7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change: Micro Shifts, Macro Results” While you’ll hear her 7-step guide to problem solving, we particularly dig into her guidance on attending to networks. Accumulating network drama due to widespread layoffs and stress that are affecting our peers is making people less resilient...

Mik Kersten, author of “Projects to Products” and CEO of Tasktop, has seen a reoccurring theme. We go to conferences; we hear about all these fantastic things that can happen when we incorporate lean practices, continuous flow, and feedback. We come back pumped to start changing the way we work because we know it will improve our lives for the better. Then suddenly, the motivation gets drained out of us by all the internal systems in place that effectively prohibit change. Mik has boiled the...

In a former life, Marc Siles was a senior executive chasing a corporate career – until he had a near burnout experience. Originally from Spain, Siles has been living in Finland for the last 18 years, where he dedicates his passion and energy to enable companies around the globe to accelerate their strategic growth.  Siles shares powerful and personal stories about how he identified what matters in his life – his daughter, his family, and his passion for human growth. He offers tips for people...

Jeff Gothelf helps organizations build better products and executives build the cultures that build better products. He is the co-author of the award-winning book “Lean UX”, “Sense & Respond”, and his latest, “Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking Work and Let Your Next Job Find You.” After waking up on his 35th birthday in a panic about the second half of his career, Gothelf knew he needed a change. So he created a content platform that brings work to him rather than him having to...

How important is transformative innovation to your company and are you willing to invest in it? John Carter, a product development expert and inventor, shares his advice for how to nurture innovation within an organization.   He believes a governance structure that includes the following is a key to success:    Governance: Get the right leaders to the table and give them oversight of fragile innovations. They allocate capital from the pool of venture funds.  Process: Establish a process for...

Alicia McLain is the co-founder of Agile Coaching Exchange (ACE) in North America, an organization with an intent to bring coaches together around the mission of building competency and community. She joined us to share more about ACE, as well as the nine things she has seen that wildly successful agile coaches do.  Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts.   Agile Coaching Exchange: http://agilecoachingexchange.com/    The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community,...

Evan Leybourn is the founder and CEO of the Business Agility Institute, an international membership body to both champion and support the next generation of organizations. He joins us to discuss the key findings from this year’s Business Agility Report, their annual flagship research study revealing where organizations around the globe are in their business agility journey. Interestingly, this year’s survey responses were collected in the time period preceding and through the first few months...

Bruce Nix is the Director of Business Agility at Vaco Memphis, a talent and solutions firm. He shares with us a wonderful example of agility: pairing up people impacted by the pandemic with non-profits in need of their talent. Listen to this case study that began with two people taking action and hear Nix’s recommendations for organizations as they to emerge from a crisis. Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts. Read case study on Business Agility Institute’s website. The Agile Amped...

Jardena London’s mission is to help organizations become healthy, productive and fun. She is founder of Souls@Work, a movement to help bring soul back into the workplace.  She explains to us the concept of Structural Agility and how it can help businesses achieve true agility and survive the challenges posed by the changing environment.  Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Alalia Lundy hosts.   Read London’s paper on Business Agility Institute’s...

Michael Hamman helps organizations grow their inner capacity for leadership agility. He joined us for this “geek fest” of an episode on the topic of agility and transformation. Hamman delves deep into a discussion on how people must shift their mindset in order to deal with the complexity surrounding them, before a company can reach “outer agility” – the agile practices. He describes his method of working on a perceived problem as a trojan horse for introducing agile concepts into their work...

In this special episode, we offer a broad overview of portfolio management that uses lean and agile thinking and approaches. Our guides are Evan Campbell and Kat Conner, who together have 50 years of experience in portfolio, budgeting and funding.    “Agile portfolio management is matching limited supply to unlimited demand to maximize business outcomes,” say Campbell and Conner.    You'll hear five parts:  Introduction to agile portfolio management   The supply side  The...

Complex systems are in a state of continuous failure. Resilience is the ability of the system to maintain its performance characteristics when failures occur. Benefits of resilience include high availability, quality, scalability, and improved business KPIs.  But, high level of resilience is hard to achieve and requires a combination of technical, procedural, and organizational approaches. In this episode, Stas Zvinyatskovsky, a managing director at Accenture, covers what it takes to achieve...

The drive for virtual meetings that are efficient and goal-oriented can often cause us to lose sight of the fact that we are people, needing real connection. Without the visual and often unspoken cues that normally surround us, our virtual interactions can be an uninteresting and lonely place. Morgan Legge, a speaker at the 2020 Business Agility Conference, shares three ways to grow meaningful and connected virtual teams and meetings.    “Pandemic work is not virtual work. I encourage people...

How do you know that you’re achieving the goals of your change? How do you know that large dashboard of OKRs and metrics will show you what you need to see? It’s not easy. Many organizations tend to measure the results of a long process, rather than the levers that drive the results. John Carter, product development expert, inventor, and founder and principal of TCGen Inc. shares his predictive metrics expertise using the example of agile at scale. Whether you’re about to begin a big change...

How will agile at scale change in an increasingly virtual world? SAFe Fellow Scott Frost and SPCT Shawn Lowe – both business agility consultants at Accenture | SolutionsIQ - discuss the best approaches and mindset for success in a virtual setting. While the world has been working virtually for some time, 2020 has pushed us into a new frontier that can be uncomfortable for large-scale transformation and training work. While it’s not business as usual, you can still make sustainable change...

Sandra Davey is founder of and product coach at Product Space in Australia. She also serves on the board of several Australian companies, including CHOICE. She shares her experience as the board chair for a consumer rights organization that she helped take through an agile transformation:  “The business plan that the board was signing off was full of operational tactical details of when’s and how's rather than why’s and what’s.”  Listen to this episode to get a great perspective into agility...

Gil Broza is the author of three acclaimed books including his latest “Agile for Non-Software Teams.” It was written to be practical and applicable for the roles “we always forget in transformation,” like marketing and HR. Each chapter is a step along a personal agile journey and ends with “Here’s what needs to be true until you move on.” Further, rather than prescribing an off-the-shelf agile framework, Broza wants to provide guidance so teams can design their own process, measure progress,...

William Rowden is an executive coach and consultant here at Accenture | SolutionsIQ. His journey to leading transformation initiatives has piqued his curiosity in org development and adult developmental psychology. For the past few years he has been researching how these two inform each other – and how the focus of an organization’s leaders provides a good indicator for the success or failure of business agility transformation. He walks us through the different focuses that leaders – and...

Tony Bonfante is an agile coach who shares his recent experience setting up an internal coaching office at a Fortune 50 corporation. The first step in the process is to fill the roles of coaches with individuals who are called to serve others.   Next, Bonfante teaches the coaches how to really listen to others because “you can’t change someone’s mind if you don’t know what’s in them.” The five levels of listening he walks everyone through are:  Ignoring – making the conscious choice to either...

Jessica Guistolise is an experienced leader, consultant and coach at Accenture SolutionsIQ. For the past few years, Guistolise was part of a dedicated Dojo team at a major US-based insurance company, where she learned how to scale dojo experiences and even virtualize them.  From a few remote teams operating as one to bringing Dojo to a completely distributed team in the Philippines, Guistolise is learning that the benefits of Dojo can still be achieved. It just takes more time. Further, as...

Melissa Boggs and Howard Sublett, the Chief Scrum Master and Chief Product Owner respectively at the Scrum Alliance, return to tell us about their own organizational transformation. Throughout 2019, the pair completely restructured the organization into cross-functional and community-centric teams that are empowered to deliver on the needs of their specific community.  Hear practical examples of how these changes were implemented, as well as success stories that are emerging as a result of...