Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations – Details, episodes & analysis

Simon Hayward is an honorary professor at Alliance Manchester Business School in the UK and author of The Agile Leader and Connected Leadership. He is also Global Lead for Leadership and Culture at Accenture’s Talent & Organization/Human Potential practice. In this episode, Hayward outlines challenges before leaders who seek to engage people in radical change – often the case in large-scale agile transformation. COVID has undoubtedly had a hand in worker expectations, and it offers leaders the opportunity to move their business from being just connected to becoming “omni-connected.”

“When organizations combine the digital and technological with the human and cultural, then that combination becomes particularly powerful. And leaders have a disproportionate impact on the way the culture operates and the behaviors in the organization.”

Accenture’s William Rowden hosts.

Learn more:
- Accenture Research "From Always Connected to Omni-Connected" https://www.accenture.com/cr-en/insights/strategy/organizational-culture

Julian Mancia is interested in helping humans get out of their own way, specifically when it comes to business innovation. As a Director of "What If! Innovation," part of Accenture, Mancia is excited by nebulous projects that might terrify others. For example, helping companies break into the competitive snack market or doubling growth in five years. How does he do it? With adaptive strategies.

Accenture’s Allia DeAngelis hosts.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ alumna and former Agile Amped host Leslie Morse is our guest in this episode. Serving as Product Owner for the Professional Scrum Community with Scrum.org has put Morse on a journey to help agilists “drink their own prosecco.” She is finding new ways to improve integrity, empiricism, and what she calls “change fluency” in the agile community. The goal is sense of personal agility that makes us all better able to serve others.

“If we can become fluent in change the same way we are fluent in language, what new might be possible in the world in terms of personal and organizational agility?”

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s William Rowden hosts.

Learn more
- Seven Transformations of Leadership by David Rooke and William R. Torbert: https://hbr.org/2005/04/seven-transformations-of-leadership
- Women in Agile podcast series: https://womeninagile.org/podcast/ 

Jason Gaulden is the Vice President of Partnerships at America Succeeds and co-author of the groundbreaking report, “The Age of Agility: Education Pathways for the Future of Work.” In his work, Gaulden strives to embed agility into the learning process, both in terms of the technical skillset and the lifelong learning mindset that students need “to succeed in the global economy but contribute to their local community.”

The need for this paradigm shift in education is epitomized in the rapid decline of the value of a college degree, which used to serve as a good proxy for proving that you had the knowledge to get ahead. Going forward, we need to address three major obstacles:

1. Students do not enter the workforce of today with all of the technical skillsets and Agile mindset they need to succeed.
2. Teachers cannot “relay knowledge they don’t have themselves.”
3. The education system needs to be more customized to different learning paths and learning journeys.

These problems are reflected in America Succeeds’ three tenets – Agile students, Agile teachers and Agile education systems.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Leslie Morse hosts at the Business Agility Conference in New York City.

Learn More:

• Download “The Age of Agility” report (free)
• About America Succeeds
• One Stone School

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Sally Elatta is the president of Agile Transformation, Inc., and founder of AgilityHealth. Elatta shares her story of the growth of her company, what they have on their “culture wall” and the current state of business agility, as well as a taste of the future. The 2018 Business Agility Report revealed that, while team agility and what Elatta calls “team-of-teams agility,” companies are doing really well. But in terms of business agility – particularly as applies to culture, leadership and support functions like HR, finance, marketing and others – the respondents of the 166 organizations who participated in the report collectively rated themselves at the crawl-walk stage. Elatta sees this as a tremendous opportunity for enterprises to strive for more than just Agile transformation, but to reach for business agility. One area that she thinks will see huge shifts and positive changes in the next two or three years? HR.

Some of our favorite quotes from this podcast:- “Be bold, be real, and lead with love.”- “Iʻm allergic to negativity.”- “[As a] young girl from Sudan in Africa, [I] couldn’t have made it in this country if I didn’t believe in the art of the possible.”- “Gone are the days that large companies are eating small. Today, fast companies are eating slow.”

Accenture | SolutionsIQʻs Skip Angel hosts.

Learn more:

- Read the 2018 Business Agility Report - Take the 2019 Business Agility Survey 

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Peter Merel has an impressive résumé: XP pioneer, author of the original Wikipedia wiki-engine, and founder of XSCALE Alliance.

XSCALE Alliance follows de-scaling practices and values, where the goal is, among other things, to “enable [self-organizing teams] to self-manage and self-direct.” Merel takes us on a thought-provoking stroll through topics like: 

• Frameworks as pattern languages
• A “damning statistic” that may have been overlooked in a recent VersionOne’s State of Agile Survey
• Throughput accounting
• YAGNI – “You aren’t going to need it”
• And – most interestingly to us – descaling in a business agility context

“How can we achieve alignment between lots of these little autonomous teams to be able to build something like a self-organizing value stream, or a self-directing portfolio? That’s really our challenge.”

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Adam Mattis hosts.

To find out more about XSCALE Alliance, visit:xscalealliance.org/

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: instagram.com/agileamped

In honor of International Women’s Day 2019 and Women’s History Month, today’s episode features a female leader we’re proud to call our own. Neville Poole is a woman of color, wife, mother, and a managing director at Accenture | SolutionsIQ.

She remembers a time when, while working as a bank teller, people would stand in line to wait for her white, male colleague to attend to them. One customer even told her manager, “I'm not comfortable sharing my financials with the black girl.” Neville took it in stride, determined not to let anyone stop her from achieving her dreams.

She says that being a woman of color in the male-dominated industry of finance and technology has not always been easy. “Some people just can't get past their own prejudices,” she says, “and I can't change that.” Hear her advice to other women on how to own your space, develop and share your uniqueness with the world. And her advice to men: Be aware that different dynamics apply for women than men, and when you notice it, have a conversation about it.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Roxi Ozolins hosts.

Accenture, a global firm with more than 450,000 employees, is striving to achieve a gender balanced workforce by 2025 – and by 2020, women will account for 25 percent of managing directors worldwide. Learn more about how we’re #GettingToEqual here: https://www.accenture.com/us-en/about/inclusion-diversity/gender-equality 

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

Sandy Mamoli is an Agile consultant and coach with a focus on organizational culture and leadership. She is also a former Olympian, an international keynote speaker and author of “Creating Great Teams – How Self-Selection Lets People Excel”. Sandy sat down to explain holacracy, which is a way to create a truly self-organizing organization, and shares examples of the method in action.

This episode of Agile Amped is part of a series in partnership with the Business Agility Institute. businessagility.institute/

Accenture | SolutionsIQ’s Ryn Melberg hosts.

Reach our guest:

Email: Sandy@nomad8.com

Twitter: @smamol

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sandymamoli/

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmped Facebook: www.facebook.com/agileamped Instagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

James Couball and Ashley Wolf share their experience with a massive Continuous Delivery initiative at Oath Inc. - a division of Verizon composed of Yahoo, AOL, and HuffPost. Thousands of systems not doing CD were involved, which was a great forcing function for implementing best practices for technical excellence. Over the years of using an open source approach and mindset to development, they stumbled on inner source (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_source), which applies source principles of code (collaboration, sharing, transparency, etc.) to business practices. Says Wolf, "We didn't try to make inner source, we tried to make better engineering," and inner source helped greatly with that. Couball provides example practices and stories from the trenches, both championing the importance of culture.

Greg Bledsoe hosts at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 in Las Vegas.

Reach our guests:

James Couball on Twitter @jcouball

Ashley Wolf on LinkedIn

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/

For Chief Technology Officer at Datical Robert Reeves, databases (and its administrators) have traditionally been a challenge for DevOps. That needs to change. Reeves shares how cultural, technical, and personal biases have stymied innovation on the database. In his experience, when organizations get to the hard issues like the database, they get disillusioned with DevOps and are tempted to stop on their journey. His advice: Now is the time to tackle these hard problems, don’t wait to be disrupted.

Greg Bledsoe hosts at the DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 in Las Vegas.

Reach our guest:

Website:

Datical.com

Twitter:

@RobertReeves

@Datical

The Agile Amped podcast is the shared voice of the Agile community, driven by compelling stories, passionate people, and innovative ideas. Together, we are advancing the impact of business agility.

Podcast library: www.agileamped.com

Connect with us on social media! Twitter: twitter.com/AgileAmpedFacebook: www.facebook.com/agileampedInstagram: www.instagram.com/agileamped/