Agile4Life Aaron Kraft

On today’s episode Moriah and Aaron consider the importance of habits in an agile life. Charles Duhigg wrote a book called The Power of Habit where he helps his readers better understand how habits are formed and how they can impact our lives in all the best ways.

How do we create habits in an agile manner? We do so iteratively, over a period of time, getting fast feedback to know how it’s going, and various other intersections between the ideas of agile and habits.

Often times we think of breaking bad habits, but those need to be replaced with the good patterns of behavior. How do we finally get what we want to do engrained? How does biology impact this and how does relate to learned patterns of behavior?

Links to resources mentioned in the podcast.

Charles Duhigg - The Power of Habit

The Power of Habit - Audible 

The Power of Habit - Amazon

On today’s podcast we are going to talk to our next guest, Bernard Williams, about his experience developing scaled agile, meaning agile when you want to practice agile on a grander scale then just a single team. This is often the case when there are lots of moving pieces, when one thing is dependent on another, when timing is complex, and you need a birdseye view of all the complexities.

Moriah and Bernard met recently at a training session covered SAFe, which stands for Scaled Agile Framework. This is an approach to applying the Agile principles we talk about each week when things get really big.

For our listeners who are more interested in personal agile this episode will probably lean a little more toward professional agile. So we’ll understand if this isn’t your cup of tea. That said, things can get pretty complex in our personal lives so maybe there will be some nuggets for you if you keep listening.

Without an understanding of Business Agility it makes it difficult for organzations to adapt and change to the world around us.


In today's podcast we're going to be talking about Business Agility as a pivitol piece in our successes. We discuss the definition of Business Agility as found in this Wikipedia post, defined below, and how we can use this in our everyday life. 

Business agility refers to rapid, continuous, and systematic evolutionary adaptation and entrepreneurial innovation directed at gaining and maintaining competitive advantage.[1] Business agility can be sustained by maintaining and adapting the goods and services offered to meet with customer demands, adjusting to the marketplace changes in a business environment, and taking advantage of available human resources.[2] In a business context, agility is the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-effective ways. An extension of this concept is the agile enterprise, which refers to an organization that uses key principles of complex adaptive systems and complexity science to achieve success.[3] Business agility is the outcome of organizational intelligence. 



Thank you for listening, 

Aaron and Moriah

Without healthy emotional control in our lives we won't accomplish everything else we want to do. On today’s podcast we’re going to be talking about emotional control as a critical factor for our agility.

4 areas where emotional control or the lack there of can positively or negatively impact things


Decision making
Relationship success
Day to day interactions
Self care - physical and mental health

Cole, Michel, Teti, Emotional Regulation is “the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with the range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed” (Cole, P. M., Michel, M. K., & Teti, L. O. (1994). The development of emotion regulation and dysregulation: A clinical perspective.)

Crystal Raypole lays out a variety of ways to achieve that healthy emotional balance. We won’t talk about all of them today, but I’ll put the link to the article in our show notes. https://www.healthline.com/health/how-to-control-your-emotions


Learn to identify what emotions you are experiencing.
Learn to regulate not repress
Know when to express yourself and with whom
Give yourself space as needed

If you or someone you know is struggling with emotions or general mental health please reach out to someone. Your personal well-being is far more important than anything else. While we're not trained to provide that support, we would be very happy to connect with the right person if you want.

Sincerely,
Moriah and Aaron

In today’s episode Moriah interviews Aaron about the idea of accountability, linking it with responsibility. These two pillars are foundational for a successful life, personally and professional.

But how? Accountability and responsibility are like two sides of the same coin and the metal that it’s made of is transparency.

Are you willing to be transparent so can be accountable for the goals you want to achieve in life or will you simply tell yourself that everything is great and you don’t need anyone’s input?

Personality is clearly a factor. These concepts will be easier for some than others. Listen to Aaron & Moriah pretend to be psychologists (apologies to real psychologists). What’s the difference between changing habits vs changing behavior?

We need meaningful mechanisms for accountability to stay on task and do the hard work that is truly important. Let’s not waste time. If we’re just going to tell ourselves or others what we want to hear, like “oh yeah, I’m making lots of progress” then we’ve lost before we’ve even begun.

All of this requires we be open to receiving feedback from other people who have a different perspective, setting our egos aside in order to be our best selves, teams, and organizations.

For more information check out our blog at agile4life.com

On this episode Moriah and Aaron talk about a book that was recently published called “A World Without Email” by Georgetown Computer Science professor Cal Newport. The title of the book is quite catching. Email has become an electronic leash for far too many people, with expectations that you will reply almost immediately, even more so with chat and texts. Is that a problem of the technology or the way we use it? Do we need to adopt a neo-ludite approach (props if you know what that is) or do we need to better manage our communications? Dr. Newport’s book has given us a lot to consider as these electronic communications have become so dominate at work and at home. We hope you enjoy this episode and look forward to your feedback (comments, reviews, etc...). For more information on a wide variety of topics check out our website www.agile4life.com