Last Saturday, 3rd of October I was invited to give a speech at TEDxAndorra, in a general council of Andorra regarding Liquid World.
This year the hot topic is a liquid world. Zygmunt Bauman – a renowned sociologist developed this concept to describe a society on the move, one of his famous works is Liquid Love where he talks about relationships nowadays.
When Gallardo Felip invited me to TEDx as speaker and explained the theme of this year, I decided to give a speech about “ Agile in a daily life” and share with you key lessons I learnt, working with Agile methodologies for more than 15 years in different continents of the world.
First of all, to stay in the same page, what is Agile? Agile – is a project management methodology that helps teams respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences, known as sprints. It is a perfect methodology for the changing environment, it helps companies to adapt quickly to the market needs. Agile methodologies are an alternative to waterfall, or traditional sequential development.
In Agile teams have a retrospective meeting in a regular basis, where they share their feedback. Actually, feedback is more than important as it gives you an idea where you are now and where you should go. What was great and where improvement is needed. Positive feedback gives you a green light on what and how you do a particular task, while negative feedback is precious as people give you a chance to make it better, grow and advance yourself in your area.
Key lessons learnt from working in agile environment, that could help you in a daily life:
1. ACCEPT THAT YOU ARE WRONG AS FAST AS POSSIBLE
If you understand that you are going in the wrong direction, it will give you opportunities to adapt faster to the changing circumstances and start following the right way. We all make mistakes, but it depends how fast we figure it out and how fast we solve the problem.
2. YOU NEED TO LEARN TO SAY ” I DON’T KNOW”
Its impossible to know everything, but the most important is willingness to learn. The faster you accept that you don’t know something, the more time you will have to learn it.
3. THERE ARE NO “BAD TASKS”
People are different, with their own backgrounds, visions, goals and personality. One person likes to travel and work from the plane, for another person its a nightmare. The most important is to understand people, talk to them and find out what is it that they are best at and what makes them happy. The challenge is in small details. The most important is an attitude and a behaviour.
And one more very important thing:
Plans are nothing,
Planning is everything
Nowadays it is very difficult to predict the future as most of the things don’t depend on us we can’t control them 100%. That’s why Agile is so important, it’s critical to be flexible and be able to quickly adapt to the changing world.
It was a really amazing experience and I am very happy to become a TEDx speaker. I liked it that much, that I have already started preparing my new speech for TEDxBarcelona. Follow us and don’t miss my next TED speech.
