Agile Is a Verb, Not a Label

So at St. Thomas right now, you're running a transformation and you not use the word agile anymore.

or sprint or whatever the ceremonies are.

You haven't used that once.

Tell us about that and how that's working.

It almost feels like Gorilla Agile.

Yeah, almost.

It's like what I call on the down low coaching.

The reason I look at it like this is because in all my years of transformation coaching with Fortune 25 companies, the biggest pushback is the fear of the unknown.

And when you go into an organization, using the word agile when people don't know what that is can be scary.

And the whole, it's fear-based.

And so if you can start to get them to buy in and meet them where they are, you're gonna have a much easier time of getting them more efficient and effective.

Yeah, so what words do you use?

So I use efficient and effective a lot.

I use collaboration.

I use cross dependencies a lot.

I actually started introducing the word impediment or blocker.

Okay.

But I do it incrementally, just kind of how Scrum works and Azure works.

We do it incrementally, right? So if we go in with this big plan and we start implementing everything all at the same time, people are going to freak out.

From a change management perspective, people don't react and respond like that.

We're only so elastic and can only stretch so far with so much change.

So I've found that if we incrementally get them to the point where they're understanding more and more and more, then I can say, oh, yeah, what we're actually doing is agile and it's incremental delivery.

And they're like, oh, I didn't know that.

So I'm very aware of how people are from a change perspective.

And that that first value lives its way through me and every single thing I do.