5 . Mindfully Agile

1.  Individuals and Interactions

This value from the Agile Manifesto highlights the importance of collaborative teamwork. Teams are comprised of individuals, with each person responsible for their contribution towards achieving the team’s goals.

Mindfulness enables each team member to remain aware of how their attitude and behaviour contributes to the team culture, as well as how it may impact their interpersonal relationships with the other team members.

It helps maintain a mindset of trust, openness, and transparency that allows teams to work together with greater cooperation and focus, overcome difficulties, share ideas, and challenge each other without falling into chaos and conflict.

Mindfulness enables us to be present when communicating with others. When working with our team during stand-ups, retrospectives and other team activities, we can remain aware of where our attention is placed.

If we detect that our mind is wandering or if we’ve been distracted, we can redirect our attention back to where it needs so we can listen, stay focussed, and actively participate and collaborate effectively with the team.

The benefits of mindfulness includes reduced stress and increased resilience. By practicing mindfulness, we can detect if our minds are racing, ruminating, replaying events of the past or projecting scenarios in the future, all of which can increase anxiety and promote negativity.

Mindfulness does not prevent stressful events or remove setbacks. However, it allows us to take more productive paths of thought and action when faced with difficulties or failure, to be more accepting and move forward with optimism and a positive outlook.

By being more aware of our inner world, our thoughts, feelings and emotions, mindfulness helps build our emotional intelligence.

Wikipedia defines emotional intelligence as, “… the ability to perceive, use, understand, manage, and handle emotions…recognize their own emotions and those of others, use emotional information to guide thinking and behaviour…”

Mindfulness enables us to recognise our inner state of mind, shine awareness into how our emotions may be affecting our behaviour, and then apply self-regulation to prevent us acting in a way that compromises the team’s performance or contradicts the Agile mindset.

2.  Working Software / Solutions

Agile teams focus on delivering value, which is, of course, on delivering software or other business solutions. Mindfulness helps maintain focus by bringing awareness into what we are, or are not paying attention to, detect distractions, and direct our attention to where it needs to be.

That way, we keep what is valuable “front of mind,” along with the level of quality required, to ensure our work and actions align to the value expected by our customers and users, and not create waste and rework.

Knowing that we are creating value gives us purpose in our work, a sense of meaning and satisfaction that contributes to motivated and productive teams.

When we think of creativity, we think of transcending current ideas and methods to create new or unusual ways of solving problems. But our perceptions, beliefs, expectations, judgements and negativity can prevent us exploring new ideas.

We may dismiss an idea before we let it fully blossom then fail to investigate further possibilities. We need to open our mind and make space for the new, the untried, the unconventional.