Today, on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, I look back on how far we have come as a society in making things accessible for people with disabilities. Yet, how far behind we are in inclusive user and customer experience. Just because I ‘can’ use your product or service, it does not mean I ‘want’ too.

am bracing myself to hear, “Sorry, we have not updated our [insert product] [insert service] for accessibility under new health guidelines” or “Sorry for the inconvenience, please check back to see when we have updated to accommodate accessibility.” Sorry is not inclusive.

Covid19 turned our lives upside down in scrambling to find new ways of how to socialize, shop for groceries, and change the way we work. However, this gives us a new opportunity to re-imagine the way we work as we shift from the ‘workplace’ to the ‘workspace’.

For me, 2019 was all about purpose. This means aligning all my effort in things that matter: professionally, social causes, community, and connecting with family and friends.

I keep hearing leaders say they’re struggling to manage their organizations through change. They’ve had trouble getting their organization to adopt agile. They’re finding it challenging to find the right talent. They’re struggling to establish the right level of transparency.

When a lot of organizations are transitioning from the way they used to work to a more cross-functional, agile squad way of working, they usually look for scaling frameworks to help them do it.

My mother was the first person who showed me unconditional love. My mother gave me direction and supported me along whatever journey or passion I was chasing. She picked me up when I fell. Celebrated with me in all my accomplishments.

When organizations begin their journey toward agility, they think the business outcomes will become instantaneous. They expect the initial decision to lead to immediate success.

Many organizations struggle in their implementation of Agile and/or their evolution of agile once they start their journey. They use practices, people, and technology to find a way to overcome their disability of delivering value to market too slowly.

Leadership means having the responsibility to enable an environment that harnesses the full intellectual talent of an organization. We hire a bunch of top diverse talent but limit them by unintentionally having them work only within their part or silo of a large organization.

One of the biggest misconceptions of agile is that it focuses on speed. How fast can we deliver? How fast can we deliver on this project/product?

Organizations are always on the lookout to cut costs and scale back when they have unfavorable reporting periods. Hiring freezes, and cutbacks in training and traveling tend to be popular and convenient.

Many large legacy organizations are moving toward agile delivery methods in hopes of releasing faster to market. Based on my experiences, they look at it solely from a production view of getting software released faster and more often. This view has them believing this will result in getting more features released.

I have been fortunate enough to have a successful career as a change agent. I leverage my experience of navigating the world with Cerebral Palsy — a world that was not yet ready to deal with a person with a disability — to help companies deal with their disability: their inability to change from the status quo.

In today’s complex ever-changing work, we need to make full use of the collective intelligence of the whole team, even if the whole organization to be able to solve and deliver on these needs.

As leaders, we are connected 24/7. Being connected with our mobile devices has meant we’re always available all the time. We have the pressure to move faster. Do more with less time. To our benefit and also to our detriment, we end up doing it.

As a Global Vice President at a major financial institution, I spend two days a week teaching Product Ownership, Agile Leadership, Scrum, and Kanban to 25 employees per week. As a Professional Scrum Trainer, I’ve taught over 1500 people through the years. This experience has made me a better leader.

We all know that developing ourselves intellectually requires sustained dedicated effort toward continual learning. We take classes, read books, read from experts online, we find mentors, we collaborate, and many of us learn by teaching others.

In the last decade, we have realized that we cannot plan all up front in a linear process to develop software. We are solving complex problems, which require us to use an empirical process, lean UX practices, and a supporting technology platform that allows us to build, measure, learn and apply the learning in a repeatable fashion.

In my experience, the word YES is one of the biggest things holding the organization back from focusing on their desire towards innovation, disruption, agile, or more customer-centric.

I just celebrated my 48th birthday. This is quite a milestone because being born with Cerebral Palsy the odds were not in my favor to reach this age, let alone a professional career in leading change and leading leaders.

Recently as I was delivering a keynote about leaders sharing their failures one person from the audience asked me mine. I shared some from my blog I wrote a couple years ago...

How are you interacting with your employees today? Are you taking the time to make an authentic connection?

One common misconception of agile is that it simply allows you to get everything done faster. This is simply not true. Agile allows us to plan a much smaller scope of work, delivering iteratively and incrementally to deliver the least amount scope needed to solve the problem/capture the opportunity.

In working in today’s knowledge work economy, it surprises me that many leaders still use traditional ways of leading their people. Leaders still put most of the focus on the work to be done instead of focusing on the people to create an environment where great work can be done.

The year 2018 was about amplifying. Amplifying my message, thoughts, ideas, inspiration and passion. My energy and stamina are not what it once was. The journey ahead of me is smaller than the one behind me.

An organization with a diversity of gender, race, sexuality, and disability make fuller products and services.

Scaling is a popular strategy these days: scaling innovation, scaling agile, scaling whole organizations. But scaling can easily undermine agile principles like focus and minimal viable product, and the abilities to deliver, learn quickly, and pivot decisively when required.

Being a professional with a disability is like working two careers:  The one I get compensation for - leading organizations to adapt continuous change. The other career - managing an organization of personal support workers to allow me to have a full life. 

Although people with disabilities do have special needs, their purchase power isn’t special: it’s the same as everyone else’s. No longer can we think of accessibility as a compliance play. It’s simply good business. Let me frame this point with my story.

Just as teams benefit from diverse, multi-functional teams, at the macro-level organizations can benefit from diverse practices such as systems thinking, design thinking, Lean practices and Agile.

Although I’m generally considered to be a strong leader with the people I am privileged to serve, I am still susceptible to making mistakes.

Having ‘agile expertise’ is in high demand these days – it seems everywhere I turn there are companies and recruiters looking for agile experts. Agile knowledge is important, but the expertise of being an effective change agent is even more important.

People always as ask me if agile is just for software. Saying agile is just about software is like saying software is just about science. Initially, computer science was about replacing manual processes. Now, it’s about creating human experiences.

Are we there yet? It’s becoming like nails-on-a-chalkboard to hear phrases like “We’re going Agile” or “We’re doing this because it’s agile.” People are putting everything they can under the Agile umbrella, right down to clea

You hear a lot in Agile circles these days about the ‘declining need for managers.’ We may not need the managers of yesterday but, make no mistake, we certainly need the leaders of tomorrow.

More and more large companies in traditional industries are singing the Agile song. I have noticed, though, that there seems to be a general misconception that Agile is onlyabout creating happy teams.

There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love...

This is the final post in a three part series. Please like, share,and/or comment.

This is the second post in a three part series. Please like, share and commentand I’ll be sure to update you when the next post in the series comes out.

Through my years of trial and error,  I have learned there is no one size fits all solution to transitioning organizations to agile...context is king!

If you have seen the TV documentary series Hoarders which depicted the real-life struggles of people who suffer from compulsive hoarding. Some victims suffered so severely that they were often drowning within their own filth.

Is there a way to help organizations move from a Change Transformations mindset to a Continuous Change mind set?

 

“To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.” - Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell’s Soup