This is part of a series of posts about servant leadership to influence change and inspire greatness. My goal is to make servant leadership more understandable and actionable for everyone regardless of position, title, or status. Because this is the only way to create meaningful change in our complex world. Instead of feeding into division, fear, and disempowerment, we will lead by inspiring, enabling, and empowering.
Humans like consistency and stability, yet that does not describe the world in which we live. The world is complex, unpredictable, and constantly changing. Therefore, one of the most important things you can do as a servant-leader is to help people embrace change and unpredictability.
When people embrace change and learn to appreciate unpredictability, they develop a more positive attitude, opening themselves up to see more opportunities. Experiencing change and thriving in an unpredictable world grows wisdom and foresight to take on even bigger challenges. It’s a virtuous cycle.
As you model this adaptive behavior and mindset, you are doing two things. First, you show the way for others to embrace change and unpredictability. Second, your leadership provides just enough consistency and stability for others to hold onto when they are feeling stressed and overwhelmed by the uncertainty around them.
A cycle is the time period in which you create something of value. At the beginning of a cycle, you establish a goal for the time period, come up with a loose plan, and then inspect the results and how the work went. You identify new information, new insights, and improvements you can make for the next cycle. Then you begin again.
Shorter cycles limit the amount of complexity you need to consider. Shorter cycles also limit risk because you can check to make sure you’re moving in the right direction and make appropriate adaptations before investing too much time and money. Shorter cycles also allow you to worry less about change and unknowns because you will discover new information and see what’s changing sooner and be in a better position to respond.
In Scrum, the maximum length of a value delivery cycle is one month. This concept of working in shorter cycles can be applied in many ways. Consider a project or activity you are doing either on your own or with a team. Maybe it’s running a business, doing a creative project, managing your family life, or earning a certification.
How much easier would it feel to work in 1-week or 2-week cycles? What benefits would you gain by inspecting and adapting frequently?
In order to work in shorter cycles, you need to break things down smaller. This is not just about breaking work into tasks. You want to think about how you break down a bigger goal into smaller, incremental pieces of value.
Breaking things down smaller provides the opportunity to learn and then apply that learning. You will get a feel for how much effort it was, your current abilities, and how to do things more effectively next time.
Breaking things down smaller allows you to start getting a return on your investment. You can release smaller pieces of value to your customers. This also helps ensure you are actually creating something people want, and if you are not, you can change direction earlier.
We call this concept Product Backlog refinement in Scrum. In order to deliver releasable product Increments at least every Sprint, Scrum Teams have to break down larger features and functions into smaller pieces of value. “Value” is the key word. A customer likely cannot get value, nor can a team get meaningful learning/ feedback, by just completing a task like writing code or performing analysis.
How you can apply this concept of incremental value to break down bigger longer-term goals and initiatives?
It’s not just enough to work in shorter cycles and break things down smaller.
How do you know you are creating value? How do you know you are moving in the right direction? How do you know quality is high?
When you step forward into the unknown, it is helpful to gather evidence to guide you. Measurable outcomes and meaningful feedback are the evidence that can help you answer the questions above.
In Scrum, there are some common product value metrics such as revenue, customer satisfaction, usage, and time-to-market. The Lean Start-up approach describes a Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop. Many of these can be used and adapted to fit a variety of products and services. Feedback may come directly from customers or people who are impacted by your work. Feedback also comes in the form of what you and your team experience.
Trust yourself to move forward without knowing the exact solution or all of the steps because the evidence you gain along the way will be the best way to answer those questions.
When you are doing complex work in a constantly changing and unpredictable world, failure is inevitable. So you need to learn to fail better.
You fail better when you learn sooner. Did you find out that customers don’t actually want what you are building? Did you find out that the platform or tools you’re using to build the solution are too limited?
That’s great if you learn it early enough to change direction and before you’ve invested a lot. Shorter cycles, breaking things down sooner, and having evidence to guide decisions will contribute to being able to fail better. But you have to order your work and design it in ways that help you learn the most important things sooner.
You fail better when you gain important insights about yourself or your team. Truly reflect on failures, inspecting what went wrong and talking about what you will do differently to be stronger, smarter, and more resilient in how you work.
You fail better when you have the courage to adapt. It can be hard to admit you were wrong. It can be hard to drastically change direction, even throwing away previous work. It can be hard to pull the plug on something, to stop investing in it because it no longer makes sense.
Courage is essential.
You do not need to have all of the answers up front. You do not even need to know how. But you will learn from doing and making decisions based on what is known. The answers will emerge as you do the work. You simply need to take imperfect action, trusting in an iterative cycle of inspection and adaptation to keep you making progress in the right direction.
Read all of the posts in the servant-leadership 101 series:
