Business Agility is achieved through proactive & quick sensing of Customer/Market needs and fulfilling those needs through end to end collaboration of Customers, Business Functions and Solution Delivery Functions in a seamless flow. Apart from technology and process elements, the critical success factor for such functioning is the mindset and culture aspects of people and organization units across the value chain. Mindfulness is a great tool to develop Emotional Intelligence which is the bedrock of leadership tenets for Agility Culture like proactiveness & self-organizing, cross-functional collaboration and facilitative leadership styles.

This session covers a case study of Enterprise wide Mindfulness transformation in a 2000+ strong global Technology company. The session covers aspects of:

• Creation of a [email protected] framework called BE-DO Framework – Being Mindful and Doing Mindfully. Being Mindful by Being Aware, Alive and Calm; Doing Mindfully by Perceiving Immersivity, Processing non-judgmentally and Performing Empathetically.
• Mindfulness techniques and practices at individual level like BreathWatch, BodyScan, Balanced Breathing, Journaling.
• Organizational and Team ceremonies to inculcate Mindfulness as part of work practices like Mindful Meeting, Sense Walk.
• Results captured after 6 weeks of practice of Mindfulness practices by the participants on Personal Wellbeing, Personal Effectiveness and Professional Performance.
• Organizational Change Management including unique role called Happiness Evangelist.

The session will be a joint presentation by the Happiness Evangelist and the Mindfulness Coach.

Introduction

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, said Peter Drucker. We all agree to that. If our organisational culture is not building up to our goals, we will never reach them. The main question is, how can you create an organisational and team culture that contributes to your goals, to productivity and success? The key for change is to form the right habits, within our agile teams. Like exercising regularly and losing weight you can develop habits for being healthy, happy, more productive and successful at work. Therefore it is important to understand the human nature and its potential for transformation. In this workshop participants get all the insights and best practices to develop habits for an happy and fulfilling (work)life and organisational culture.

In any large scale Agile transformation journey, it is very important to build and sustain continuous improvement culture. What choices are available beyond regular retrospectives and Inspect & Adapt workshops to identify and address improvement opportunities in a systematic approach?

Communities of Practice help create a forum for interested individuals to learn from each other and external resources like eminent speakers, video recordings, books, etc. However, many learnings through these Communities of Practice activities very often doesn't always get converted into practical immediate to short term application. Therefore, the participating individuals gradually loose their interest in such COPs and within in a short time span, such COP initiative meets with its natural end. This leads the COP champions (or promoters, which typically would be Agile Coaches in cases of Agile Transformations) to wonder: what could be done to create an self-organizing environment for continuous improvement that yields tangible results to individuals and their teams/organization?

Above questions were encountered by us in our current Agile transformation engagement and in response, we discovered the WorkingOutLoud concept from John Stepper. This model sounded like a perfect opportunity to experiment with our attempt to build a self-organizing and sustainable Community of Practice to promote continuous improvement culture at the overall organization level. In this talk, we shall share our approach and learnings from this experiment.