Language is powerful and can paint a picture, lift people to happiness or dive us into despair.  Transforming our language can be an amazing way to shift our own mindset and that of others. What can you do to change your own internal dialog to embrace a new mindset? Why not extend the same language to help teams and others transform?

In this talk, we’ll cover a variety of language topics that can be incorporated immediately, including:

• Language of a Fixed Mindset, Growth Mindset, and Agile Mindset to enhance Agile Transformations
• Clean Language to help teams uncover root cause issues instead of focusing on symptoms
• David Marquet’s (author of Turn the Ship Around) focus on Leadership Language to help management transform into leaders
• Power Questions to help people see the future and the advantages of Agile transformations

Many agile journeys end prematurely because they exhaust the organizations 'capacity for change.' As we define and actively manage capacity setasides for architecture or technical debt, I propose that we should actively manage change capacity and explicitly design our change plans around the availability - and intermittent absence - of change capacity. 

This remarkably suggests that our agile change journey should be agile, incremental, and adaptive - and provides a framework for structuring, negotiating, and planning agile change.

I suggest an alternative SAFe implementation journey based on these principles. 

Slides from an earlier presentation on this topic are attached.

The Five Love Languages proposes that there are five general ways that romantic partners express and experience love, but these desires are not unique to romantic relationships.  Scrum masters can consider these same mindsets to support their team's happiness and success.

In Agile and Lean transformation, one of the great barriers is leadership style. The typical teaching is proposing 'servant leadership' - but for many, the notion of servant leadership is hard to connect to.

An alternative is emerging, but isn't well-known yet - 'Host leadership.'

This intended as an introduction to the concept of Host Leadership, it's compliment - Guest Followership - and a discussion of the advantages it may have over Servant Leadership in many contexts. 

Mapping out all the steps a customer takes while interacting with my organization is a powerful way to improve the customer experience. Customer journey maps clarify what customers are trying to do, what barriers they face, and how they feel during each interaction with our program and service. 

Understanding customer personas,  such as how people join our learning program, complete online registration, or file a complaint, is what journey maps are known for. Many companies don’t realize that these maps can also help them identify broader business opportunities or challenges that customers face. For example, new learners do not know how to register for the education program.