To “do Agility” you need study, discipline, training and much but a lot of practice. Experimentation and failures will make us learn and improve, little by little. At the same time, if we are growing our skill with Buddha’s patience, samurai attitude and sherpa humility, this will result in a progressive awareness and each learning will become more meaningful for us as well as for those around us.
Agility is not a methodology, but a mentality. That means that beyond the practices, techniques, group dynamics and specific frameworks, there is a kind of “Agile way” of seeing the world. However, this new way of seeing and doing things implies challenging inherited habits and paradigms that go through us completely, but which are hard for us to visualize if we don’t train our eyes. Therefore, it is convenient to start getting into this world from empirical learning, with a growth mindset, to learn again to see and do things in a different way.
How can Agility contribute to Communication at work?
. Forcing communicators to always keep the focus on the internal customer, pointing all our actions to the sum of iterative and incremental value. That is to say, repeating short cycles, failing soon, learning together with the client and improving the proposal as well as coordination and collaboration within the team in each cycle.
. Organically promoting collaboration networks within the organization.
. Making leaders being more permeable to Innovation, Digital and Cultural Transformation and (Lean) Change Management.
. Encouraging ourselves to incorporate new practices and methodologies, which must be acquired by studying, practicing and training hard.
. Keeping ourselves updated, or even some steps ahead, rather than reactively adapting to the changes of our organizations and consequently being an active part of the constant evolution of a world in “beta version” mode.
How does the role of the communicator change under this new paradigm?
Thanks to the agile mindset, we will increasingly become facilitators of the organic communication that occurs in the teams rather than “experts”, that keep knowledge to themselves. It is time to definitely change our obsolete paradigm of “expert communicators”, in which we believe we know a lot of communication models from the theoretical, moving away from people and teams that “don’t know anything about communication”. Conversely, we need to take a place of a Sherpa, which guides and genuinely facilitates the communication of the teams, accompanying them to discover their purpose and co-construct their own communication.