From a Fixed to Agile Mindset: How to Make the Transition

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile  

I run into clients who believe they are applying agile project management. Yet they are seeing little benefit. Why? Typically these folks try to apply agile while still using a fixed mindset. In this article, I’ll give you core practices and tips for reaping the benefits of agile.

Fixed vs. Growth Mindset
In agile, we often think of having an experimental mindset where we try something, measure the results, retrospect and replan. We need to do that for our projects. And, as agile leaders, we need to do even more. We need to have the agile mindset.

In the agile mindset, we need to encourage people for their efforts, sometimes especially if they fail. We need to encourage people on our projects to ask for and offer help. We need to be aware of our biases for estimation. Why? Because we are not perfect at anything, never mind estimation. We are works in progress, getting better all the time.

Having an agile mindset can be challenging at times. The agile mindset is the growth mindset, named from Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.

Here are two statements:

1. We are born with the capabilities and talents we have.
2. We can learn and grow, no matter how old we are. We may have some limitations, but we can always get better.

If you believe in the first statement, you have the fixed mindset. If you believe in the second …

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