Closing Keynote: Lyssa Adkins – We Are the Leaders We Have Been Waiting For
Lyssa Adkins closing keynote of the already excellent Global Scrum Gathering in Dublin in 2017 is still sending shivers down my spine.e.
First of all, I was impressed with her speech building patterns: Starting very very personal, grabbing our attention, not letting it go again, she focused on a trip to Peru and the very visible disastrous changes to our environment humanity is causing.
Addressing our inability as a species to take on big global challenges, she spanned the arc to people working together in organizations (at least that’s how a month later I reconstruct it).
She asks:
If individuals and interactions are so important,
Why do tools and processes often run the show?
Illustrations by Steve Silbert
Secondly she taught about Integral Theory, we then focused on the We quadrant (see image above) and dove deeper into relationships. Why are there sometimes difficulties in human relationships? This is when I learned about the Third Entity:
The next step took us to Spiral Dynamics (for which there is only a German Wikipedia article). This psychological approach means to “understand worldviews or systems of thinking held by individuals, organizations and societies” and I believe it is an inspiring and generally optimistic look into the future of mankind:
Read more about it here: http://www.cruxcatalyst.com/2013/09/26/spiral-dynamics-a-way-of-understanding-human-nature/
But how does all of this relate to us? To you and me? What does it mean? It means everything!
Everyone has the potential (!) to change the world for the better. Power might be different, capabilities might be different, but this is just a reference frame. Eventually it comes to a single question:
Do you want to make the world a better place?
Lyssa Adkins gracefully narrowed the scope from this high level concept to the group of several hundred Agile Coaches, ScrumMasters, Software Developers in the room asking:
What are you applying Agile to that’s worthy of you?
Then we used https://pollev.com/ to do a live survey, creating a word cloud of what the audience would apply Agile for. It looked something like this:
Even before, I was determined to use Agile in non-software-development environments. The CPO of one of my clients connected me to Christian Breternitz, who already talks to schools and universities regarding EduScrum in Germany and Berlin especially. But Lyssa Adkins’ talk highlighted even more the importance of improving the world around us and not just the place we call work.