Aspiring Agile Leader - Activate your curiosity

A transformation is not a genie magic trick. Becoming an agile business leader often requires fundamental shifts in your behaviour and how you interact with your team.  You will impact the people around you as you begin to learn.  Then as you shift your expectations of your team, you will need to guide them through their agile learning. A successful adoption of agile values or practices is more likely when you have prepared yourself for agile leadership. 

Your first essential action to prepare and become an agile business leader is to activate your curiosity. Curiosity amplifies your performance as a leader and ultimately the performance of the business to seek out new revenue generating opportunities. 

Three tactical practices of active curiosity that strengthen your capability to be an agile business leader are;

1. Questions - of the status quo

2. Observations - visualise the systems at play

3. Appreciation - understand the actuals

These practical first steps to activating your curiosity prepare you to be a successful agile business leader by building up your strategic thinking and scenario analysis capabilities. The sustained power of mastering these upfront is that you will continuously lead these similar exercises with your teams to activate their continuous improvement and creative innovation. In the same way a professional athlete practices skills intentionally, so they perform at their best in the game with the team; you will perform better when you have practiced these skills before doing so with the team.

In addition to curiosity being the spark to activate your agility and your teams innovation, it is now known to be a critical ingredient in businesses out performing their competitors. Businesses with curious leaders generate beneficial outcomes both in terms of product discovery and frequency of innovation. Harvard Business Review has done a great 3 part series on the business case for curiosity; 

1. https://hbr.org/2018/09/curiosity#the-business-case-for-curiosity

2. https://hbr.org/2018/09/curiosity#from-curious-to-competent

3. https://hbr.org/2018/09/curiosity#the-five-dimensions-of-curiosity

For yourself, simply be prepared by practicing the above three tactical practices of active curiosity.

“one important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.”

Arthur Ashe 

(first African American to win a major men singles championship - Wimbledon, US Open & Australian Open) Days of Grace, a memoir of Arthur Ashe.

Image Source: https://www.tennisfame.com/blog/2016/1/a-letter-to-arthur-ashe