GREATER COLLABORATION +
ENHANCED CREATIVITY +
HEIGHTENED AGILITY
We are entering a New Age. An Age demanding greater collaboration, enhanced creativity, heightened agility.
With practitioners and thinkers, Dan Feldman explores the future of work, education and community, as well as the evolutions in leadership mindset and the revolutions in the human-centered innovation around experience and purpose. His guests include Agile practitioners, team builders, design thinkers, organization designers, systems thinkers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries.
We have it in our power to begin the world over again.
Thomas Paine
In addition to discussing established topics like Agile, Lean, and Kanban, he engages with teams around the world, exploring avant-garde organizational designs, workplace re-organizations, and even new economic models.
What is Agile?
Any system which uses data and feedback to improve is agile.
Agile is the conscious evolution of a system to its optimum end state.
Jesse Pearlman
A system which employs the empirical process model of inspection, adaption, and transparency is agile.
Global humanity is on the threshold of a transformation as psychologically unsettling as the Industrial Revolution.
The real man smiles in trouble, gathers strength from distress, and grows brave by reflection.
Thomas Paine
The disruption is foundational – technologically, economically, socially.
The transition is severe. Perhaps even more painful and profound than when free independent farmers rushed en masse to rent themselves to factories in the 1840’s.
If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.
Thomas Paine
Purpose of “Agile and Beyond”
- To make the workplace, the nation and the world more human, more innovative, and vital.
- To elevate the understanding and wisdom of the Agile, organization design, and economic communities, and to share it with the world.
- To create, nurture, and grow a global mastermind group dedicated to improving not only how business operates, but how human beings collaborate and create.
- To provide a repository of ideas from which to pull working models and practical learning.
- To create a resource, a hub of vibrant, forward-thinking, and even controversial ideas, which serve to develop the critical mass of understanding needed to pull the larger community forward to the next stage of creativity and collaboration.
- To co-create media channels which support the activities of this global mastermind group.
- To collaborate and partner with individuals and teams seeking to change the world.
Scope of “Agile and Beyond”
- Agility
- Collaboration, teaming across boundaries, and the cultivation of learning organizations
- Experience, purpose, and mission, including Moonshots and Massively Transformative Purposes.
- Start-up creation, minimum viable product, and growth
- Creativity, innovation, design thinking, and balancing discovery and delivery
- Customer focused product development
- Culture, team building, and team dynamics
- Organization design and workplace re-organization
- Systems thinking
- Future of work, education, and community
- Leadership mindset
- Human-centered innovation
Guiding Principles
Institutions serve both stakeholders and customers better when workers have ownership of them and a voice in their governance.
Decisions made collaboratively are more resilient.
As our economic entities are responsible for the way in which resources are harvested and fed to consumers, global change starts with maturing our economic enterprises and institutions into responsible entities.
Jesse Pearlman
It is better to create new systems than to fight the status quo.
“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
Socrates
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
R. Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller
It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. Intellectuals are in the position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives, and often hidden intentions…
Noam Chomsky, 1966
But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
It is error only, and not truth, that shrinks from inquiry.
Thomas Paine
Quite generally privilege confers opportunity, and opportunity confers responsibility, and responsibility means dedication to challenging, questioning the verities that are imposed on us by doctrinal systems and structural relationships that are based on hierarchy and domination. And working not only to challenge them, but doing something about it. And to the degree that you have privilege there is more that you can do. I think it is just as simple as that.
Noam Chomsky, 2015
Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.
David Hume
… [P]ower is always illegitimate, unless it proves itself to be legitimate. So the burden of proof is always on those who claim that some authoritarian hierarchic relation is legitimate. If they can’t prove it, then it should be dismantled… It’s illegitimate by assumption, if it’s a relation of authority among human beings which places some above others that’s illegitimate by assumption. Unless you can give a strong argument to show that it’s right, you’ve lost.
Noam Chomsky
He who dares not offend cannot be honest.
Thomas Paine
I am just looking for an [honest] man.
Diogenes, when asked why he went about with a lamp in broad daylight
We spend 5 out of 7 days a week at our jobs, and when we go to work, which is where we spend most of our adult lives, we enter a place in a capitalist society that is the absolute opposite of democracy. A tiny group of people (major shareholders and boards of directors) 25 – 30 people, make all the decisions that thousands of employees, not to mention the communities where these employees work, have to live with. Their participation in those decisions is completely excluded; in principle, in law and in fact. So we spend most of our adult lives in an institution that is fundamentally undemocratic and pretend we live in a society with a fundamental commitment to democracy. This is crazy!… It isn’t just that I’m poor, it isn’t just that I’m living in a polluted environment in an overcrowded city. It’s that I’m not treated like a human being. And this is revolutionary stuff.
Richard Wolff
Man cannot make principles, he can only discover them.
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
Thomas Paine, Common Sense
Independence is my happiness, and I view things as they are, without regard to place or person; my country is the world, and my religion is to do good.
Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
“Every organization rests upon a mountain of secrets.” Julian Assange