Agile and Our Planetary-Level Challenges

I had the pleasure of curating and co-creating with 5 other Agile leaders a panel keynote for Agile 2022. We delivered it to the attendees (1500+ strong) in Nashville, Tennessee. This blog post gives you some highlights and the same calls to action the attendees received. Here is the opening:

Thank you for your interest in this topic and for being here.
I am Lyssa Adkins, Agile and Leadership Coach, and it’s my pleasure to be your host for this panel.

We are entering into some challenging terrain in this panel and I want to be straight with you about that right from the beginning. Please pay attention to your own nervous system and notice when it gets activated. Do what’s necessary to take care of yourself.

To move us into this terrain, let me share a few lines from a poem.

it’s 3:23 in the morning
and I’m awake
because my great great grandchildren
won’t let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?

surely you did something
when the seasons started failing?

as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?

did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?

what did you do
once
you knew?

Those are the opening lines of a poem called Hieroglyphic Stairway by Drew Dellinger. I first heard them 12 years ago and those particular lines have been ringing in my ears ever since. We are already experiencing planetary-level challenges unique to our time and at a scale so immense that it’s near impossible for each of us to grasp. Climate disasters, biodiversity loss and extinctions, increasing poverty and rising inequality, extreme political and societal polarization, systemic oppression and economic systems that run on growth at all costs  – these are just some of the wicked and interconnected problems that are now our everyday environment.

“What did you do once you knew?”

“What did you do once you knew?”

In times like these there are always leaders who dream and do. Now, I am holding that every one of you, every one of us, is a leader because a leader is simply someone who is willing to take responsibility for their word and for the change they want to see in it. Leaders also know not to go it alone. This is one of the built-in benefits we have available to us which is this beautiful worldwide agile community that loves to learn and share and make things better together.

On this stage are 5 such leaders. People who have taken responsibility for their world and for the change they want to see. People who have rallied communities around them.

In our time together, we’ll start by hearing from each one of them. Each will tell us what they have been dreaming and doing related to our central question which is this: If Agile is no “accident” and has emerged at exactly the right time, then what is its purpose in meeting today’s planetary-level challenges?

As you listen to each, be thinking about the question you’d like to hear them answer. After we hear from them, we will solicit your questions and we will take the top few.

At the end we will have some calls to action for you because it’s easy to get lost in the immensity of this. These calls to action will give you some places to start and it’s our fervent hope that this panel sparks conversations and actions all over the agile world — in every geography and in every conference, meetup and corporate conversation.

I now turn to our panelists.

The panelists moved the audience to tears and spontaneous applause as they spoke from the heart and stood upright with the backbone of perseverance.

• Aanu Gopald spoke about Africa Agility which has already lifted 6000+ girls out of prostitution and into good paying jobs through training in Agile.
• Sally Elatta told the story of her work to help liberate Sudan from dictatorship, bring Agility to the early workings of freedom and democracy, and sustain herself as a leader when Sudan fell into dictatorship again.
• Joanne Stone rallied a community around the intersection of Agile and Wicked Problems, called Wick’d Agility, and called for us Agilists to have more ambition.
• Pia Fåk Sunnanbo told her story of being one ordinary software engineer who stopped wasting time developing products that don’t matter and who persevered until she found work at GoClimate where she could merge her deep sadness about the climate crisis with her abiding hope that we can achieve the seemingly impossible together.
• Jutta Eckstein revealed some of the latest devastating climate projections, opened eyes about our inattention to developing sustainable products and showed that we can have sustainability in agility and sustainability by agility.

We ended the session with some calls to action — some places to start. They can all be found on the new Agility Impact community website which is hosted by Joanne Stone. We also created a Lean Coffee-style Conversation Starter Guide so people like you can take this conversation to your geography, conference, meetup, and corporate conversation. Here are a couple links:

AgilityImpact.org

Lean Coffee-style Planetary Challenges Conversation Template