10 SUPER CRACKER quotes on agile change management

It’s a bird? It’s a plane? No, it was the visual management board that we set up in our Enterprise Change office - a space to help us to ‘work out loud’ and run our stand-up meetings. We posted our Kanban Board and success measures dashboard, making our messages visually appealing with word clouds, photos and infographics. People within and outside our team would stop by to look and start a conversation with us. It was generating just the engagement and dialogue we wanted.

To add to our wonderful board, I hunted down some quotes that represented agile change management, and aligned them to the capabilities we were building: adaptability, design thinking, customer-centricity and a growth mindset.

We wanted to get the message across that agile is not just a methodology, it’s about a mindset and behaviours too.

After some trawling through the internet and my other resources, I’ve come up with my favourite 10:

1. Fail often so you can succeed sooner. David Kelley, Founder and Chairman of IDEO

2. The customer isn’t always right. But if you don’t listen to them, your product won’t be either. Oli Gardner, Co-founder at Unbounce

3. Stop doing agile and start being agile. Unknown

4. If we wait until we’re ready we’ll be waiting for the rest of our lives. Lemony Snicket, Novelist

5. The true method of knowledge is experiment. William Blake, 19th century Poet

6. We don’t need an accurate document, we need a shared understanding. Jeff Patton, Author & Agile and Design Thinking specialist

7. All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. Bruce Lee, Martial Artist

8. Agile retrospectives give the power to the team, where it belongs! Ben Linders, Agile Consultant and Blogger

9. We are at a critical point where rapid change is forcing us to look not just to new ways of solving problems, but to new problems to solve. Tim Brown, CEO and President, IDEO

10. Lean change management is about fundamentally changing how we think about change. Jason Little, Author and Founder of Lean Change Management

Draw a crowd like a rock star!

Change your quotes regularly to keep your people curious, and ask them to add their favourites. Post them on your visual management board and your Enterprise Social Network (such as Yammer) and keep the agile conversation alive!

You can also see the visual version of these quotes on my SlideShare presentation here.

I’d love to hear your favourite quotes on Agile Change Management!

If there are more ways to improve the productivity, capability and engagement of your people during change, what’s stopping you? These are the areas we can explore in greater detail in one of my #changehacks session.

To find out more about what I do, take a look at the rest of my website, take a peek at my white papers, or follow me on Twitter @LenaEmelyRoss.