Agile Amped Podcast - Inspiring Conversations

Latest Episodes:

Personal Agility: Integrity, Empiricism and Change Fluency Nov 22, 2021

Show notes

Accenture | SolutionsIQ alumna and former Agile Amped host Leslie Morse is our guest in this episode. Serving as Product Owner for the Professional Scrum Community with Scrum.org has put Morse on a journey to help agilists "drink their own prosecco." She is finding new ways to improve integrity, empiricism, and what she calls "change fluency" in the agile community. The goal is sense of personal agility that makes us all better able to serve others.

"If we can become fluent in change the same way we are fluent in language, what new might be possible in the world in terms of personal and organizational agility?"

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's William Rowden hosts.

Learn more - Seven Transformations of Leadership by David Rooke and William R. Torbert: https://hbr.org/2005/04/seven-transformations-of-leadership - Women in Agile podcast series: https://womeninagile.org/podcast/

Defining Agility in Terms of Risk Jul 19, 2021

Show notes

In his book "Agility: How to Navigate the Unknown and Seize Opportunity in a World of Disruption," Leo Tilman offers a comprehensive definition of the word "agility." According to Tilman and co-author former NORAD commander General Charles Jacoby, agility is "the organizational capacity to detect, assess and respond to environmental changes in ways that are purposeful, decisive and grounded in a will to win." In this episode we unpack the loaded definition and discuss how (tactical) agile practices and mindsets as we know them in the industry fundamentally address risk – and how agility can help address other types of risk in the world including global climate change, nationalism, and populism.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's William Rowden hosts.

Pride at Accenture Jun 21, 2021

Show notes

This special episode celebrates the Pride month of June and features the hosts and producer of Agile Amped as the guests. Alalia Lundy (she/her/hers) is a Business Agility Enablement Manager; William Rowden (he/him/his) is a Business Agility Practice Development Associate Director, and Ryan Keawekāne (he/him/his) is a Marketing Associate Manager. We all work at Accenture and also happen to belong to the LGBTQ+ community. We share our stories of being LGBTQ+ in a business environment, some of the "roses and thorns" of our experience, as well as what we are amped about.

Pride and Intersectionality in Leadership Jun 07, 2021

Show notes

Kayton Bhatia is a Senior Leader in Digital Product Management at Kaiser Permanente. For Pride Month, he is sharing his story about bringing his whole self to work. As a gay, Indian man, Bhatia's path to leadership is anything but typical. Despite changes to laws in both the US (where he lives and works) and India (where he was born and raised), there's more to do. He offers advice to leaders and LGBTQ professionals and is an example to those who happen to be both of how to live and lead authentically. "I'm quite aware of the weight I'm carrying as if I'm representing several communities."

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's William Rowden hosts.

Innovation and Leadership for Humanity May 17, 2021

Show notes

Sandy Beky is the founder of two companies whose work, at first blush, seems unrelated. The first is HeHop, a nonprofit that uses blockchain technology to empower victims and witnesses of domestic violence to capture and store tamper-resistant evidence for use in court. The second is Kyosei Solutions Lab, through which Beky helps leaders of France's biggest companies evolve their mindset and approach to leading organizations. In this episode, we learn how Beky sees her work through both organizations as contributing to a greater whole, to furthering humanity. "Human transformation is what is going to trigger the business transformation."

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's William Rowden hosts.

Learning to Create Thriving Systems from Nature Apr 19, 2021

Show notes

Colleen Kirtland is on a learning journey, and in this episode, she shares her passion for and commitment to learning as much as possible from nature. Pointing to many resources and examples of biomimicry, economics, and above all systems thinking, Kirtland invites us to think about creating systems that not just grow linearly but thrive. She argues that "resiliency is built over a very long time," and the same can be said for agile. "As I'm unpeeling life itself, I'm learning to be a better leader and a better coach of teams…" Accenture | SolutionsIQ's William Rowden hosts. (Stick around until the end for some more insights and fun interaction.)

Learn more: • Jeanine Benyus, biomimicry.org (https://biomimicry.org/janine-benyus/) • Kate Raworth, Donut Economics (https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/) • John H. Miller and Scott E. Page, Complex Adaptive Systems (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CTLFPNK/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) • Mariana Mazzucato, "The Value of Everything" (https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-value-of-everything) • Linda Hogan, Dwellings (https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393322477)

Cloud Breaks Barriers to Agility Apr 05, 2021

Show notes

Adam Burden is Accenture's Chief Software Engineer and a senior managing director leading Technology services for Accenture in North America. In this episode, Burden shares how Cloud helps break barriers to agility. One barrier is legacy systems. While package solutions have become popular in the last few years, Burden says that the "renaissance of custom" today may make it more practical for businesses to customize their legacy systems. The result often is greater agility. "If I want to get more out of Agile, I have to change my culture. And Cloud is … the catalyst that helps to make that happen."

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Alalia Lundy hosts.

Learn more

• "Breaking the four barriers to Cloud" (https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/cloud/cloud-technology-adoption)

• "Why the renaissance of custom is here to stay" (https://www.accenture.com/us-en/blogs/software-engineering-blog/adam-burden-custom-systems)

FirstRoot: Growing Next Gen of Impact Investors Mar 22, 2021

Show notes

What happens if you put $1 billion dollars in the hands of students to invest collaboratively? Luke Hohmann is Founder and CEO of FirstRoot, which wants "to get $1,000 into a million schools so that children are in control of $1 billion or more of capital by 2030." Hohmann shares stories of how real school students have invested in their schools and communities – with surprising results. It's all in an effort to help cultivate civic responsibility in youth and grow the next generation of impact investors. As our guest puts it, the circular economy and impact investing "are the mechanisms by which we can make positive change occur through the normal structures of business in a very powerful way."

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's William Rowden hosts. Learn more at firstroot.co.

Riot Games Makes it Better to be a Player Mar 08, 2021

Show notes

What does it mean to put customers at the center of everything you do? For Riot Games, the brand behind League of Legends, it means "making it better to be a player." Our guest Michael Robillard is the Principal of Enterprise Agility for Riot Games, and he shares how business agility unlocks their ability to make good on that promise. One outstanding example of what Robillard calls "customer-centric business agility" happened at the 2018 League of Legends World Championship in South Korea, where a fictitious, VR Kpop group took the real stage to rave reviews from fans around the world.

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Ryan Keawekane hosts.

Modern Management Made Easy Feb 22, 2021

Show notes

Johanna Rothman, a.k.a. the Pragmatic Manager, is author of 18 books and frequent blogger on the topic of product management and more. Rothman shares with us insights about her latest three-book bundle on "Modern Management Made Easy." These books are full of "the kinds of questions I keep hearing from my clients." Each chapter begins with a question followed by a popular myth and then many different options for managing oneself, others, and one's system to be more effective at work. "We are now in the hard work of trying to help entire organizations change their entire cultures… An Agile approach is not a new lifecycle: it's a culture change. And managers hold and refine the culture for the organization."

Accenture | SolutionsIQ's Alalia Lundy hosts. Learn more about Johanna Rothman at jrothman.com.