The Six Disciplines of Agile Marketing

Chapter 22The Role of the Agile Leader

Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.

—Colin Powell, American military leader and statesman

In Chapter 20, we talked about the importance of creating a vision. That vision, created by the leader with the help of the team, answers three questions:

1. What problems do we want to solve?
2. What does success look like?
3. How do we know we're improving?

While the vision is necessary and helpful, leaders also need to make the vision tangible by diving down into the beliefs and behaviors that make up an Agile mindset.

Exercise: Defining Your Beliefs and Behaviors

Agile marketing isn't just the adoption of new methodologies and practices—Scrum, Kanban, Sprints, user stories, and so forth. It requires a change in beliefs and behaviors; many people refer to this as adopting an Agile mindset. This exercise will help you and your team define the beliefs and behaviors you aspire to (your Agile mindset) and discover those you hold today.

Begin by asking each person on the team to think of a few people they see as excellent marketers, people whom they'd hire in a heartbeat to add to the team. These are likely people that they've worked with; they could be public personalities. They don't have to be people who you actually hire.

What beliefs or values make these people outstanding marketers? What behaviors? Have each team member make a list. For example, ...