Life in agile style

On July 25 TechGals organized the second meetup in Amsterdam. It was dedicated to the topic of how we can use agile approaches in our personal and professional life. The meetup was hosted and sponsored by BinckBank.

What is agile?

Agile is the approach to software development, which promotes:

communication instead of fixed processes;
quick response to changes instead of following an outdated plan;
early delivery with continual improvement to provide value and receive feedback as soon as possible.

Waterfall approach to software development reflects how the life was planned and built decades ago. Choose a profession, get an education, follow a predefined career path. However, now, new duties are appearing before you finished your higher education; new skills are becoming required before you mastered old ones. So quick response to changes and continual improvement are becoming a key to a happy and successful life.

What agile principles can teach us?

The topic of applying agile in life is quite broad. Annebel Bergmeijer, agile coach from BinckBank, decided to focus on one specific technique, called Ecocycle planning. This technique can be used to identify obstacles and opportunities in any area of your interests. Ecocycle planning is one of 33 liberating structures. On the meetup, we practiced Ecocycle planning to explore our careers.

Ecocycle planning

Ecocycle planning technique helps to analyze what you are doing and need to stop doing, and what is that you are not doing, but should be doing. The cycle looks like this:

Gestation – is the stage for activities, which require time and effort to discover if they are valuable. It’s the stage when you are sowing seeds.
Birth – activities, which require time and effort to become valuable. You should have enough sun and water and to fertilize your seeds to make them grow.
Maturity – activities, which you can do without much effort and which bring you a lot of value. You are harvesting and reaping the rewards.
Creative destruction – activities, which you need to get rid of to free space for innovation. You’re freeing ground for new seeds.

The first step is to create the list of 10 activities which you perform as part of your job duties.
After that place these activities in the Ecocycle.

In addition, you need to beware that some of your activities may get stuck in traps. Rigidity trap holds activities which value is diminishing or you are not feeling fulfillment from them anymore. Poverty trap catches activities that don’t get enough of your time and energy to grow into something valuable.

Example of ecocycle planning

To gain something new, we need to get rid of something old. Therefore, this technique helps to see which activities you can stop doing as they don’t benefit you anymore, and free the space and time for those new, which will benefit you in the future.

You can download the template here and try it yourself!

Some photos from the meetup, so you can feel the vibes and will not miss the next one!