Agile Australia 2024: Resilience and Growth

Attending Agile Australia has always been a highlight of my year, and this year was extra special because I finally got the opportunity to keynote the conference. It only took me 10 years (since I first set myself that goal), but hey, lifetime achievement unlocked!

My Keynote: Embracing the New Reality

In my keynote, I addressed a critical issue that our industry is facing: the reality that Agile is at a crossroads. Since COVID-19 the trajectory of agile and our ways of working has changed, and not for the better. For the first time since 2004, Google Trends shows Agile on the decline, echoed by findings from the Global State of Agile and the Business Agility Institute.

Why Is This Happening?

The global economic conditions have led to widespread fear and anxiety, which in turn has caused learned helplessness. Many people are so overwhelmed that they’ve stopped thinking creatively—they just want to be told what to do. This mindset is leading to disengaged individuals and organisations that rely on off-the-shelf frameworks without thinking about how to adapt them to their unique contexts.

I see it all the time: teams waiting to be spoonfed “tickets”, Scrum Masters venting about dysfunction without taking action, and organisations blindly following frameworks like SAFe or “the Spotify model” without truly understanding them. This approach is failing us.

Why It Matters

Resilience is declining, and stress and depression levels in Australia and New Zealand (and the rest of the world) are back to COVID-19 peaks. As our industry reverts to traditional approaches, creativity and innovation suffer—stressed, anxious people just can’t be creative.

Motivation at work is directly linked to autonomy, mastery, and purpose. The current decline in autonomy, coupled with an increase in learned helplessness, is making us anxious and unhappy.

Waiting for leaders to provide all the solutions isn’t just unfair to them—it also pushes them toward a command-and-control mindset, which stifles creativity and autonomy even further.

What we need to do

We need to confront this fear head-on. Over the past five years, organisations have focused heavily on wellness and mental health initiatives, offering things like mental health days. While this has been helpful—thank you!—the statistics show it’s not solving the problem.

Perhaps the pendulum has swung too far. While these initiatives contribute positively to work-life balance, they’ve also created a culture of entitlement. At the first sign of stress, people pull back and take time off, rather than developing coping mechanisms. I’ve seen it firsthand: a great design agency offering unlimited mental health days, only to have employees frequently declare “mental health day” on any pretext, leaving their teammates to pick up the slack. This encourages some to take time off at the first sign of stress, doing them a disservice in the long run.

One New Zealand leader summed it up perfectly:

It’s true. People are looking to their workplaces for emotional security, friendships, and social lives, leading to a culture of dependency. This is a threat to our ways of working.

What Can We Do About It?

If you want to help reclaiming our autonomy and agency I have three challenges for you:

Challenge 1: Re-train Our Resilience Muscles

What is resilience? It’s the ability to bounce back from adversity, and like a muscle, it can be strengthened—but only if we use it.

I spent my first career as a professional athlete and represented Austria in handball at the 1992 Olympics. Since then I have always had a great affinity for learning from sports and love that increasingly psychologists are treating elite athletes as case studies from which to draw useful generalisations.

Angela Duckworth’s research on grit shows that all elite athletes face adversity, whether it’s injury, selection disappointments, or unmet expectations. It’s overcoming these challenges that builds resilience. Athletes who never face adversity never develop resilience and never reach the elite level.

Matt Fitzgerald in his book “The Comeback Quotient” offers a framework for how athletes build resilience:

• Accept Reality: Acknowledge the situation as it is—no denial, no catastrophizing. Life just gave you lemons.

• Embrace Reality: Wholeheartedly embrace the challenge and commit to making the best of it. Commit to making lemonade.

• Address Reality: Take proactive measures, do the work, and make the lemonade.

Here are two examples I use for my work:

Example 1: Generative AI

1. Accept reality: Generative AI is going to have a huge impact on our jobs and workplaces. We don’t know exactly how and when but it will.

2. Embrace reality: I commit to integrating AI into my work. I have promised myself to approach change with curiosity and an open mind.

3. Address reality: I use AI every day and learn as much as I possibly can, attending courses, presentations and reading books and articles.

Example 2: Economic downturn

1. Accept Reality: My consultancy work has decreased by 60% this year due to the economic downturn and budget cuts among my clients.
2. Embrace Reality: I’m going to see this not as a setback, but as an opportunity to diversify my skills and client base.
3. Address Reality: Upskill: Dive into new areas of my field, like AI.

Challenge yourself to confront workplace tensions head-on. Don’t shy away—use the framework to guide you. And then, do one hard thing every day to get closer to your goal.

Challenge 2: Reassess and Recalibrate Your Relationships

The loss of autonomy is a relationship problem. Our relationships with our leaders are out of balance, and we need to address that. We need adult-to-adult relationships where people put forward their views, handle conflict and risk well, and cope with change.

Back to the world of sports. Here is what a former elite gymnast and gymnastics coach has to say about Simone Biles’ relationship with her coach:

This is the relationship we're aiming for between leaders and employees. In fully formed adult relationships, there’s mutual respect, accountability, ownership, and open communication. At work, while there may be a formal imbalance—like a coach calling the shots in a team—the relationships we want should be based on mutual respect and responsibility between leaders and team members.

My challenge to you is to assess each relationship you have at work. Is it an equal relationship? Or is it more like a 1950s husband taking care of everything? And if not how have you contributed to this relationship? What behaviours need to change? What conversations need to happen?

Challenge 3: Give People Space to Be Resilient

Leaders, stop telling people what to do—even if they ask for it. Give people the space to be effective players and to develop resilience. Kill your advice monster and start asking questions. Then listen to the answers.

Here’s what to focus on:

1. Create space: Step back and give your team room to think, problem-solve, and make decisions. Resist the urge to jump in with solutions at the first sign of struggle. Kill your advice monster!
2. Set clear expectations: Establish clear goals but allow flexibility in how they're achieved.
3. Provide support: Be available to guide and mentor but avoid solving problems for your team.
4. Keep them accountable: Regular check-ins ensure that the team stays on track without micromanaging.
5. Establish boundaries: While giving space, also set clear boundaries to ensure that freedom doesn't turn into chaos.

Balance space with structure, support, and accountability to create an environment where resilience can flourish.

Conclusion: Embrace Agility

We are facing a new reality, and the way to deal with it is to accept it, address it, and then embrace it. Grow your mental agility, personal agility, and organisational agility. Nobody knows exactly what the new ways of working will look like, but we need to be agile and figure it out through small experiments and feedback.

Let’s figure it out together—as a team, with each other, and with our leaders. I invite you to start the conversations at your workplaces: What symptoms do you see, and what will you do about it? Run experiments and share the results.

If you'd like me to give this talk at your conference or organisation please contact me by email.