The Personal Agility System (PAS) is a simple coaching framework to help you spend more of your time on things that really matter. Why is PAS a coaching framework? Why not just call it an agile framework? And why is coaching so important to the Recognized Practitioner training?
Other agile frameworks are often defined by tasks or processes: The core principles of Kanban can be summed up with, “visualize your work” and “reduce your Work in Progress (WIP)”. Both of these are tasks. The heart of Scrum is the Scrum flow, the series of events to create a product by inspecting and adapting on the product, the work and them.
Personal Agility was informed by both Scrum and Kanban. As you get to know Personal Agility, you will recognize the family resemblance! There is however a third major influence: Powerful Questions, the core coaching skill. (Now would be a time to mention the other important influences: Christopher Avery’s Responsibility Process, Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Simon Sinek’s Start with Why, and Tim Urban’s amazing Wait, but Why.)
The heart of Personal Agility are the six Powerful Questions, including What Really Matters? What could you do? Of those things, what’s important, what’s urgent, and what’s going to make you happy? A powerful question encourages you to think.
A very early observation coming from PAS practitioners was that asking yourself questions encourages an attitude of kindness to yourself. Making active choices about how to spend your time, even though you have many constraints and demands on your time, is quite empowering. You take command of your ship while having better acceptance of yourself. ‘What really matters’ enables you to know why you make the decisions you do, and to make adjustments (“course corrections”) if you are not in alignment with yourself.
Questions are surprisingly versatile instruments. You can ask questions to yourself and you can also ask them to other people as well. What really matters turns out to be a very scalable organizing technique. Clarity of Purpose got man to the moon, and enabled transformational development more recently at places like Microsoft, Apple, Tesla and SpaceX.
As our case studies emerged, we saw people’s results are often not just incremental improvements but substantial transformations in their lives. Coaching usually played a role in these transformations.
So the Personal Agility Recognized Practitioner Program starts with coaching techniques to help you get better at getting things done, then to achieve long-term goals in the face of distraction, procrastination, and other resistance.
Once you can achieve long-term goals, you learn to apply those same skills to become a catalyst, then a leader in your organization, by helping others to solve problems and ultimately to identify consensus and build alignment among diverse groups of stakeholders. The goal is not to make you into a coach, but to give the right tools to have impact in your life and work and to inspire others to follow you.