How of PAS Archives - Personal Agility

Maria Matarelli
September 14th, 2021

Discover “What Really Matters” with the Personal Agility System Alignment Compass

Knowing “What Really Matters” in your life is the first step to designing the life you want that is full of satisfaction, joy, and fulfillment. Knowing “What Really Matters” in your business can create a powerful level of focus to help you create greater results. It’s easy to get swept away with the busy world we live in now with social media distractions, texts, emails, and other notifications going off all day on our phone. It can also be easy to slip into being supportive of the people around you without taking the time to really focus on what is important to you – the things you find fulfilling and the results you want to create.

If you never step back to think about what matters, you may be wandering aimlessly in a repetitive cycle from week to week and not feel like you’re getting ahead. Even if you do know “What Really Matters” – are you taking the active steps forward that will help you achieve these goals and make the results you say you want a reality?

Enter the Personal Agility System Alignment Compass. A powerful visual tool for helping you reflect on where you’ve been spending your time to see if your behaviors, actions, and patterns are in alignment with the things you say are important. While your Priorities Map will help you see what you’ve achieved, the Alignment Compass provides an additional layer of insights, a holistic visualization of where you spend your focus.

You can see if you are in balance or if your attention has been pulled in different directions. This holistic view of how your actions have aligned with what you say matters can provide valuable insights and an opportunity to reflect while celebrating what you have achieved and providing the opportunity to choose differently if you want to create different results moving forward.

If you would like to learn more about the Personal Agility System and the Alignment Compass, join one of our upcoming events or training courses and unlock a level of higher performance: https://personalagilityinstitute.org/events

Maria Matarelli
March 7th, 2021

Personal Agility Stakeholder Interview Canvas

Posted in: How of PAS

The Personal Agility System helps people and organizations identify What Really Matters while providing a simple system to aid in achieving these goals. In addition to helping individuals and organizations gain clarity on What Really Matters, we go one step further to help people identify and create alignment. This could be alignment with the people in your life or in a work context, alignment with stakeholders and other teams throughout an organization.

Stakeholder alignment is important for any company using Agile. Having a clear vision for the teams to support clear initiatives that create a positive return on investment (ROI) for the organization.

We recognized early on how important it is to ensure that we create alignment with the people around us and alignment with the initiatives in an organization and we have created a tool at the Personal Agility Institute to help with just that.

Introducing the Stakeholder Interview Canvas. We have discovered this canvas can be a powerful tool when talking to stakeholders to uncover what is most important to them. The first column has questions related to “Who”, the second column has questions related to “Why”, and the third column has questions related to the “Desired Outcome”.

A powerful question at the core of Personal Agility, is “What Really Matters?” though we don’t immediately jump in to asking that question. We recommend going in the numerical order and jumping around the canvas. This encourages you to flow with the conversation and you can jump in and out of different questions as you go.

Begin with the first column with the questions related to “Who”. This is where we ask questions about the main goals or objectives.

Next, we go to the middle column and ask the questions related to “Why”. Here, we explore the challenges and impediments along with risks, concerns, fears, and frustrations.

As we approach the third column, we want to focus on the desired outcomes. This is where we ask about their definition of awesome and how we can support them in creating that outcome.

Next, we loop back around to summarize what really matters to the other person. You can summarize the top 3 areas of focus that emerged from the conversation or you may want to ask if they can clarify what the top 3 areas of importance are and identify any follow up steps.

Give it a try! Download a free copy of the Personal Agility Stakeholder Interview Canvas under the “Free Tools” section of the website here: https://personalagilityinstitute.org/freetools

We would love to hear how this tool works for you. Please give it a try and reach out to Maria (at) PersonalAgilityInstitute (dot) org to share your experience on how it helped!

Peter Stevens
February 11th, 2021

Announcing the PAS Problem Solving Canvas

Posted in: How of PAS

The Personal Agility Recognized Practitioner Program teaches you how to apply powerful questions to be a catalyst, that is to help other people identify and solve their problems.

Many people find the coaching approach difficult because you are expected to lead someone through a problem-solving process without being the expert or even offering solutions. How do you do that?

We now have a canvas to help you coach other people to solve their problems.

It’s called the PAS Problem Solving Canvas. Use it to lead someone through a 5-step process to understand and come up with solutions to their challenges. The basic steps are:

Create safety so the person is able to talk about potentially sensitive issues
Identify and understand the goal
Identify and understand the problem
Explore alternatives for solving the problem
Identifying a possible course of action

For each step, the canvas includes a number of questions you could ask to help your coachee through the problem solving process. Your job as a coach is to be and active listener. You are striving to understand where your coachee is in their thought process, so you can ask the right question next. Remember when you have gotten an answer to “read it back” to confirm your and their understanding of the issue or solution.

This is a draft version. Please give it try! We’d be thrilled if you share your experience with it on Linkedin. Be sure to tag Peter, Maria, the PAI and your PARA.

We are taking what is probably an unusual step. We are releasing the PAS Problem Solving Canvas both as a PDF and as an MS-Office template. Yes, source form! So you can use it to log conversations or you can maybe come up with your own versions. Please respect the CC license conditions if you make an improved version, please share it back with us. Good luck!

Download the PAS Problem Solving Canvas

As a PDF file
As a zipped MS-Word template