Happy New Year!

Every year I, and many others, try to set up resolutions which we tend to fail at after a very short period of time. As an agile coach, I find myself needing to practice what I preach (AKA eating my own dog food), especially when it comes to working iteratively and empirically along with embracing change. As workers, we need to consider who our customers are and how we can better serve them, focused on delivering the most value. Even on the home front there is room for improvement and an opportunity to contemplate how I can be a better husband, father, neighbor, human, etc.

There is no other time of year that people are more apt to engage with agile principles than the start of the New Year. It’s a great opportunity to consider where you have been, where you’d like to go, and how you’re going to get there. In Scrum it’s called a retrospective, and it’s performed on a regular cadence (not just once a year). The time period can vary from a week to a month, or whatever time period makes sense for your team and the work you’re doing. Unfortunately, I often see posts about people abandoning even trying to make New Year's resolutions because they’re so ineffective. The second Friday in January is referred to as Quitter’s Day because 88% of people have failed to achieve their goals by then. Rather than abandoning the idea of change, and the power found in it, let’s consider some other options.

Make your resolutions SMART. SMART resolutions are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound - providing a framework for objectivity, clarity, and focus. Instead of resolving to “exercise more,” a SMART version would be "walk 30 minutes, five times a week, for the next month." This creates a system of manageable, measurable steps (no pun intended) while grounding it in relevance to larger priorities. SMART systems define success criteria and deadlines. Whether applied to personal ambitions or professional endeavors, the framework encourages intentionality and discipline. Using a structured mechanism like SMART becomes even more powerful when paired with regular review and adjustment, as it encourages adaptation to evolving complexities in life.

Try a more iterative approach. If you’re not familiar (and since I often find people using words that are not part of my regular vocabulary that I then have to go look up), Cambridge Dictionary defines iterative as doing something again and again, usually to improve it. The old adage, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” still holds true. If I start breaking my work up into smaller pieces and regularly consider how things are going, and where I can make adjustments to increase the chances of hitting my goals, I don’t have to make as painful a change from the beginning. For example, if I want to start writing blogs on a regular basis, I only need to get some ideas down for one; perhaps even today. Based on the success (or failure) of said blog, I can take my learnings and bring them to the next one. One of those learnings: I don’t have to write the perfect blog from the beginning (since I won’t be able to) so I can practice better agility (and writing) by just capturing some thoughts and getting them to the rest of the team so we can iterate on it.                                                                                                                                                       

As far as setting up iterative processes, James Clear expresses some useful ideas in the book Atomic Habits. It is probably one of the best self-help books I have read in recent years. One simple concept is to focus on making small, consistent changes. Similar to saving money, there is a compound interest that builds up over time when tiny changes are made. Improving by 1% per day compounds into almost 38 times improvement by year-end. 

Instead of trying to lose 50 lbs, make changes to your habits and behavior by building systems that move the needle 1%. What would it take to lose .5 lbs (and keep it off)? Want to do 100 push-ups? Start with one. Every action taken is a vote toward the new identity you are trying to achieve. (Every cookie I forgo, every time I do another pushup, etc.)  I could go on, but get the book. You’ll thank me later.

How does this apply at work? As the New Year begins, reflect on where there might be opportunities for improvement with your team (or by yourself if you don’t work on a team). What have you been learning, and how can you apply those learnings to your workflow? What meetings do you have that are stale, and what is one thing that you can add (or take away) to make them more beneficial? Where have you lost focus on delivering value to your customers (both internal and external)? Experiment with new ideas, reflect regularly on their effectiveness, and adjust accordingly. Agile is not about standardized meetings and frameworks as much as it is about delivering value through communication, collaboration, curiosity, and change.

So here is my first action toward my new behavior. It’s not 2000 words of genius (though it might be by the time the internet sees it), but it is an agile approach to delivering value to my customers. What do you think?