Leadership, Ownership, and Agility

At work I got nominated for a committee I didn't want to serve on, whose focus is promoting methods described with stupid cutesy marketing terms, and ended up inexplicably and involuntarily drafted in to a leadership role. The methods my organization settled on doing are called SCRUM and SAFe. But these are just methods, the ultimate goal here is an empowered Agile mindset. 

Related to this is the concept of "management 3.0" and predecessors. I think that people want to do a good job and give customers what will help them. While we're being told by leaders to transform by following these Agile processes, I'm not sure that all leaders understand that for this to work they will have to surrender some control.

I'm listening to this audio book called Extreme Ownership by a couple of Navy SEALs. It talks about leadership and an cultivating an ownership mindset. It talks about pushing decision making down and instituting decentralized command. 

Agility, Management 3.0, extreme ownership-- aren't these all pretty much difference facets of the same thing?

Writing About The Future as a Goal Exercise

In three to five years, what do you want your life to look like? What do you want to achieve with this class/degree/training? What do you want your epitaph to say/what do you want to be able to remember on your death bed? There are countless variations of this exercise that have shown up in my life again and again.

I often listen to a wide range of podcasts and in the last few days I have again tripped over this exercise again most recently on a Jordan Peterson episode of Theo Von and before that Debbie Millman's first appearance on Tim Ferris. The stunning Last Lecture by Randy Pausch comes to mind too.

Thinking back, I can only identify one time I have really done this and it was accidental. As a kid I knew without a doubt I'd end up programming computers for a living. Full stop, that was going to be my lifes work. Looking back I wasn't even that good at it but I saw amazing possibilities. The other times I remember being faced with this was in classes, the intro questions. "What do you want out of this class?" type questions. My stock answer is brief, "An A."

If I have ever done this exercise as an adult I don't remember it. Change is the only constant in life. The last comprehensive, whole life goal list I remember setting had one thing on it and I was single digits in age. It seems everything since has been tactical. Degree or not? Kids or not? Move or not? To make a play on Doctor Pausch's, "Achieving Your Childhood Deams", maybe it's time to think about my middle age dreams.