Is Agile business or is it simply personal?

In her recent blog post, referring to the stress she feels when moving countries, Melanie Franklin describes how she uses an agile approach to reduce the stress and pressure she experiences, but also to streamline the process: “This is really helping us to think about our priorities in a really practical way. Instantly this agile approach takes the pressure off, reducing the number of things I must plan and giving me a criterion against which to judge if I am doing the right things. Agile encourages us to take the pragmatic approach, to try before we buy, reducing the risk of a "get it completely right first time" approach.” Read more here.

Agile is a mindset and a set of rules that is beneficial not only for corporations and start-ups but can also be highly beneficial to individuals that adopt this approach. I have mentioned below some of the reasons to become more agile, both in your personal life as well as in your work life:

1. Most of the jobs of the future for current pupils and students does not yet exist, the jobs of tomorrow are nothing like the jobs of today. There is a need to educate the workforce of the future and that means creating the agile mindset from the very early stages of education. How do we define what skills are needed? The higher education degree used to be enough, the current economy is through the skills-based economy, not the knowledge-based one. Rapidly changing technology is shifting the way we work, and the skills required to achieve success. One needs to have both skillsets as well as the agile mindset in order to be successful. Today’s economy calls for us to embrace flexibility, to commit to a lifetime of learning, and to creatively approach problem-solving. Simply put, today’s economy pushes us to be agile, the economy of the future demands it. See more here.
2. This does not mean “Human Skills” will be in decline, in fact the opposite is happening. The research clearly suggests that due to automation, continuous evolution and disruptions such as Industry 4.0, roles and skills that are easily replaced by machines will be in decline. But at the same time “human skills”, such as; popularity, analytical skills, innovations, creativity, originality, complex problem solving as well as leadership skills, emotional intelligence and empathy will all be growing. Many of the skills which are important will be growing, enhanced, empowered and allowed to shine in the agile and DevOps environment and mindset. Read more here.
3. According to recent LinkedIn research, 57% of senior leaders claim that soft skills are more important than hard skills, but among the 5 most important soft skills companies are looking for most in 2019 are: creativity, collaboration and adaptability. All those skills’ development is not only supported and possible in the agile environment, but it is a necessity that the members of agile teams have them. The World  Economic Forum reports that you need, among others, skills like complex problem solving, critical thinking, creativity and coordinating with others or service orientation to thrive in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 
4. In a business landscape where volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (“VUCA”) occurs, leaders need to become nimble, flexible and adaptable. In other words, they need to be agile. The key to becoming agile is to be self-aware in order to innovate or risk becoming archaic. See more here. “In an agile organization, the way people are managed must also be agile. A traditional bureaucratic structure is incompatible with agility. That's why one of the major challenges faced by organizations that still have not embarked on the path of agility (particularly their HR departments) is to transform the organizational culture, so people can learn to work agilely within the organization.” Read more here. This means that leaders in agile environments need to adapt a new philosophy to managing not only projects, but even more so people. “The key to agile people management is to apply agility itself to the process of change, i.e. to initiate an iterative trial and error process, in which little by little control is replaced by autonomy and infantilism by responsibility. This way, control must be gradually replaced by supervision, which should become increasingly lighter and more remote as the person learns to work autonomously and responsibly, since an agile organization is one where people willingly and responsibly meet their commitments and accept the consequences of their actions.” Read more here. 
5. The agile organization and its transformation require a fundamentally new type of leadership. As we read in “Leading agile transformation: The new capabilities leaders need to build 21st-century organizations”, research confirms that leadership and ways in which leadership shapes culture are both the biggest barriers and the biggest enablers of successful agile transformations. According to the article, organizations should start from both extending and transcending the competencies that made their leaders successful in the past. Leaders need three new sets of capabilities for agile transformations: First, they must transform themselves to evolve new personal mind-sets and behaviours. Second, they need to transform their teams to work in new ways. Third, it’s essential to build the capabilities to transform the organization by building agility into the design and culture of the whole enterprise." It also suggests that leaders should start building small teams that are “diverse, empowered, and connected. This allows and encourages agile teams to work in rapid cycles enabling them to deliver greater value more efficiently, more quickly and keeping agile teams focused on both external and internal customers and on creating value for customers, by understanding and addressing their unmet, and potentially even unrecognized, needs.” Read more here