“Tolerance” and (most especially) “forgiveness” are great values; I keep referring to “agreement” because it forms part of a value system through which I teach and apply Kanban and reflect on my own effectiveness as an agent of change.

I describe myself (fairly I think) as a natural consensus-builder, but that doesn’t mean that integrity and creativity go out the window. A diversity of opinion is both the start of a process guided by the “discipline” of agreement and an important check on it. Your “signal of uncertainty” is a good point.

> The advice about speaking your values is really useful, though. I probably don’t outline that this is what I’m doing enough. Thank you!

I’d be a little careful here – it’s not about you (if that’s what you mean). All I’ve done here is to reverse-engineer a value system that (it seems) a good part of the Kanban community buys into, from which some principles broader than those of the method can easily be extrapolated. You could do the same with another method, community or organisation, just as DJA has done for the Agile manifesto since at least 2007. Speaking the values, the principles and stories are how we build shared understanding, bind ourselves together and turn lip service into concrete action.

Mike

I’d go with “tolerance and forgiveness” over “agreement”, though – more of an “understanding of what needs to be tried” than an “understanding of what needs to be done”.

I like using disagreement as a signal of uncertainty. I’ve been teaching all kinds of teams to treat it that way; they then come up with ways of getting more information, quickly, either by spiking something out or other small experiments.

This has been especially useful in change processes, where just about *everything* is complex! And I’ve also seen the results of disagreement being treated as failure in this space, when people aren’t sure of what needs to happen next. I don’t believe that needs to be the case.

The advice about speaking your values is really useful, though. I probably don’t outline that this is what I’m doing enough. Thank you!

It is true that for transformation to succeed, mindset has to change (and if it doesn’t, you get FrAgile and LINO/LAME), but that’s *part* of the transformation journey, not a pre-requisite.

I’d rather work in a FrAgile/LINO organisation than one where the mindset is changing, but not the working methods, as that’s a recipe for huge stress and frustration. For change agents, there will always be an element of this, but as long as the transformation is still moving, then it’s manageable.