Can we use Agile Methodologies to live a life?

I recently finished a course on Agile Management practices and I was basically stunned by it! For those who don’t know, Agile is a group of frameworks and methodologies to manage projects, it was born to solve complex problems (mainly for the IT area), but today it can be used basically by anyone, in any area.The framework I focused more on was Scrum. It was named after a movement done in rugby, which represents a lot of effort in teamwork. And scrum is very much based on that.

In Scrum you have rituals and practices, and also key roles. It is an iteractive, incremental approach, where you divide your big, complex problem into small (more digestible and workable) chunks. You have the “work cycles” that could vary from 1 week to 4 weeks and are called Sprints. Before each Sprint, you have a meeting with all the team to plan the Sprint, finding a goal for it and deciding which tasks to pick up, this is the Planning Meeting. Then, by the end of it we have the Review Meeting, to see the progress done in the product, and the Retrospective Meeting, to understand what worked and what didn’t in terms of the team. And to manage all this, we have a 15 minute meeting called Daily Meeting, where all developers check in on each other by answering three questions: “What I did yesterday”, “ What I will do today.” and “What is a problem that I am having”. 

And we have roles in this team. The developers are the ones that make the magic happen, they are responsible for doing the incremental work every sprint. We have the Product Owner, the person that manages and understand everything about the product that is being created (or the complex problem that is being solved) and the Scrum Master, who is a guide and a supporter of the team, ensuring they are together, working on the framework (this person is basically a Jedi, I think that is where the name Master comes from).

Anyway, as I was studying Scrum I was more and more realizing how it can be applied to life. Life, by itself, is a complex thing, and most of us are trying to solve it on a daily basis. We are the developers, the Product Owner and the Scrum Master all at the same time. Sometimes we are the ones doing the work, sometimes we are supporting ourselves and, most of all, we are the ones that really know about the product at hand (in this case, our own lives).

So, we can see how to benefit from the practices of the Scrum. If we decide we will run Sprints of 4 weeks, we can do that cycle each month. The Planning meeting is that time of the month where we sit down and think about what we will do in the next month, what tasks we will focus on, and what is our goal for the month. The Daily meetings are spaces for us to check in with ourselves on the progress of our projects and life, it is just 15 minutes, so it can be pretty doable even on a busy agenda. Then, we have the Review Meeting, where we can see the progress we’ve made on our tasks and if we achieved the goal set before. And finally, at the Retrospective Meeting we have some time to see what went right and wrong in terms of ways of work. Here we can really see if we need to change something in the way we live our lives, basically this is where we grow. 

And, to conclude, we can run this as an experiment. Try one month and see how it goes. probably you will find several benefits of it. And always keep in mind the Retrospective Prime Directive (Norm Kerth):”Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.”. With this mindset we can look at ourselves with love and compassion, believing we can grow and develop, on incremental steps, one sprint at a time.