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Everything you learn about Agile, Scrum, and any other framework is designed to do one thing – create and harness disciplined action. To do effective things repeatedly until they become habits, and then to build on those by incorporating more.
To me, discipline is the art of doing the things that need to be done. It’s about making promises and keeping them. Promises to yourself and others. It is about setting a standard for yourself for who you want to be – who you want to become – and taking all of the actions necessary to get there. It is about never quitting, no excuses, no shortcuts, no compromises. It is about doing the hard work – each day and every day – until you have integrated as habits all of the things you need to be successful no matter what. It means rejecting those things that have little or no value in your life.
If it sounds like basic training – it should. This is about letting go of the part of yourself that wants to relax, that wants the easy way, that wants complete freedom and autonomy, and surrendering to doing the things you are compelled to do instead.
How is Discipline an Agile Thing?
Does this sound Agile? Do the most important things first. Focus. Cut waste by no longer doing the things that don’t add value. This is the whole point.
There’s nothing about Agile that a bunch of really smart, focused, hardworking folks wouldn’t figure out on their own. The secret to doing great work, the secret to doing better quality work in less time is discipline. Disciplined execution. Disciplined attention to quality. Disciplined measurement. Disciplined attention to improvement. Disciplined prioritization.
There are no secrets in Agile. But the philosophies and frameworks simply attempt to make repeatable what discipled people would be doing anyway. Executing, inspecting, and creating systems and methods that allow them to repeat and build upon what works for a particular type of work and a particular team to achieve a desired outcome.
It may seem to many that Agile is a rejection of structure, when in fact it is the rejection of WRONG structure that creates more work that doesn’t deliver meaningful value. Focus instead on repeating and habitualizing the important disciplines that tend to create success.
How To Get More Disciplined
Discipline starts in the mind. We see discipline as painful, but in reality, discipline allows you to have more so you can be more. Discipline is what will make you a great leader, a great agilest, and a great human being. It is the bedrock of all success. There are about seven steps you can take to become more disciplined:
1.Be Consistent
98% of the population are not consistently disciplined. Only the few, the elite, get up every day and do what needs to be done without fail. Only the few take the trappings of discipline and reinvest it in more discipline – constantly improving their capacity and game
2.Do Focused Work
If you are looking for motivation to get disciplined, you will never find it. You have to make it. Read deeply about the lives of extraordinary people and teams if you like – it helps to be surrounded by inspiration – but that’s not enough. Know your reason for wanting to be the best. Accept that the only path is through focused, disciplined work, and that every delay or excuse is what keeps you among the 98%. The average.
3.Create Rituals
It doesn’t matter what your rituals are, have rituals. Get up in the morning and make your bed, unload the dishwasher, do 10 push-ups, or journal and plan your day. Do the same just before bed. Anything to root your day in a repetitive practice that you never miss but also has some benefit of its own – good health, mental clarity, introspection.
4.Make Habits
Your rituals should force you to do critical things routinely until they become habit. Once habitualized, discipline demands that you adopt newer or better practices that will help evolve you as a person and as a leader
5.Start Small
Most people never get started on discipline because it sounds painful. It can be, but you can also get started on discipline by choosing one simple habit or routine and ensuring you hit it every single day.
6.Set Goals
From there, your next habit should be setting goals for new habits to integrate every few weeks or every month. If you take on too many at once, you are likely to fail, especially if you have no experience being disciplined. I did NOT come from a disciplined background and I had to learn this the hard way. There’s often a point at which the cost of your lack of discipline is painfully obvious, and you make a holy commitment to immediate and vast change by promising to stop doing 10 things and start doing 10 more….and the sheer size of the promise is overwhelming. Don’t do that. Do it in increments. Pick one hard thing and get good at that. Then add more.
7.Challenge Yourself
Try to choose some habits that are difficult – they are not already habits for you – but also valuable, in that they move you closer to a very important goal. Harder goals are easier to
achieve if they matter to you. Fitness is important to all of us, and it comes naturally to some. To others it is a lifelong challenge to stay in shape. For those, you will never commit to the disciplined act until you find a compelling reason to do so. If this goal doesn’t matter to you right now, you will never get good at it.
Build The Right Type Of Discipline
A final note for Agile practitioners. I don’t care if you follow the Scrum Guide or not. Discipline does not mean following the ‘rules’ of agility as dictated by a framework or model. Discipline means making promises to ourselves and others and sticking to them; finding out what works for the team, and then adjusting our promises to ensure we continue to move forward. If you decide you should do retrospectives every 7 weeks or every 20 minutes – I don’t care. Experiment, find out what works for your team, and forge your disciplines based on those findings…and then stick to those promises no matter what. And no matter what norms you choose for your agile practice, make doubly sure you are not doing them to find the easy way out, to align to the old, familiar way of doing things, to appease the boss, or to make room for more meetings and status reports. Make sure every habit you build is helping you build unheralded, massive value.
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