Living an Outcome-Driven Life Using Mobius Loop
I have been using and espousing Agile for a very long time since I first applied it in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Invariably, friends and coworkers ask the question — do I use and practice Agile in my personal life?
Why, yes, I definitely do! I initially didn’t start that way. I was just using Scrum on the teams I was a part of. At some point, it kind of naturally fell into place into my life. I initially didn’t set out to use it. I started using sticky notes to keep track of items I wanted to do in my home life. I then started prioritizing and figuring out what mattered to me and adjusted. Agile took over, unconsciously and subtly.
Today, I’m more intentional about using Agile in daily life. I have Trello board and use personal Kanban to manage both home chores and personal passion projects. I prioritize my travel plans and my hobbies, for example. I have overall themes about the various things in my life that I want to do, sort of like guardrails. I make sure to set boundaries, so I don’t overemphasize one thing over another.
And I don’t do for the sake of doing. One of the things that I see when people start doing Scrum or Kanban is that they initially measure success with being able to release something consistently and continuously. Yes, we finally shipped! We finally got it out the door! We’re shipping every two weeks!
That’s great for when you first start and succeed with Agile. But that’s not a correct success metric long term. You just released something – how has that impacted you and your business? What truly matters, when doing Agile, are the outcomes, not the output. The results of what you released are what drives value.
I take the same approach when applying Agile to my life. What are the outcomes I want to achieve? My life outcomes don’t have to be physical and tangible. They can be aspirational and experiential, like the thrill that I get when seeing something for the first time in my life. I can vividly replay in my head the first time I saw the Aurora Borealis ever, during my trip to Iceland.
A dear friend and a long time Agile mentor of mine taught me to use Mobius Loop, an outcome-based framework. And I’ve applied it to my life in spades! Take a gander at how I’ve used it from the video above (forward 12:50 into the video if you want to see how I’ve used it personally).
Head over to the Mobius Loop website if you want to learn more about the framework and how you can use it in your business. Or your life for that matter, just like I did. ?