BE THE CATALYST

It Can Feel Like You’re Treading Water...

When you're running so fast, your teams don't have time to go out and experiment or learn. 

Yet without the opportunity to take a breath and see what others are doing, even the best team in the world will become internally focused. Slowly, the daily grind takes its toll and the energy fades. 

It's nobody's fault. None of us can escape the negative power of entropy.

We believe energy needs to be put back into the system. The fastest way to achieve this is to shift from an internal focus to an external one by sharing and collaborating with others in a similar situation.

Bring your best practices and help others. Share your challenges and discover how other teams, with different perspectives, have tackled similar problems.

The new-found energy becomes infectious, driving a desire to improve. The ripples spread throughout your organization.

Join our fight against entropy and help your teams fall back in love with their work. 

Infuse New Ideas Into Your Team
With Institute Agility's Project:Ignite

At Institute Agility, we know how hard it is to run an internal Agile Community of Practice. We've worked with hundreds of organizations and very few create the environment for growth your people deserve.

It's hard to run an internal Agile Community of Practice because the internal owners (or the people who are most passionate) only have so many ideas to share. They'll want others to bring in ideas... but they often don't have time or inspiration. 

Institute Agility can take that responsibility off their shoulders. We've spent the last decade learning and applying new ideas and techniques. We are ideally positioned to lead the Community of Practice with new ideas and allow your internal people to focus on how to take those ideas and make them blossom in your organization.

Here's How Project:Ignite Works...

Here's a little about us...

As a change agent in an organization, there’s always so much you want to do.

Yet there's always pressure on to deliver more and delight your customers.  

At times, it can feel as if you’re treading water.  

You want to get ahead but the fires you need to fight means you're reactionary.   If you could get a breath of air, and just take the time to focus on the more systemic issues, you could start to have the impact you want.

At Institute Agility, we've worked with hundreds of agile organizations and we've seen people who want to have that impact.

They have the energy, the vision, and the innate desire to create change and drive improvement.  We call them hummingbirds and they're the inspiration for our work. In the words of Elizabeth Gilbert:

At Institute Agility, we consider ourselves hummingbirds. We know how hard it can be. Yet it's how we think and see the world. There's no changing us because it's who we are.

As agile coaches, it means we don't take the "by the book" approach because it's too inflexible. Life is rich and it's the individuals and interactions we value. The processes and tools you need are ineffective if the human spark is lacking.

For that reason, we believe in collaboration between like-minded people who are focused on enjoying work, developing trust, and creating effective solutions. And occasionally, we'll get a little rowdy doing it. Life is for living and we bring that same joy to our work.  

We created Project:Ignite to give your teams the hummingbird experience.

Here's How It Works.

First, we know every team is unique and has unique challenges.

When you join us, your guide will use The Hummingbird Method to collaboratively create a clear path forward.

You (or your group if you're in a group plan) will be able to join up to two sessions a week, or eight a month. These are designed to bring new ideas and new energy to your teams.

Acting as a hummingbird, your guide will pull on established tools and their own diverse experience to guide them forward.

Your Guide Will...

 We believe collaboration between external teams is the key to infusing new, exciting ideas into teams.  

We also believe any training you invest in should be "sticky". Great training is never inexpensive, so your investment should never be experienced only to be forgotten the next week.  

As the momentum builds in your teams, we'll actively repeat key lessons and facilitate retrospectives to ensure the learning is captured.

Our definition of success is that one day you come to us and say, "Christy, that was an awesome experience. Thank you, but I think we've go it from here."  

Every team needs an external focus to succeed.

If you also identify as a hummingbird, join us by applying here, and I'll happily answer your questions.  

If you'd prefer to build or improve your own CoP, we can help with that too.

A Word of Caution.

Creating a Community of Practice is one thing. Maintaining and developing it so it spreads through the organization and helps teams deliver what they're capable of... that's a whole different ball game.

They're often easy to start, but difficult to maintain the excitement and new ideas.

The great ideas and sharing often get exhausted after the first few months and Community of Practice sadly often die on the vine, even though people know how valuable they can be to organizations.

We are often asked now to run Community of Practice with our clients because we can see where they are struggling and simply taking an hour out each month to focus on new ideas proves invigorating.

Here's the interesting part: we started out having people request what they wanted to learn, but this felt like pulling teeth because frankly, they often didn't know what might solve the issues they were struggling with. Instead, I keep a pulse on the orgs and then suggest topics as their own personal hummingbird. 

The energy is palpable now and they take those ideas and run with them!