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Agile Innovation Leaders

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(S3) E022 Lyssa Adkins on Coaching Leaders

Jan 29, 2023

Bio

Lyssa Adkins is a coach, facilitator, teacher and inspirer.

Her current focus is improving the performance of top leadership teams through insightful facilitation and organization systems coaching. Making difficult decisions faster and with clear alignment, unknotting challenging multi-department impediments, creating the conditions for smooth organizational delivery, helping leaders take up the “Agile transformation” that is theirs to make…this is where she thrives and helps thrive.

Her Agile community focus is amplifying women’s voices, which is why she is a founder of the TENWOMENSTRONG #WomeninAgile programs.

She has been pleased to serve the emergence of Agile Coaching as a profession. In 2010, she co-founded the Agile Coaching Institute which has developed over 10,000 people in the knowledge, skills and being-ness needed to yield genuinely competent agile coaching. Since 2011, she has been a member of the ICAgile working committee that defines the learning objectives for Agile Facilitation and Coaching and she assesses candidates for the ICAgile-Expert in Agile Coaching competence-based certification. She has also served the Scrum Alliance as an application reviewer for the Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC) designation.

She is the author of Coaching Agile Teams which, as a top ranking Agile book, was released as an audiobook in its 10th year.

She likes to explore facilitating intense conflict, societal change, organizational change, the benefits and costs of being human in the workplace, agile coaching, agile transformation, adult human development, human systems dynamics, the role of nature, and books of all sorts. She tends toward a balance of the provocative and practical.

Lyssa holds an alphabet soup of certifications: ICAgile Expert in Agile Coaching (ICE-AC), Scrum Alliance Certified Enterprise Coach Emeritus (CEC-E), International Coach Federation Professional Certified Coach (PCC), Organization and Relationship Systems Certified Coach (ORSCC) and Certified Integral Facilitator (IF).  She is also a trained Co-Active Coach and Leader.

Social media/ website(s):

Interview Highlights

Timestamp

05:35 How can we stop going faster while our ability to see further ahead is decreasing?

08:00 Coaching leaders – Lyssa’s 5Cs

21:05 Agile Mastery

24:55 Using agile to author a book

30:52 TENWOMENSTRONG

37:50 Expanding leaderfulness

Books/Resources Mentioned

Episode Transcript

Ula Ojiaku (Intro): Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I’m Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener.

Ula Ojiaku (Guest Intro): Hello everyone. It’s my absolute honour to introduce my guest for this episode, she is no other than the legendary Lyssa Adkins herself. We met at the Agile Coach Conference in Amsterdam and she graciously agreed to be my guest. Lyssa is renowned for her groundbreaking work in defining the Agile coaching discipline and she is known for her book as well, that is titled Coaching Agile Teams. She is also one of the original founders of the Agile Coaching Institute. In this conversation, Lyssa talked about some things that are currently on her mind, and a little bit more about her work that she is currently doing which is focused on coaching the leadership teams in organisations. Without further ado, my conversation with Lyssa.

Ula Ojiaku

So, Lyssa, thank you so much for being a guest here on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast.

Lyssa Adkins

You're welcome. I took a little peek at your previous guests and I'm like, oh wow, there have been some really amazing people on this podcast. So I'm hoping that this goes well for you and me and all the people who listen to it.

Ula Ojiaku

I have no doubts, Lyssa. It's a known fact that I’m a big Lyssa Adkins fan. So for me, this is like a dream come true. I am speaking, well, virtually, face to face, with someone that I absolutely admire and it was a pleasure meeting you as well at the March Agile Coach Conference back in Amsterdam. So do you want to tell us a bit about yourself so we can know how your journey has brought you this way?

Lyssa Adkins

Yeah, I sure will. I think that the thing to know about me is that the places where I find out that I am not a match for what's going on in my environment is the thing that propels me forward. So I'm thinking about the things I've been learning about recently, and they are things like trauma informed coaching, how to deal with grief and loss and suffering. And this is all because, you know, we're sort of in a time where these things are up and I don't have the skills for it. And so, you know, as you mentioned, those things like, you know, I like to sing and all this work and I've just, I was realising that these are the places where I find in myself that I'm just not capable to meet the complexity of the world around me. And so I try to do something different. One of those things in meeting the complexity of the world around me is that we've just bought a collaboration space property in Portugal. So that's a little bit about what's happening in my life and my home and my work. And my adult daughter is going to go move there with her partner and they're going to be the full-time caretakers of it. So that's a whole new thing that's just opened up for us and will allow us to do some really deep and wonderful work with people.

Ula Ojiaku

So are you planning to do some sort of retreats there as well? Because you said it's a collaborative working space?

Lyssa Adkins

Yeah. So people who have programs, and want to bring people to the property, it's a beautiful property, on more than an acre of land and beautiful, mature fruit trees and all of this and lovely property. And so people who want to do deep work with their groups or people who want to come and co-work together, you know, just to be in the same spot, you know, they don't even have to be from the same company necessarily. So that's something that's happening now, more in the world. And we just want to create this as a space for people to really get in touch with the fullness of what's going on in their work, in their life, and ask themselves some really different questions and perhaps even start to generate a completely new way of forward.

Ula Ojiaku

Interesting, given the world we’re in now with the whole change caused by COVID 19, it means that we can remotely work from almost anywhere in the world. So that is something I think is very relevant to the times we’re in and the opportunity to as well, do the deep work you're talking about. So we will put the links to more details on this in the show notes of this episode, but can we then go, because we are also interested in knowing about you Lyssa, you know, the person who is Lyssa Adkins?

Lyssa Adkins

Oh, I'm someone who is, on a daily basis, confounded by the world and by the difficulties we're in. I find myself experiencing a significant amount of grief about the things that are falling away in our society, and my outlook on where we're headed is that things are going to continue to fall away. And so a really big question I'm sitting in, I guess, two questions I'm sitting in for myself right now are, one is, you know, who do I want to be as a leader while things are collapsing? And the second question I'm sitting in is, it's so funny, because I just drew this Inspire Me card right before we got here. And I was thinking about this question. This is a card deck that I created with my husband and another agile coach, Deb Preuss, years and years ago. And so for the people who are listening to the audio version, it's a picture of someone driving like into fog and they can't see much, and the question is from Peter Senge and it's this, How can we stop going faster while our ability to see further ahead is decreasing? And I think that's a really big question for me, as a leader in the world, like how can we get off the crazy merry-go-round we have created because we can't expect the same level of performance we did before. We can't expect that things are going to remain certain and stable, actually, I'm pretty sure they're not. So I, you know, who is Lyssa Adkins is someone who sits in these big questions, and for like months and months and months, like a really long time, I sit in these big questions and, according to the strengths binder, my top two strengths are connectedness and futuristic. So that's where my mind tends to move a lot of the time. And what I'm realising as I'm working with leaders is that they hang on to all those things that aren't going well. And that compounds the problem that, that makes it so, now our nervous systems are on high alert, in addition to the thing that's going the way we didn't want it to go.

Ula Ojiaku

What could be those things that actually lead us down that path of holding on to things when we should be letting go?

Lyssa Adkins

Well, so there are three broad areas I'm talking to leaders about right now, and I've created them sort of like little bumper stickers so we can remind ourselves of them. And the first is upgrade your complexity of mind. The second is downshift your nervous system. And the third one is expand your team's core capabilities, core competencies. Five Cs for short, because there are five of them. We remember them. So, I mean, so your question is squarely in the bumper sticker of upgrade your complexity of mind, right. So when we upgrade our complexity of mind, this isn't requiring a new skill or a new model or a new whatever best, it's definitely not a new best practice, what it is, is being able to take in so much more information, especially contradictory and competing information, which is happening to us anyway. But to be able to bring on a deeper level of meaning-making about all of that. And in part of what is required, there is not necessarily to stop going fast, but what's required there is to start listening and bringing in different essence energies that allow you to make different kinds of decisions. Because I see leaders right now making the same kinds of decisions over and over, and we're just trying harder. We're just trying harder at the things that don't match the world, where supply chains are failing, where we're having multiple climate disasters at the same time where, you know, we can just keep going on and on about the things that are walking our world.

Ula Ojiaku

Are you able to also talk about the other two, you know, you said, downshifting our nervous system, I couldn't get the C, and then upskilling your team's competency as well. Those other two.

Lyssa Adkins

Sure. Let's just touch on those briefly. So downshifting your nervous system is actually one of the key capabilities for having a more complex mind, because what happens to us is that when we encounter something that is a threat of some sort and a threat can be to our sense of identity, to our ego, to our intellect, those are all very related. You know, a threat can be that there's just, you know, now a global supply chain meltdown, and all of a sudden, as an executive, I'm going, oh my God, what do I do? You know, I mean, it's like deer in headlights moment. Like now I'm at the edge of my meaning-making and I don't know what to do and what happens is that our bodies respond and our bodies respond, according to something called neuroception. It's a type of perception, but it's based on your biology, it's based on your actual, your animal body, this thing that you, that you are in, this animal body, responds to these threats in the world before you have cognitively realised them. And so what it does is a very smart thing. It floods your body with all kinds of anxiety hormones, you know, adrenaline, all of these. Yeah. Right. And it gets you ready to take some immediate action because your body does not know that the idea that feels like a threat to you is not the same thing as a sabre tooth tiger chasing you. Your body actually doesn't know that, right. Now, good news is that we have this amazing prefrontal cortex. Human beings get the luxury of a prefrontal cortex where all our executive functions, reside and work. And we can recognise when the animal of our body has taken over and flooded our body with these stress hormones, and we can go, okay, I have the ability to interrupt these. There are really easy ways to interrupt it, actually, and to bring back online those executive functions, because that's the important thing. Things like decision making, critical thinking, empathy, logic, they all leave the building when your body is getting ready to have you run or freeze or fight. Right. And so what I'm noticing is that this happens in really subtle ways on leadership teams and people don't know that their body has been hijacked. They don't know it's happening, but I can, because I'm working with teams, leadership teams on sort of like the pattern level of their interaction. I can sit there and go, huh? It looks like she's hijacked, and I can watch this interaction, and a couple minutes later. Oh, he is too. Well, there's a third. And so, pretty soon you have an entire executive team operating without their executive functions online and no one is recognising it. So part of what I think is important for us to do in this particular time we're in, when things are incredibly stressful and our ways of coping don't necessarily work in the complexity that we're in.

One of the things that's important is learning about our nervous systems, because it's actually super easy to interrupt this whole process of your lizard brain getting hijacked. It's super easy, but people don't know to do it. And people feel a little bit embarrassed about it. They're like, oh, well this is like my thing I have to deal with. No, actually it's a group thing. So that's maybe a little more than an introduction to the idea of downshifting your nervous system, but that's the idea there that I've just really gotten clear about how much people are operating, not at their best.

Ula Ojiaku

And then what about upskilling your team's competency? The third one. Could you tell us a bit about that?

Lyssa Adkins

Yeah. I think executive teams, as I watch them work and as I interact with them to help them work better together, I notice that they have the same, this might be a little bit unfortunate to hear, but they have the same sort of mediocre conversations that delivery teams have. And by mediocre, I mean, they don't have a high level of competence in conflict, in collaboration and creativity and communication, and definitely not in change. Because all they keep doing is driving, driving, driving, driving. They keep moving through these very surface level conversations and making decisions from there. And we're basically getting the same results we've been getting, you know, we're not going anywhere new and we're not able to take in the fullness of the context we are now in, which is something human beings have never encountered before. So as I work with executive teams, I'm like, okay, great, you've got your key result, great, fantastic. Those key results happen through a series of conversations, decisions, work sessions. In those work sessions, the way that is happening is through these five core competencies, communication, collaboration, creativity, conflict, and change. And then to the core of that is actually the intelligence that resides and how the relationship system is working. So if we can focus on that, then those five core competencies increase. Then we have much more effective working sessions and decisions. Then we meet our goals. So it's like working from the core out.

Ula Ojiaku

It's really an interesting framework. I don't think this is yet out in the world or in any of the materials you've released to us yet. So I hope to learn more about it at some point in time. Is there anywhere that I could actually…?

Lyssa Adkins

Yeah, I've just now realised there is somewhere. So I created a keynote around this last year, and it's one of the keynotes I give publicly and to make myself get clear about the contents of the keynote, I made myself record my own podcast, which is called the 5 & 5, five minutes a day, five days a week. And it's all around this topic of the five essential shifts for leading in turbulent times. And so we can absolutely provide that link in the show notes. So that definitely gives people, a flavour, in five minute bites, of these things we're talking about. Upgrade your complexity of mind, downshift your nervous system, and expand your team's five core competencies.

Ula Ojiaku

That's awesome Lyssa, we'll definitely have that in the show notes. Now I'm curious, in working with, you know, the leaders that you do, how do you go about setting the intention for the engagements and how do you measure the progress towards meeting that set intention?

Lyssa Adkins

That's a really good question, and I have to say, I have not found a secret sauce that I'm happy with here yet, because most executives and executive teams don't know that they're in over their heads in a way that they certainly are in over their heads. They keep thinking that if we just apply the same things we've been doing, we're going to get out of this mess. They keep thinking normal is going to come back. They keep thinking, well, maybe normal won't come back, but we'll just keep going. And I don't know that we're going to be able to just keep going, I don't know how much longer we'll be able to keep going, because we are absolutely encountering, now, the limits to growth that were predicted back in the 1970s, you know, so everything that we've predicated our business world on, the idea that growth is good, growth is what we go for, you know, and we always have to have this sort of sterling impression of our service and we can never let anyone down. Well, we're going to start letting people down. We are absolutely approaching limits to growth. We're not going to be able to keep growing as we were before. And so I think that what is going on is that I move into executive teams starting with this idea that I'm going to help them develop their leadership. And it usually is around a goal that the organisation has. So for example, the organisation will have a goal that, hey, we're going to expand threefold in the next year, which means we have got to make ourselves, leaders, capable of creating leaders. And we've got to do that at the next two layers down as well. So now, so that's a phrase that people understand. We now, as leaders, our job is to create leaders and we now realise that we're not very good at that. So that's one way that people think, oh yeah, maybe I need some leadership development help. And it could be around any kind of crisis. That's also a certain time that people will, executive teams will say, yeah, I guess we should look at the way we're working, but pretty infrequently, you know. So, I’m now sitting at the crossroads, wondering where is the greatest impact for me as a practitioner? Is it working with an entire executive team or is it working with those two people on the executive team that are really ready to level up? And so I'm actually in the process of expanding my one-on-one leadership coaching for the latter half of this year, because I want to just really find out and, you know, have a sense at least of how is the return on investment for them and me? You know, where is the greatest impact, basically?

Ula Ojiaku

That's really interesting. And I would be keen to know what the evaluation is at the end of the year, when you've… because it seems like it's an experiment to understand where are you going to make the most impact? One of the things that you are renowned for is the fact that you made some breakthrough contributions, you know, in the field of agile coaching, you, co-founded the Agile Coaching Institute in 2010, and you wrote the book, which is still helping, you know, lots of people, agile coaches and other people who, you know, play servant leadership roles in organisations that are in their journey towards embracing agile ways of working and mindset, coaching agile teams. What led you to that? If you don't mind, if we could take a walk down memory lane, what led you to writing the book and coaching, and co-founding the Agile Coaching Institute?

Lyssa Adkins

So I love this trip down memory lane, and actually it's not totally in the past, because as you say that book is still doing its work in the world, even though it is now 12 years old, it's still selling as much as it ever did, and so right now I'm actually recording what we call a guided study and practice group that we're going to open for ongoing admission. And it's sitting inside of this really beautiful community called Agile Mastery, so like it's the lessons from me, which are something like a book club on steroids. So we're taking just a section of the book at a time, a metabolisable section, there's field work that people are doing in between each session and they're interacting with each other on it, and they're helping each other learn. There are accountability conversations that are going on. And so that sort of action learning cycle takes place to help people really use what's in that book. Because what I kept hearing is like, gosh, I’ve read this book four times and I can't believe I'm still discovering something new, or like I've had this book for 10 years, I just opened it again, like, oh my gosh, how did I not see this before? So there's a lot in it, it's really sort of dense actually. So there's a way in which, although my personal practice is now with leadership teams, I am still very much involved with people who are working with delivery teams and the portfolio level and that sort of thing through helping people use what's in that book well, and where that book came from was my identity crisis. I mean, so we started this podcast by saying, well tell me a little bit about you and I’m like, well, I'm someone who, you know, grows by realising I'm totally in over my head and I don't know how to deal with this. And so instead of doing the same stuff I did before, like, what skill do I need to get? And what I love about people in the agile community is that's a very common mindset. You know, what I think is not so common is allowing the identity crises in and allowing them to inform us and allowing those crises to break us down, which is what I did. I allowed the identity crisis to break me down. And I started writing about that on this little blog called The road from project manager to agile coach. And so this is in 2008 or something like that. And so that's what eventually led to the book. I, you know, gave a talk at a Scrum gathering, my very first Scrum gathering. My very first public speaking thing called The road from project manager to agile coach. And talking about that, now the things I do as an agile coach now that I would have never done as a plan driven project manager, like I would've thought were stupid or ridiculous, or like magical thinking or just wouldn't work, you know, and of course they worked beautifully. So you know, from that point, I got asked to write the book, you know, and I had no intentions of writing a book and actually resisted it for a while, and kept getting all these sort of messages in the phone with people saying, gosh, that's good, you should write that down. And eventually, got in the place where the Coaching Agile Teams book just galloped its way into the world through me, it just, it was, it took one calendar year to write it and really, I didn't start writing it until May and it got turned in in November. I mean, so it just moved through very quickly.

Ula Ojiaku

Wow. Is there anything, because, you know, knowing what you now know, that you would do differently about the process of authoring a book and the messaging in it?

Lyssa Adkins

I think I would use the same process of authoring the book, and I think it's probably worth saying a little bit about what that is, because I actually went and found some mentors, people who've written books and said, so, you know, I don't know how to do this, you know, what's your advice? And so some of, the main process I used was agile. And so I had an outline of the book that had come to me over like a six month period of time before I turned in, before I finally decided to, well, I guess I’ll go ahead and turn in this book proposal. It seems like I already have it written. And I, at the time we were in a Facebook group, I sent that out to the group and I said, put these in business value order. You know, and they put it in a business value order about 90% of the way I would have. And so I started writing the book in business value order. And when I met the publisher in August and the book was due in November, he said, I guess you probably want an extension. You know, cause you surely the book's not going to be ready in November. I'm like, hmm, yeah, it is. He's like, well, how can you be so sure. I'm like, well, I'm writing it in business value order. I mean, so I'm writing the chapters that are most useful to people. So if we get to November 1st and something's not written, it's just not going to be in the book because it's the lowest value content anyway. He was like, wow, really? And he still didn't believe me that I would make the deadline, but I did, November 1st. So, you know, so I think that's an important thing. What was, what was important then, and I think it's probably even more important now is timing. You know, I had the sense that the content of the book was important, and that the sooner it got out there, the better, and that was more important than it being great or amazing, definitely not perfect, definitely more important than being perfect, that's something that I struggle with all the time. So it turned out though that my husband quit his job, retired a little bit early and he became the proofreader of the book and he and I were in this amazing cycle for the last few months of the book. And it all got written, every chapter.

Ula Ojiaku

Wow. That's amazing and inspiring. So what about the mentors? What was their inputs in addition to, you know, telling you how, their own process for writing? Did you also get their input to, you know, proofreading and suggesting?

Lyssa Adkins

We got a lot of people's input to the book. The book went out for review to about 12 people, and there were some really useful things that came back from that, and that affected how it, how it rolled out eventually. But one of my mentors was a guy named Lee Devin, and he's written a few books, but the one he's most known for in the agile world is called Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work is what that book is, and when we got together, he gave me two pieces of advice. He said, don't let your writer and your editor be in the room at the same time. And so what he meant by that is, your job when you are getting content out is just to write and don't even worry about spelling or punctuation or anything. And don't judge it, just get it out, come back in another time with the editor, who's got the red pen. It's like, oh, I don't like that language, this is not even a well-formed idea, punctuation, whatever. Now, to the extent that I can do that, the book flowed very beautifully. I can't tell you that I could do it all the time because I am so critical. Most of us are so critical of ourselves that we are writing and editing at the same time and what that, what that means is that our ideas die before they get to be born. And so the other thing that he recommended as a practice, which I did religiously, was before you start writing content for the day or whatever session you were, open a Word document and just start typing whatever is in your mind. And what you're doing there is you're trying to get your fingers and your body to move as fast as your mind. And so you're literally sort of warming up, you know, like a pianist would warm up or like someone playing soccer would warm up, so you're literally warming up this whole mind body instrument because the mind moves so fast. And it turns out, of course, that through that stream of consciousness writing, there were some real gems in there that got pulled into the book, but usually it was just a bunch of junk, you know, and I only, I set a timer for only five minutes. It didn't take a long time to do it, but the times that I didn't do it, the writing was not as good.

Ula Ojiaku

It's almost like, you know, priming a pump, because when you're speaking, I'm thinking of an ancient well, where you'd have the manual pump, you know, you'd have some prime it before the water starts flowing and you get into the zone and interestingly, that's also what, so Marie Forleo, she's more of a, she has a podcast as well and a course, I mean, what's it called, but the key thing is she said, interestingly, she said the same thing about, you know, just typing or writing and not minding whether it's quality or quantity and at a point in time, you know, you'd get flowing.

Lyssa Adkins

Yeah, exactly. There are all of these beautiful books of writing prompts too, you know, I mean, there's just, you're making me realise I need to start writing more. I think I've let the well go dry a little bit. Yeah. Thank you for the reminder.

Ula Ojiaku

Could we talk about your organisation, because there is your TENWOMENSTRONG Program. Is that still on? And if so, can you tell us about it? What's the vision behind, your putting that organisation together and how is it going right now?

Lyssa Adkins

Yeah. So I am a co-leader and a contributor to TENWOMENSTRONG. It's actually an organisation owned by Carolyn Dragon and Carolyn, and I've known each other for more than a dozen years. We were in a really intense year-long leadership program together in 2010. And so she had this program and this company, TENWOMENSTRONG, and about the time that I sold Agile Coaching Institute in 2017, you know, she would, she said, I'm going to put myself on your calendar every six weeks just for us to have coffee, and I want to hear that you're doing nothing but singing and gardening and whatever you want to do, and that you're actually taking a break because it had been, you know, about a decade of really intense work, following my mission to help professionalise the discipline of agile coaching, you know, and working with so many people on having, you know, such a focus on that for so long and, you know, and it totally worked because now dozens of people are carrying that forward, you know? So my role in sort of, again, priming the pump, we're back to this metaphor, right? So my role along with Michael Spayd, like our role together, priming the pump for agile coaching you know, was done, it was done. And the next question is, well, what do I do next? And so Carolyn, true to her word, we got together every six weeks. What a great friend in that, in that following year, while I was busy transitioning Agile Coaching Institute to its new owner, but not really having a new mission for myself. And she was telling me about the impact of this program she has called TENWOMENSTRONG, and it's basically a program to help women reconnect with their purpose, and go through this process of discovering who I am authentically, you know, what are all of my creativities, especially the ones that I've forgotten about or that I think aren't wanted in my work world or in other parts of my world. And then what's the creative expression I'm here to bring. And so, at the time I had been looking around the agile world and going like, where are the women? I mean, I kept looking and going, like, there are plenty of us at these conferences, there are plenty of us at these meetups there, you know, like there's plenty of women in the agile world, but when you ask, you know, who are the people who I should read, you would get a list of men's names predominantly. Maybe my name would be in there and maybe Esther Derby and maybe a few others, but just, just a few. And so, as Carolyn was telling me the impact of this program, where she'd been running it inside of corporations and publicly, all of a sudden out of my mouth, I was like, oh my gosh, we need that for women in agile. And so we started, I think it was probably in 2019 with virtual and in-person programs, maybe it was 2018. So and then we did those for a few years and then the pandemic hit, and it was a real reassessment of what we wanted to do. And it was also Carolyn's decision, which I thought was a very brilliant business decision, to pull back, because people had enough on their plates, you know, another constant self-improvement like this whole sort of constant self improvement thing we do is another trap, you know? And so she did things that supported women in her circles, women who've been through her program that she attracted through various free offerings. She did things to support them, but not to add anything that would, you know, just contribute to the stress of the moment, they were under enough stress. And so now, as it is, she's now starting to bring back more programs, but she's doing them shorter duration. And so the one that I'm contributing to TENWOMENSTRONG right now is called Influence and Impact in the Agile World and it's a workshop where women come and they share with each other, the places where they're not having the influence and impact they wanted, and they don't know why, they've tried all different kinds of things, and so it's a workshop to take, you know, to create community about that, to actually be vulnerable and say that to other people, and to know that you're going to be received. And then we go through some different steps that allow the women to have some insight about their specific situation and they leave with an idea of what they want to try next. So those are the types of things that she's doing there, couple of other programs, but that's the one that I'm leading with her.

Ula Ojiaku

Now, based on what we've talked about so far, what are the books you would say have influenced your thinking and, you know, your approach as a coach, as a professional?

Lyssa Adkins

Well the books that have influenced my development as a coach and a professional are the ones that are written by the people who are in the coaching schools I went to. So, Co-Active Coaching is one, and then there's just a new book out now that encapsulates what I learned in organisation and relationship systems coaching, and that book is called Systems Inspired Leadership. It encapsulates the coaching approach, but talks about it from a leadership perspective, so it marries those two worlds for me. And then there's the whole genre of learning about Zen Buddhism, which I think has been a really important contribution to my ability to be a good coach. And so Pema Chödrön is someone I read there. There are many, many others, but she's the one that comes to mind right now because she has books that are called, well, hang on, what are they called? Get a load of these titles. The Places That Scare You, Comfortable With Uncertainty, Welcoming the Unwelcome, The Wisdom of No Escape - those are just some of her books. So what she helps me do, is actually what we talked about at the beginning, upgrade my own complexity of mind to work with what actually is happening and not ignore it, or try to bypass it. Downshift my nervous system, and then expand my ability to see the web of the relationship system to expand those five core competencies in myself and in my interactions with other people. So I think that for me, that's an essential piece of learning and, I would say, not so much learning, but leaderfullness, expanding my own leaderfullness, and ability to be in the world and with the world as it is.

Ula Ojiaku

That’s a new word for me, leaderfullness. It's almost like…

Lyssa Adkins

Yeah, it's a funny word, right. I think I picked it up from the Coaches Training Institute. They used to, have said that for years and years, but I think it conveys something really important, which is that leadership is not even primarily anymore about knowing better or doing more or any of these things that we promoted and we lauded leaders for, you know, leadership is about working with the world as it is and bringing to every moment, your authentic leaderfullness, you are full up with leadership. You are a full up, it's like a fully embodied way of expressing leadership and expressing our ability to take in what's really happening, to slow our minds down, to not be hijacked by the situation, to ask some deeper questions, and to look squarely in the face of the things that we don't want.

Ula Ojiaku

Awesome. Are there things that you'd like the audience to know in terms of what you're doing currently?

Lyssa Adkins

Yeah, I would direct people to lyssaadkins.com for what I'm doing currently, and of course you have to know how to spell it. L Y S S A A D K I N S.com. I know it'll be in the show notes too. The thing I think I want people to know is that something really exciting is just now starting, and I'm part of starting it. And I would say it's going to be, the kickoff or the beginning of a worldwide movement in the agile community, all centered around the question, if it's no accident that agile has emerged at exactly this time, what is its role in the planetary challenges and the paradigm shifts we are currently experiencing? That question, both enlivens me and haunts me. I've been holding that question for a long time and the first thing I know that is related to that question that's going to be moving out into the world will happen at Agile 2022 in Nashville in late July. And I am the moderator of a panel, essentially about what is Agile's bigger role and the panellists are all using agile in ways that help make our current situation better, help try to fend us off from the worst of the impacts of our previous behaviour. So there are people who, for example, are working in climate change, they're working and bringing agile into helping democracies arise. They're bringing agile into pulling girls out of poverty and the only option for themselves is sex trafficking, for example. All right. So these are some of the leaders who are going to be speaking about how, what they've been doing to investigate this question of like, if we agilists have something that's useful and we know how to do and be a different sort of person, have a different sort of skills, like what can we add to the people who are already doing this really important work on the planet right now. So I'm really excited to find out how that conversation goes. We're hoping to see that the sparks from that panel fly all over the world and ignite these conversations and agile communities all over the world, because I think we do have a role, and I think we have something that's so different and so useful, and I don't think we need to force it on anyone, but I think we’re good at experiments, you know, so like why don't we run some experiments, go find out, like would what you know, as an agilest be useful for an organisation who's responding to climate disasters, for example.

Ula Ojiaku

That's inspiring. What one thing would you like to leave the audience with?

Lyssa Adkins

You know, there's a quote, I don't even know where it came from that I say to myself all the time and I think that's what I want to leave the audience with. For those of you listening, first of all, thank you for your attention. I know that is the most precious thing we have. So what I'll leave you with is this. It will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end.

Ula Ojiaku

That's a great one. Thank you so much Lyssa for your time, it's been an insightful conversation.

Lyssa Adkins

My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. I've really enjoyed this exploration and I've found some new ideas too

Ula Ojiaku

That’s all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I’d also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!