Mindful Agility

In this Mindful Agility podcast episode on procrastination, hosts Mirela Petalli and Dan Greening delve into the hidden costs of procrastination. Have you wondered how procrastination could impact not just your work, but also your mental and physical health? This episode uncovers shocking research findings from Sweden that link procrastination to poor health outcomes. Tune in to discover an innovative tool developed by productivity...

Want to learn the secret behind Warren Buffett's success? Curious about how SpaceX rockets are built? This episode of Mindful Agility podcast uncovers the power of low-cost experiments and how they can propel your success. Hosts Dan Greening and Dan Dickson discuss how to use low-cost experiments to reduce risk and increase reward, and suggest practical steps to apply this concept in your own life. Learn how to turn your signi...

Toxic work and home environments are all around us: intimidation, humiliation, secret discussions, manipulation. Those environments are psychologically unsafe. When we and those around us feel unsafe, we become fearful, stop learning, and fail to improve.

Discover the power of psychological safety in fostering high-performing teams, as we dive into techniques to cultivate trust and open communication. Learn from Google&apo...

Discover the secret behind successful partnerships in this episode on incremental reciprocity. Start with a small task without expecting anything in return, and ask your partner to match your effort. As you both grow, this technique helps measure reliability and build trust. Famous duos like Lennon-McCartney and Oprah Winfrey-Gayle King used this method to achieve greatness. Enhance your teamwork and friendships by trying this appr...

Unlock the mindful power of the Five Whys technique in this intriguing episode, with agile coach Dan Greening and corporate fixer Dan Dickson. 

The Five Whys method has transformed businesses and personal lives, revealing hidden causes of problems, and promoting safer, more lasting improvements. Hear intriguing stories, like how Toyota fixed a recurring production line issue for good, and how Dan Greening hosted a Five Whys "pa...

By developing two uncommon skills, mindfulness and agility, you can achieve true success in most fields of life and work. You must define success on your own terms, rather than rely on others' metrics or recipes. Imitating others who have been successful works fine to get your feet wet, but it won't make you successful, because the world has new competitors, and you are a different person.

Mindfulness practices d...

Learning from failure ought to be easy. Good experiments should fail, about half the time, especially if they aren't costly. And agile experiments are designed to be low cost. But failure, it turns out, freaks us out, especially when we are new to a field. That might explain why agile transformations fail at a very high rate, even though the benefits of agile are well studied. Folks in an agile transformation are new to agile,...

Our clumsiness in life creates most of our suffering. We haven't practiced the skills we need to be happy. We don’t see what’s going on around us. We don’t see the causes early enough to prevent a train-wreck in work or life. And when we don’t know how to distinguish truth from delusion, well that leads to a world of hurt.

But if we don't have a purpose, should we or anyone else care that we mess up?

Mi...

The faster and better we take action against impediments, the more successful we'll be, according to renowned military strategist John Boyd, developer of the OODA Loop.

The OODA loop is observe, orient, decide and act. It’s how we take action in new situations and succeed. In this episode of the Mindful Agility podcast, Tom Looy explores how John Boyd used the OODA Loop to help fighter jet pilots, and ultimately whole...

When we fail, we can easily fall into anxiety, guilt, or depression. But failure can lead us toward success. A simple Google search reveals many famous people discuss their failures and subsequent successes. We can succeed through failure, too!

In this episode of the Mindful Agility podcast, Mirela Petalli, Matthew Zimmerman, Dan Dickson and Dan Greening discuss an episode of Matt's life. He moved to Ireland, thinking...

People around us need help. Our inclination is to rush in, fix the problem, and rush out. After all we have stuff we need to do, ourselves. But we can get stuck. And stay stuck. For months.

Dan Dickson wanted his friend’s pet project, a wine store in Manhattan, to succeed. Dan had the skills to add online transactions to their web site. But, he didn’t want to get stuck doing all the work forever.

Dan Dickson built...

In this episode Christina Smith, a certified scrum master, shares how she started using scrum and mindfulness not only in her work, but also her parenting.

Like most parents, Christina wants her children to lead happy and fulfilling lives, both now and when they are adults. She also needs them to take out the trash now and then too. Stressed with trying to be a perfect parent, Christina decided to experiment and apply the ...

In this third and final episode on fabled merchandiser, Ron Johnson, we discuss the startup Enjoy.com, which turned $500M of invested capital and goodwill into nothing. This was Johnson's second attempt as a CEO. What did he learn from that failure? How did it shape his new company? 

Your co-hosts, Dan Dickson and Dan Greening, bring perspectives of traditional and agile management, finance and technology, retail and ...

This is the second episode of a three-part series on fabled merchandiser, Ron Johnson, and how he failed to restore JC Penney to its former leadership in retailing. In this episode we're going to be talking very explicitly about business mindfulness and how it applies.

If you want to understand "business mindfulness," this is the episode for you. If you'd like some background on scaling mindfulness, you...

As an executive working for other CEOs, Ron Johnson succeeded wildly in redesigning Target stores and building Apple Stores from scratch. But then, as a CEO, Ron Johnson crashed and burned two later companies.

Join Dan Dickson, a seasoned retail executive and Harvard Business School grad, and Dan Greening, co-host of Mindful Agility, as we talk about Ron Johnson's first failure, JC Penney.

Major shifts in man...

If we want lasting change, emotions may be our strongest opponent. 

When forced to change, people feel fear, rage, anxiety, and other emotions.

Emotions are designed to satisfy basic needs: defend, fight, flight, reproduce. But when they overwhelm us, they shut down logic. They’re great when we’re suddenly confronted by a lion in the African savanna, we don’t have to take time to think. We just feel fear and run. But when b...

Nurse Heather's four year old son, Jack, likes to put his fingers in his mouth. But this can lead to dental problems in the future. She heard the episode about Matt learning to keep track of his keys, by noticing that he was setting them down and saying "I'm putting my keys on the counter." Heather wondered whether it could help her son.

We also discover that Heather has bigger plans, involving her husb...

We all have hapless friends who would lose their head if it wasn't attached. Maybe we are that friend! Matt recently moved in with his girlfriend, Mirela Petalli (our co-host), and Matt realized losing his keys kept making them late. Can mindful agility help?

Matt and Mirela worked together. Matt is familiar with Scrum, an agile technique; Mirela is familiar with mindfulness. Together they take us on an exploration of how mindf...

Our stories provide a shorthand self, which gives us focus while the stories make sense, but they put our happiness at risk. If we imagine them to be complete and permanent we are doomed to suffer. 

When we release our attachment to our stories, we create freedom. Only through our actions will we transform ourselves and our world. The stories are only decorative.

We talk with Noah Rasheta about the stories around him, as he lives a l...