Evolvagility: Growing an Agile Leadership Culture from the Inside Out

Michael Hamman’s book; “Evolvagility" is an extraordinarily eye opening read. It is basically a blueprint on how to achieve an Agile organisation, by building Sense and Respond leadership and growing people’s minds and relationships. Regardless of the type of change you want to make happen in your organisation, this book is what I suggest your management team and key leaders should read.Most agile books describe a tool or framework and (maybe) how to implement it. Evolvagility takes this two steps further. First, it describes the kind of capabilities and complexity of mind needed to comprehend and use such tools and frameworks, and how to develop that in people. This is like taking the step from recognising a great painting to learning how to paint one yourself. Secondly it describes how to build a work environment that deliberately develops such capabilities in people. To continue the analogy, this is like learning how to build an environment where people become great painters.It may sound like the book is abstract and esoteric but that is not the case. On the contrary, it's dense with knowledge and highly applicable. While still reading the book, I found myself expanding my toolbox and even forgetting that I hadn’t always worked that way. To me, this is the mark of a great book; when the content is extremely eye opening and yet so usable that it naturally fits into and improves upon your current way of working. Said in another way:Once this book has opened your eyes (and I can almost promise that it will) it’s damn near impossible to close them again. Not that you’d want to.Esbjörn HylteforsEnterprise Agile Coach, Stockholm

What an outstanding book for personal development as well as how to apply the learnings to the development of others with a focus on the inside-out. There is a lot to unpack in this book, but it provides a fantastic framework to absorb, reflect, and apply the learnings for yourself and for others.Applying agile to a small or large company requires a focus on so much more than just the practice of agile. It starts with yourself and how your mindset can impact the behaviors and mindset of those around you.

Evolvagility goes beyond mindset into the underlying beliefs and worldviews that determine mindset and instruct our core sense-and-respond capability as individuals and as organisations. It is a sorely needed breath of fresh air in our pursuit of enterprise agility.Michael's ablility to articulate what it means to have inner agility and, further, how to cultivate it individually and organisationally is going to be a key ingredient for the success of our drive to create agile and adaptable businesses that thrive in a VUCA world.

I liked the, "inside/Outside" approach and that the book lent itself well to guiding a very non agile leader through an experience aimed at getting him to peace with the agile transformation he was a part of. The book is well written and has a good flow.

In Evolvagility, Michael Hamman gets to the heart of the shift in thinking required by leaders at all levels in order to cultivate organizational agility. This book takes leading edge theory and practice from the field of leadership development and applies it specifically to the challenge of leading the cultural change that agile methodologies require. A must read for anyone tasked with the success of agile initiatives of all sorts.

A great read for Agile Coaches of the world looking to hone their skills and take their thinking to the next level. One bit of advice, be prepared to focus...to go beyond quick consumption of the words and diagrams and to truly reflect on the insights shared and to dig deeper by exploring the references to the work and insights of additional thought leaders (which there are many).

Hard read so far

With Evolvagility, Michael describes a new mindset that can take an individual and an organization into new, higher realms of learning and understanding.Using the concept of “Sense, Respond, and Sense Making”, Michael takes us through the evolution of individual and collective thinking - from Traditional to Modern and into Post-Modern view points.Evolvagility shows how these viewpoints build on each other and can be brought into our personal and organization daily existence. Michael connects the thinking of agile, along with the theory of developmental psychology, opening a pathway for readers to create a framework on how to interpret the world in which they exist. Michael provides examples of how this framework can be incorporated into our thinking and influence ourselves and those we interact with daily.A highly recommended read for “agilists” and agile coaches who want to gain greater insights into “the why” of how people in their teams think, behave and interact, and for organizational leaders looking to gain further insights into their own mindset and how they can influence organizational change .

If like me you've come across expressions like VUCA and moving from a predict and plan to a sense and respond world. Then this book provides real substance behind those ideas, combined with practices you can use to put these ideas into action. Michael shares an incredible amount in this book, along with a fantastic list of places to learn more and dig deeper into the world of developing our minds to make sense of complexity.