Paradigms simply are psychological patterns, models, maps that help us not to lose direction in our life. Our paradigms can be useful and helps us develop our teams can even be life-saving if we make appropriate use of them. And this is something we can talk about thanks to our experience in Agile transformation.
However, our instantaneous world of continuous disruption tears us out of an environment that feels comfortable for us and forces us to change our ways every day, instead.
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Such a change requires us to revise our paradigms as a daily process of reflecting and learning: not taking things for granted but being forced to reconsider our position, and that is always unpleasant.
However, there are many people and Agile teams who, to escape the trouble and the hard effort of making progress, are content with sticking to their familiar routines.
- Clinging to routines sustained by obsolete paradigms limits the development of teams and Agile transformations.
- Paradigms are lethal when we consider them immutable truths that are valid for everything.
- Paradigms paralyze us if we use them as walls to protect us against the new ways of thinking and acting.
To tear down these walls, we discovered the strength of Hansei years ago.
In Japanese, Hansei means:
In Agile High Performance Organizations, teams use Hansei as a fixed-cadence introspection, a systematic reflection aligned with Agile value iterations, which allows them to learn from actions, their results and the change in the environment that can affect the correlation between those actions and results achieved.
Hansei makes sure that the paradigms that have guided you today will not limit you tomorrow at an Agile transformation.
In other words, the systematic reflection that allows the teams to iterate on their experiments and learning to achieve the defined objectives, usually referred to as OKR.
Hansei is an intellectual and emotional self-reflection. Hansei involves recognizing the gap between the current situation and the ideal, taking responsibility for finding solutions and translating those solutions into action.
Such an introspection involves a review of successes and failures to determine what works and what needs to be improved.
Failures are the subject of Kaizen and with this exercise, the Agile transformation of what is necessary.
To wrap things up, Hansei is a system of self-reflection, learning and Agile transformation that supports the development and evolution of any team development into an Agile High Performance Organization.
