Agile, Our Planetary Challenges and the Butterfly Effect
“The butterfly effect is the idea that small, seemingly trivial events may ultimately result in something with much larger consequences – in other words, they have non-linear impacts on very complex systems.” On July 25th, 2022, I went on the keynote stage with five very powerful female leaders to talk about “It Was Never Just About Software – Agile and Our Planetary Challenges”. (Panel Moderator/Creator: Lyssa Adkins and fellow panelists: Sally Elatta, Jutta Eckstein, Aanu Gopald, and Pia Fåk Sunnanbo.) All of us with a vision: that Agile was meant for something beyond development and that agile is a powerful companion tool for dealing with complex gnarly and wicked challenges.
Onstage, I spoke about my vision: creating a platform to support a community of Agilists who utilized agility to chip away at problems locally to create hope globally. Within this community platform, we would inspire others with what we did in our local communities, volunteer to help, post projects that needed support, invite our local communities to our community platform, and we would have fun.
I recognize wholeheartedly and with such great knowing (as many of you do), that we as Agilists have the ability to create great teams, great leaders, and can chip away at complex problems. Why not then, take our greatest skills and utilize them where we as a planet need them most? Yet, the only challenge I saw, was that some of us may lack ambition.
Perhaps it is because we do not know practically how this can be done. Or we may think the time commitment is too much for us to handle; that this may take away from the money we need for ourselves and our families. Maybe we feel we need to be an expert before we help. Perhaps we may not want to help out in our local community, or we may feel we do not have the skills to help out. There can be many reasons and for me, I want to see how I can make the pathway to the community easier.
For me, my ambition is to create a community platform, a bridge, so that we can inspire and help others across the bridge. Help make our travels more doable and probable.
And now, is what we are doing a butterfly effect? Could we possibly impact something greater than we know? For now, I am not sure, yet I am willing to try and see. Will you join us?