As we celebrate and reflect on 20 years of Agile, LeanInAgile is proud to offer and facilitate increased diversity within our community.

LeanInAgile (LIA) is a community service organization, founded by Leila Rao and Padmini Nidumolu, to increase the value and visibility of women within the Lean and Agile communities. The hallmark of Agile servant leadership is based on stereotypically feminine attributes such as empathy, collaborativeness, effective listening yet there is a significant gap in the number, recognition and compensation of women at the higher levels of Agile leadership.

LIA works to narrow this gap by empowering women to celebrate, learn and grow together through initiatives such as spirals, LIA100 and LIANextGen. We believe that an actively inclusive and diverse community will generate better outcomes for us all and help to realize Agile values and mindset in our workforces and in our communities.

For the Agile20Reflect Festival, we offer to facilitate this discovery and improvement for those who share our mission. Specifically, we have designed a program that incorporates many of the unique LIA value propositions to enable communities to identify barriers their group faces and to co-create their approaches to a more perfect Agile community.

In this 60 minute session, we will start with our signature Offer/Seek technique to explore the systemic and internalized barriers each group faces. Based on this crowd-sourced wisdom, amplified by LIA’s own expertise, we will facilitate an exploratory technique to prioritize overcoming these barriers and will work to realize this commitment through the spiral framework.

Flow and outcomes of the session

• Warm-up activity: hopes & dreams
• What’s keeping you from realizing the dream (barriers activity)
  • Classify barriers — systemic vs internalized
  • What barriers are the priority?
  • Explore how to address barriers
• Power of the collective: Offer-Seek activity
• LIA Spirals : Commitment to address barriers and offer/seek from each other is a Psychological safe space