Intentionality and Agile Teams
Intentionality is critical to nearly every complex, valuable, or long-term goal. If you don’t have a detailed understanding of why you’re doing something, you lack a critical decision-making guide and your opportunities to fail begin to multiply. The range of potential pivoting justifications broadens to the point that abandonment becomes an option when things become even slightly difficult.
It’s possible for mature, agile, and otherwise highly functional software engineering teams to operate with surprisingly little intentionality. You can probably think of examples. Maybe your team is an example; however, in nearly every case, intentionality is going to improve the way a team operates, makes decisions, and cultivates a healthy culture. While there are many ways to introduce more intentionality to your work, I firmly believe in one model that promises significant results relative to its degree of implementation effort.
CMV
This approach ensures that your goals’ intentions are well-defined by looking at them from three separate perspectives. I call this CMV.
CMV stands for the three perspectives: Credo, Mission, and Vision. These are terms you may have heard associated with businesses or brands, but they’re valuable tools for professional, personal, entrepreneurial, or creative goals as well.
Here’s a breakdown:
Credo
Beliefs about what’s valuable, important, or desirable
A Latin word that means a set of fundamental beliefs or a guiding principle
Begins with “I believe…”
Example: I believe that individuals in malaria-afflicted countries should have the opportunity to live long, healthy lives.
Mission
Your purpose or calling. What you’re hoping to accomplish.
Begins with “To…”
Example: To increase malaria treatment availability in afflicted countries
Vision
An image of the Mission accomplished (or being accomplished)
An ideal future state (framed within the scope of your influence)—though not necessarily an end state—which would be possible only if your Mission was successful
Reflects high standards
Creates a visual scene
Worded in the present progressive (“it is”) or present perfect progressive (“it has been”) tense
Example: The cities and towns of historically malaria-afflicted areas are bustling with healthy humans; when doctors encounter a case of malaria, they’re genuinely alarmed and puzzled because it's so rare an occurrence.
Note that your Mission is an actionable manifestation of your Credo, and your Vision validates your Mission. Everything flows together.
You can (and should) develop a CMV for every remotely complex goal or undertaking in your life that you value. Scale doesn’t matter; the exact same structure can be applied to anything from cutting carbs or managing social anxiety to building a business empire.
A CMV:
Brings everything you do into focus and lets you make progress toward your goal with intentionality
Ensures you have a quickly accessible and simple way to illustrate your intentions, motivations, and purpose to others
Helps inform decisions and risk tolerance
Reminds you what to value/prioritize vs. what to disregard
Sparks insight and provides guidance when you’re unsure about your next step
Keeps you more intimately engaged with your goal and therefore less likely to give up when things become difficult
CMVs for Technical Teams
The above general guidance is applicable to personal, professional, entrepreneurial, or creative undertakings of any sort, but when crafting CMVs for/with a technical team, there are a few more considerations:
You only really have to share your Mission.
Viewed practically, your Credo is a tool for defining and understanding your Mission, and your Vision is a test against which you can measure your success and stay focused. As such, your Mission is in many cases the aspect of your CMV that external stakeholders will care about and therefore the one that’s most important to share widely.
Many of the teams I’ve led have stated their entire CMV on a “welcome to the team” informational page or something of the sort, available to new team members and anyone who cares to learn about them, but shared their Mission more widely (e.g. at the top of documents, in their primary Slack channel topic or description, and in email signatures).
If you’re a leader, guide from afar.
Many years back, I changed roles and began leading a new and unfamiliar group of software engineering teams. Once I understood the teams, their current goals, and their respective histories, I was tempted to propose a CMV, but instead opted to gather everyone together to create one democratically. Given my familiarity with the model, I attended and was happy to provide clarity and guidance when it was requested, but otherwise tried my best to remain hands-off. The exercise went really well, and even the most skeptical engineers on the teams found themselves deeply engaged in both the process and resulting CMV. I’ve since used the same approach with great success.
Keep your Credo and Mission simple and clever.
If your Credo and Mission are simple and clever, they’ll be more memorable.
In Jeff Lawson's book, Ask Your Developer, the Twilio CEO and founder writes: Values can be empty words on the wall, or they could be guiding principles used daily by employees to make countless decisions. What takes them off the wall and into practice is two things: memorability and mechanisms. If they’re memorable, then employees are more likely to remember them, refer back to them, and want to use them in daily interactions.
Due to their narrative nature, Visions may sometimes need to be a bit long, and so I purposely leave them out of this point.
Your CMV doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
While CMVs should exist on the team level, they should also celebrate and work within the overarching parent organization’s goals and values, whether explicit or implicit. If the team’s values or CMV conflict with the organization’s at large, then you have a much larger problem on your hands.
Recognize that intentionality is an investment.
When you feel like you’re running on a treadmill, it can be hard to justify spending time and energy on something “big picture” or philosophical; however, you shouldn’t underestimate intentionality maturity’s potential to circumvent dysfunction, empower individuals to make decisions, distribute accountability, and reduce time spent debating direction. While often difficult to quantify its payoff, it does pay off.
Learn More
Want to go deeper? I go into much more detail about CMVs and dive into some real-world examples here.
Intentionality is just one of the fundamental concepts I explore in my book, Foundations of Execution.
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You’re ambitious. You’re driven. You’re creative, believe in your vision, and know what you’re capable of. But like most, you often find it difficult to make progress toward the things you value.
When it comes to accomplishing personal, professional, entrepreneurial, and creative goals, the world is bombarding you with bullshit guidance — coddling mantras of positivity and motivation devoid of practical action. Bullshit sounds good. Bullshit feels good. But bullshit will fail you in the long run nearly 100% of the time.
No more bullshit.
Let’s change tactics. Foundations of Execution won’t motivate you; it will give you the tools you need to execute despite the lack of motivation that will inevitably befall you. It won’t train you to abstain from excuses; it will give you the tools to strip all power from the excuses that will inevitably bubble to the forefront of your consciousness. It won’t argue the same tired case for self-discipline and convince you to work against your nature; it will show you how to circumvent your nature when it undermines your interests.
As shockingly simple as it may seem, three behaviors tend to separate those who struggle from those who consistently execute on their goals; and by the time you’ve finished reading this book, you’ll have mastered all three. You’ll come away with repeatable habits that address not just how you tackle complex undertakings, but also how you think, behave, and approach problems in all aspects of your life. It’s an irreverent, philosophy-first, whole-self approach to execution that will change you forever.
Paperback & Kindle
181 Pages