Dancing with Elephants

Today, we are going to dive deeper into what is my first audience requested topic for this newsletter which is on how to effectively engage with senior stakeholders.

So who are those stakeholders? More often than not they are those busy executives with calendars more complex than tetris, who can make or break your transformation with a single head shake or facial expression. The ones who might use words like "Agile" and "Scrum" in a conversation but sometimes seem to have a different definition or interpretation than you do.

I like to think of engaging senior stakeholders as "dancing with elephants". They are powerful, graceful, commanding respect, and can either be your greatest allies or accidentally squish your carefully garden of Agile practices without even noticing. Learning to dance with them, to move in harmony rather than get trampled, is an art that can make the difference between a transformation that thrives and one that merely survives.

So let's go into some practical approaches that have worked for me and many teams I've worked over the years.