A Recipe for Agility

While my mother was present in our home my entire life, I consider my maternal grandmother, Bonnie, to be my "mother". She was my primary caregiver growing up, nurturing me and my sister consistently during the gaps when my mother was unable to care for us because she was struggling through frequent bouts of mental or physical illness. My Grandma taught me basic life skills like cleaning and cooking which encouraged me to become an independent and self-sufficient adult. She was an amazing role model for work ethic, a spirit of persistence and a heart filled with patience. My greatest desire in life was to become my Grandma when I "grew up" because she was the best example of an amazing human being with a pure heart of a servant leader.

My friend, Karen, invited me to join her Bunco club…the "Bunco Bees", which is a group of 15-16 women who rotate "hosting" a game at their home once a month on a Saturday afternoon to shoot craps, eat snacks and have fun. It is a very nostalgic game for me because I grew up watching my mom, grandma and other women in our close circle of family and friends playing the game. I really love the format of this Bunco club --- each month is organized around a "theme" with this month Derby and Mother's Day. The Kentucky Derby is Louisville's claim to fame as the host city for the fastest and most exciting two minutes in horseracing. Mother's Day in the US is celebrated on the second Sunday of May. In the spirit of both celebrations, each Bunco Bee was encouraged to wear a Derby hat and bring a picture of their Mom and one of her recipes to share along with a story about their mother. Being the literal neurodivergent that I am….I interpreted that I had to bring an actual recipe and share a copy with the group. Other Bunco bees "followed" the intended instructions by bringing actual prepared dishes to share!!! In the spirit of looking for the "silver lining", my deviated interpretation of the instructions was the inspiration for the blog post this week. #makinglemonsfromlemonade

In the 1980's, there were no cellphones and a simple call out of the area was considered "long distance" with a per-minute upcharge that could get very costly when having long or regular conversations. My family was not wealthy, so long distance phone conversations were reserved for special occasions or checking on family after catastrophes like bad weather or a death. Grandma and her family "down South" preferred to communicate regularly in writing by mailing cards, letters, pictures and recipes by US Mail every week. Since communication was written, it was very important to my Grandma that I learned to demonstrate good "penmanship"…because the message is lost if the receiver of the message can't read or interpret what you wrote. My Grandma loved to tell stories, which she encouraged me to do in these biweekly letters to our distant family. As an adult, I would come to fully appreciate that a basic exercise like copying a recipe would reap benefits beyond practice in simply learning to follow instructions. Many years later, I am still impressed at how creative Grandma was in creating opportunities for me to co-mingle, learn and practice life skills.

It is no coincidence that recipes were highly valued in our family because my Southern grandma emphasized hospitality as the number one priority with food at the center of hosting. One of my favorite things to do with my Grandma was to cook. My Grandma's love language was cooking to actually feed your belly and metaphorically fill the soul. She was notorious for clipping recipes from the newspaper or "trying" a dish recommended by a family member shared in a recipe. By nature, she was a very structured person who relied on recipes to cook, rarely deviating from the ingredients, steps and instructions for how to cook a dish, dessert or casserole. And while I appreciate the emphasis on process conformance, I have a creative side and natural disposition to experiment. And while my style and approach was different from my Grandma's method of cooking, the foundational practices that she instilled in me about the importance of following instructions was critical to building the blocks to which I have elaborated on over the years. With her encouragement and reinforcement mastering basic life skills, the psychological safety that she provided gave me the confidence to try deviations, improve, and even fail.

My inheritance from my Grandma before she died was priceless. She left me with a set of cast iron skillets, CorningWare porcelain bakeware and four ZipLoc gallon bags containing sixty years of recipes handwritten by family, clipped from the newspaper or salvaged from the underside of CoolWhip containers. Soon after my Grandma left this earth, I made a commitment to preserve my treasures by organizing into an affinity grouping of three-hole binders labeled "casseroles", "desserts", "appetizers", "meat" recipes. I did scan the recipes electronically but encased the originals in plastic sheet protectors. When I pulled out the first binder and flipped through to find a recipe to share at Bunco, I found this recipe written in my seven or eight year old handwriting for "Golden Pecan Pie" that my Grandma lovingly kept safe for over twenty years. I don't recall a vivid memory of reproducing this actual recipe, but I suspect it survived because I had a spelling error that my Grandma marked out when I demonstrated to her my completed work product. Since spelling and grammar were critical components for the recipe to be considered "done" and ready to mail, I am certain that as "product owner" she made me "re-do" the recipe with correct spelling, so that the recipe was acceptable to send to a family member by mail.

As I read the "Golden Pecan Pie" recipe through the eyes of an adult, it occurred to me how practical, lean-minded and efficient my Grandma was in teaching me about living daily life. She embraced and demonstrated the proverbial "kill two birds with one stone" mindset that I am certain imprinted very early as a child struggling to survive during the Great Depression on a farm in rural Mississippi. Life circumstance coupled with an unfailing natural instinct to survive forced her to adapt because they were abandoned by her father when she was only seven years old…leaving my Grandma, her younger brother (Tobie Gene) and her mother (Granny Carrie) to figure out how to continue running their farm, which was their sole source of income. She valued practical daily life skills balanced with an emphasis on growth, learning and education. A simple exercise like copying a recipe was more than just learning to copy something exactly. It was an exercise in quality, communication, and process adherence.

As a servant leader, Agile coach and SAFe SPC, I teach and model foundational values, behaviors and principles for best practices/frameworks that have been built upon the growth mindset that my Grandma fostered in me from a very young age. Scaled Agile is a model for business agility that solves for enterprise complexity where an organization must scale beyond a single Agile team to deliver a continuous flow of value to customers. SAFe v6 is founded on ten lean-agile principles --> Principle #6 to "make value flow without interruptions", which aligns quite nicely to a method for cooking using a recipe. Some of those life lessons learned from cooking recipes with my Grandma have crossed over in my professional life and career as an Agile servant leader and practitioner. Much like following instructions for baking a pie, whole product development for Business Agility also relies on using PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Adjust) for success.

Planning to execute on the recipe is a critical first step for cooking success by reconciling or purchasing required ingredients and validating minimum necessary tools are available and operational. If there is an unknown condition or missing ingredients then the cooking process stalls or hits roadblocks that must be remediated to avoid an unfinished work product being thrown in the trash. --> PLAN enables flow and supports risk management

Recently I saw a video on Facebook about a "breakfast muffin" baked in a muffin tin using cheese, bacon, ham and a tortilla rolled up, cut into pinwheels and topped with an egg. I "borrowed" the concept and followed some pre-requisites like oven temperature and time to bake but I innovated on what I considered a very boring recipe with a limited list of ingredients by adding chorizo and country sausage as substitutions for ham. Instead of Boursin cheese, I used cream cheese blended with Kerry Gold herb and garlic butter. Instead of sharp cheddar, I added vintage cheddar and green onions. I adjusted the recipe that alled for cracking one egg on top of each pinwheel, choosing to "scramble" the eggs, which allowed me to adjust the amount of the egg for each "muffin". This innovation was made possible by my experience understanding the flavors of different sausages combined with a variety of cheeses and adjusting for yield of mixed eggs. I am proud to say that my family loved this dish for Sunday brunch and I will be making this a regular dish for rotation because not only was it "good" to eat but also offers added value since the individual servings are preservable for future meals as individual portion sizes. #innovation #leanthinking #continuousimprovement

In an upcoming blog edition, I will share how I repurposed a tool/technique from Agile for managing teenager household chores using backlog "definition of done" (DoD) for ensuring process compliance and quality.

Successfully "doing" cooking from a recipe is dependent on basic known conditions even if the constraints are not explicitly stated/written in the recipe. For example, if a cake recipe includes instructions to bake at 350 degrees then this is the optimal temperature AND also requires a mechanism (like an oven) for baking the final work product. --> DO enables delivery using best practices and standards

Experience and practice helps avoid repeated pitfalls and constant failure by influencing future cooking efforts and success. Experience is an enabler of learning and adaptability, particularly where ingredients or process deviations are not possible because using an alternative would result in a failed product. Experience and reflections may inspire innovation --> ADJUST with retrospectives for enabling test & learn mindset and accelerating continuous learning

Using a small taste test prior to cooking ingredients or after the recipe has completed is critical to checking and demonstrating the final work product (dish) meets quality standards and expectations. -- CHECK enables quality and ensures that the final work product delights the customer