The Rapid Retro applies the concept of a retrospective to career conversations with guests from the world of Agile, Agile PeopleOps, and Business Agility. In this session, we speak with Pam Ashby, a Marketing & Agile Transformation Consultant, about her journey, lessons learned, and aspirations.
How would you describe yourself and what you do?
So, I’m a career marketer, and I was very excited when I discovered Agile because that approach just makes so much sense for marketers! I’d focused very much on project management for a long time. And when I discovered Agile, I thought, hang on, this is what marketers need. So, I then began evangelizing about Agile marketing and became an Agile marketing expert. And that led me to be a qualified coach, which is very in tune with developing the growth on which effective agility depends. Much of my work is also as a leadership and teamwork specialist. So that’s really been my journey from career marketer to Agile marketing expert, to coaching and working with organizations and teams around leadership and teamwork.
Loved
What have you loved or been most proud of in your career, so far?
What makes me really proud is when people do something different because of me. It’s those moments that are so important to me. And if you like, it’s those sort of micro changes, to behaviours and approach, that have the biggest impact. So I don’t think it’s right to look only for big bang achievements because that’s not the world that we live in. An example might be, a client of mine wrote a book, and that completely changed things for them. The book was at my suggestion. I spotted the topic, the concept of that book, and I introduced them to a publisher. I’d seen an opportunity which I then took. I was then able to support them to get the book published and help to make that happen. I spot opportunities as they emerge and help people capitalise on their value.
I was privileged to be lead for setting up a TEDx conference. I created a virtual team and shifted that TEDx from being a local community event to being a nationwide brand that attracted television broadcasters and some big names.
More recently, I am proud of what’s been achieved for the Agile Business Awards. So this is an initiative where organizations get validation from their peers and from the professional body for business agility, for the achievements and initiatives they’ve been working on. It’s now the only conference that is comprised almost entirely of organization stories – a community event which brings in all the different areas within business agility. The assessment of organisations entering for awards is done by a reviewer community, volunteers. Other organizations choose to support this because it’s a great initiative and is advancing business agility worldwide with lots of different communities involved. So I am very proud of the success of that.
I noticed that there’s two key themes for me, which were the storytelling theme, and using storytelling to propel that growth when it comes to agility, through some of your initiatives there – and also the impact.
So not the big bang impact, but that iterative impact, that kind of micro impact, which is very much aligned to that Agile way of working and a coaching approach. The key is to allow people and organisations to start where they are, and build on their skills and assets iteratively, and always learning as you go.
Lacked
So with all of the experiences that you’ve had, and being able to now reflect on those, is there anything that you would change?
Always. So, you know, agile mindset, we’re always looking to improve. It’s never done. So I wish I had realized really early in my career that it’s not about what I know, it’s about what I do. So I think particularly early in our careers, we tend to be focused on being great professionally and having fantastic results for our objectives. But it’s important to take more time to reflect on the behavioral aspects over the factual, the people over the processes (that’s one of our Agile principles, people over processes). I think more time to reflect and learn, and less time rushing around doing, that would have been really good.
I’m picking up on that bias to action approach and I agree, early on in our careers we get very caught up in the optics, what that looks like, and that can lead us down a road to accolades, qualifications and certifications and everything else, and you may sometimes lose sight of what all of that means in the grand scheme to people, to process, when you’re actually delivering something. I believe you mentioned at the top end of our conversation (before we started recording) that reflection is so important to growth, and sometimes we lose sight of that as well.
That’s right – but I’m also reflecting that there’s always a balance in Agile. So Agile has a bias to action within it. So, we don’t want to reflect too much and do a long period of project initiation planning before we get going. What we want to do is have that bias to action, but do a small chunk, do something safe that we’re not risking the business on, and then get feedback in order to move forward. It’s moving forward incrementally based on what we’re seeing, and noticing how it’s working for us. But I think we do have a bias to action within Agile, because ultimately, it’s about getting value to an audience rather than sitting on the value and spending a lot of organizational time and resources without seeing any value back from it. And an example of that is actually the marketing agility community. When I founded the Marketing Agility Community, it was a question of, well, how do I do this? Do I sit around trying to formulate the most ideal community? But no, I set it up as a meetup and found some amazing collaborators so we became a team and could work together to make it great. Five years later, I’m very proud of this worldwide community. It has around 2,000 members, and we meet regularly and the events are always well attended with active participants. And that came from small beginnings. I set that up with collaborators, because we’re always better together. It’s been fun and we were also involved in rewriting the agile marketing manifesto back in 2021.
The marketing agility community is just a community, so there’s no monetization involved in that. We describe it as a safe place for marketers and others to get together, to find out how Agile relates to marketing. And we’re focusing on building business agility, because we’ve spent a lot of time thinking what’s needed for agility to really work, and how marketing needs to be stitched in and connected right across the whole organization. Our current cadence of events is focusing on AI, and then we’re moving on to exploring different perspectives on leadership. We’re supported by the Agile Business Consortium and their Nine Principles of Agile Leadership is a valuable lens for leadership.
Longed-For
So the final segment of the retrospective, being longed for. And it feels like you’ve added a heck of a lot of value over the work that you have done, but is there anything that you’d like to do more of?
So what I’d like to do moving forward is to use my natural boundary-spanning tendencies to help others join the dots to make strategies really successful, because I feel like as an industry, we have a model for team success. We need to work on that, because Agile is all about the ‘we’, not the ‘I’. We need to move from thinking as individual professionals to thinking as a team where we collaborate to help get things done – because it takes several perspectives to be really successful. We can’t just do again what we did last time, and expect it to work. We need to be adaptive. One brain is rarely enough to achieve this, given the complexity that we’re operating within. But then the next step from that is to join the dots across the organization so that all teams are actually working towards the same strategic goals and contributing to those goals. So you don’t end up with siloed agile teams, which would be very sad, wouldn’t it? Because what we’re about, in agile – we are about keeping things connected, and collaboration is at the core of what we do.
You’ve just sort of reminded me of a quote that came to mind, “manage the system and lead the people”. And I think what you’re kind of talking about there, bringing all the strands together and joining the dots when it comes to business agility is effectively that. It’s bringing those elements of the system together and leading everyone to the same outcomes.
Yes, absolutely. And, that’s why business agility is more important than Agile, because it’s so important to have the whole business working in the same direction, so that we’re getting the value from collaboration at every level.
Do you have any advice for anyone who’s followed a similar career path to you or anyone who’s looking to move into business agility, as a career?
I sort of smile when I think of somebody that’s followed a similar career path. I think in the future, we’re not going to get those similar career paths. So, you know, if you think about it, I’ve run marketing teams globally, but then I’ve also been a journalist working alone covering things like product launches with Lord Sugar. I’ve interviewed Ken Livingston and I’ve done all sorts of different things that have brought me to where I am – I think it’s the breadth that for me has worked. So maybe one thing would be if you are broad, that’s a strength, and you need to realize it’s a strength. The future of business isn’t going to be about discrete specialist skill career paths, I think it’ll be about the talent demonstrated by a combination of skills and behaviours.
And also don’t feel that you have to have all the answers, because guess what, there are no answers. All we can do is put our brains together to get the best outcome for now and try and get the value that our organizations need right now in the best possible way. So my advice for anyone is, never feel that you have to do it alone because you’re better together. And also think about having a coach or doing some training as well as working and collaborating with your team members. You don’t have to do it alone.
The element that really stood out for me there was that kind of having that breadth and depth of the T-shaped or comb-shaped approach to your skills and expertise. And of course, drawing on other people to collaborate and bounce ideas from and in some cases you may end up writing a book, you never know, if you’ve got the right coach on your side.
Where can people find you?
On LinkedIn is the best place to find me. Feel free to message me, or you can check out my posts and articles. As a consultant, I love to support people and organisations in their journey to get more value for their effort.
That wraps up this Rapid Retro with Pam Ashby! Her journey through marketing, Agile transformation, and business agility is packed with insights, and her emphasis on storytelling, iterative impact, and collaboration truly highlights what it means to be agile in today’s world.
Stay tuned for more Rapid Retro conversations, where we continue to explore careers, agility, and the ever-evolving world of work!