By Anton Rossouw.
Sport elicits emotions in most people. This has been true from the day that societies, communities and tribes have had free time to play more and be active in things other than survival. This was due to the emergence of organisation and technology.
Reflection on and passion for sport ranges from individual achievement events to teams competing agains each other in many different ways.
The Greeks created the Olympics games as a civilised response to not go to war and kill or get killed. Sport is an anti-thesis to war as a competitive response and much more acceptable. Lets replace all war with the fun of sport - but remain vigilant that sport does not become war - just a wild idea!
The Aztecs played powerful ball games that created focus points for their civilisation.
The English empire brought sport to many of their outposts. Thats why we have to thank them for our Sri-Lanka, Indian and Zimbabwe cricket teams.
And its also used as a powerful metaphor in business narrative and stories. We talk of "teams", "kicking goals", and in project management "kick-off", "ballpark figures" and "on target". Others are "jump the gun", "the ball is in your court" and "don't take your eye off the ball".
So overall its use is in positive, inspiration and motivational language. Its synonymous with performance, trying harder, achieving our best, going further, faster and quicker.
It also applies to being "Agile" - so sport metaphors are ideal to use to illustrate the change in paradigm and thinking, energy, passion, practice, learning, improvement, and nimbleness required to become an agile enterprise.
We know that in order to implement the Agile organisation we need to "jump over some hurdles" to "create a high performance team".
Lets when transforming to an Agile enterprise continue "playing the game", "practice to lift our performance", "climb the highest mountain" and "excel against our competition" and "hit the bulls-eye".
Agile Enterprise as a Sport?
Scrum Masters, Sprints, training bootcamp, being coached, feedback from our recent game, improving our score. Yes, agile terminology already use a lot of sport metaphors. The video below done by those crazy and fun guys in Benelux offers the best illustration of how the game could be played: