E130: Agile Sustainability Manifesto with Ines Garcia

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In this episode, I share an interview with Ines Garcia, who is one of the creators of the Agile Sustainability Manifesto. She emphasizes the importance of adapting sustainable behaviors to individual lifestyles and advocating for change through personal example rather than pressure. She stresses that meaningful change starts with individual willingness to be part of the solution and that tipping points in sustainability are not linear but require collective effort.

We also explore her work in agile sustainability, including the Agile Alliance Sustainability Initiative and collaborative projects such as her books and a community-driven recipe collection with proceeds that support charitable causes. We also discuss the concept of biomimicry, using nature-inspired solutions for innovation and process improvement, and discusses the integration of sustainability into business practices.

00:00 Introduction to Lean Six Sigma for Good
00:17 Meet Ines Garcia: Agile and Sustainability Expert
02:01 Understanding Agile and Scrum
04:18 Agile Sustainability Manifesto
06:26 Exploring the Four Main Values
09:07 Challenges and Solutions in Sustainability
16:20 Ines Garcia’s Work and Impact
20:40 Books and Resources by Ines Garcia
23:04 Practical Applications of Biomimicry
31:35 Final Thoughts and Call to Action

Listen to the podcast on this page, download it on your favorite podcast player (search “Lean Six Sigma for Good”) or watch the entire interview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ0b8XF-IhE

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Have you ordered the book, “Lean Six Sigma for Good: Lessons from the Gemba (Volume 2)?” The book is made up of 8 chapters written about experiences from Lean and Six Sigma practitioners, to give you tips and tricks to help you work with nonprofits in your area. All proceeds donated to charity. Now available in audiobook as of Feb 2024. You can also order Volume 1 released in 2019.

Transcript
Note: may contain typos and errors, generated with AI

Brion Hurley

Today I have Ines Garcia. She does some work in Agile and sustainability, and I asked her to come on after she had me on as a guest on her podcast. Welcome, Ines. Can you give us a little background about your experience with Agile and business and process improvement?

Ines Garcia

Sure. Thank you, Brion. I will probably fit first the Agile Alliance session with yourself over LinkedIn. So that should be easy to find for people. Very insightful conversations. I’m glad to swap roles today. Thank you for having me. In terms of background, I’ve done lots of different things over my life. And education-wise, I studied art for two years. I have a double degree in communication, PR, advertisement, marketing, Microsoft State, things like that. I’m A certified Scrum Master Advanced Professional. So that path I have more than 25 certifications in the Salesforce product suite, that Salesforce architecture to multiple different products and different acquisition bundles that they have. I’m also a circular economy professional from Cambridge University. and a biomimicry practitioner. Maybe we’re going to what that means later. But that’s basically went through an immersion through the Learn Biomimicry, which is endorsed through the Biomimicry Institute. I think this Always Be Learning is a great mantra. So I put myself through the University of Oregon Permaculture Design Certificate Advanced. So that’s basically regenerative land design in short. So that’s a little bit education-wise on me.

Brion Hurley

Okay. I think those are all really interesting topics. And maybe we’ll start with Agile and Scrum. Can you explain that for people who might not be as familiar with those approaches and how that ties into process improvement in general?

Ines Garcia

So once upon a time, the concept of this manifesto of Agile came about more than 1/4 of century ago. So it’s been around beyond and before that, right? And that was people in the tech industry coming together that they were doing things differently and decide to put their differences aside and find commonalities. And this is really where it came about. And the idea is to have a better way of working, where you can increase predictability, you can reduce risk. You stop talking about resources of the people involved and really tapping into everybody’s potential and becoming better at what you do because we put so much effort into what we’re doing. Traditionally, you don’t really look about how you do it and how you help yourself so that you can become 15% better week on week. One of the very common frameworks of helping A-team to get into a little bit of structure and is this crime framework and have certain touch points that you do with your team about what we’re going to do, how we’re going to do it, how did it go? And then are we getting closer to where we say we’re going to go? Encapsulate that uncertainty as part of the process, then you suffer less. That’s the idea.

Brion Hurley

Yeah, it’s an alternative approach to like a waterfall model, which is a plan And so what I like is that Scrum and Agile allow for that adjustment very quickly and frequently to look at what do we need to do right now to move this forward, to get some feedback and then decide based on that feedback, what’s our next plan right now versus we have this long drawn out schedule that is supposed to work perfectly, but it starts to get off track very soon. I found that that’s a very similar approach to how we do process improvement is having feedback quickly from the people that we’re trying to help or the process we’re trying to change. I think it works in nicely. Can you talk about the Agile Sustainability Manifesto?

Ines Garcia

So if we think that the agile manifesto, the first manifesto that was a quarter century ago, many things have happened since. And I believe that it’s really time for us as practitioners to take our own practice up a notch. If the kind of work that we do is about inspect and adapt accordingly to how things are moving and changing, of a changing space, we should also do that in our own way of working. because we talk about the how we do things, not just about what we do. And so for the agile professionals or anybody in change management, product, process improvement, I really do argue that we are a key place because we have access and we have a skill. We have access to key areas of the organization and then we have skills already under our belt to help and leverage and help moving towards something. that will leave the place better than how we found it. Frustration. And frustration, I try to remind myself that it’s just excess energy. And so I always try to funnel that excess energy into something productive and in something of value. In the Agile Alliance, we have this sustainability initiative. And there you have bite-sized related content and you have tools for free to use with your team. And also you have the manifesto there. So it has four. There are values, 8 principles, and it builds upon, right? It’s not a scrap, but building upon the existing one. And also it’s alive, which is different from other things, because this is an emergent area. So the best we can do is poke. and adapt from what the poking has helped us learn and accordingly continue poking into the next. There is a particular value about abundance rather than scarcity, which has its own little explanation. So yeah, we keep moving as we learn.

Brion Hurley

Would it help if we walk through the four main themes?

Ines Garcia

Yeah, sure. So the four main values is we value people and planet over profit. So it’s this idea that we’re going to prioritize the well-being of place. So place being ecosystems, biodiversity, and also of people, of individuals, of communities, of future generations. So sometimes when we do product development, we think about our customers as a chair in the room. But also we should be thinking about the room itself as an idea of the planet that we live in, right? We don’t live on the planet, we live within the biosphere. So we value those things more over short-term financial gains, fostering that idea of regeneration, of living it better and having an equitable world. So that’s one, people, planet, over profit.

Brion Hurley

I’m in the US, and so it feels like heavy on profits. If it also benefits the planet and the people, then it’s okay. But that tends to be the predominant idea that profit is the driver. That’s putting us in a very dangerous situation where we’re having to only deal with these problems when it becomes financially a problem. And that’s too late. It’s too late to fix these things at that point. So that’s definitely part of my business in consulting, trying to get organizations to think triple bottom line or bring in the people and planet perspective as well. That’s what helped me align quickly to the manifesto is saying that that has to be an important part of any business. It is how they become sustainable. They can’t just make profits till there’s no more materials to use and then they go quickly out of business. That’s not good for their business in the long run either.

Ines Garcia

And I think for me, there is a couple of things on the narrative of profit. One is that profit may be a condition to stay in the game. You are to be a profitable organization to keep going. But profit is not an organizational mission or purpose. So we need to remind ourselves about that. In terms of profit, today we already have figures. We know that places are insurable. We know the cost and the hidden cost of things. So let’s not blind ourselves and be honest into the financial decisions that we take. So yeah, there is, maybe I can send you a link of a session that we did about the business case for sustainability and it’s literally looking at the financials and the different perspective with the different stakeholders that you have so we can divert But you have certain myths and I think it’s time for us to confront them. So we were talking about the people and planet of a profit. The value to is, and in not a particular order, but it’s this idea of adaptability, over rigidity. It keeps going in this theme of process improvement, right? We embrace change. That’s an opportunity for resilience, for regeneration, for valuing the skills of adaptability, I think become more and more important as we go on this quest, rather than very specific plans ahead of time, because things are going to move very quickly. And we talk about from climate perspective, from policy perspective, from people’s behavior. So it has a lot of flavors here. Then the value of abundance over scarcity. we are governed by natural laws, regardless if we know of it or not, if we like it or not. And nature is abundant. It will flourish where you may think there is nothing left. And there are spaces, ecotones, where things meet edges. Those things have a huge increase of exchange of resources. And so if we stop thinking about scarcity. And yes, we have a lot of things against us. And yes, we may feel we don’t have enough influence, but let’s think from the narrative. Let’s move from this narrative into ones of abundance where we build up on each other, where ideas, where we win, win, win into the decisions that we take, away from blaming one another and working together because we want to go far, we better go together. Like the SDG 17, Sustainable Development Goal 17 is partnership for the goals. So we even have it there. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And then the fourth one, which is we value more over consumption. One of the things that happens on these discussions is the carbon channel vision. I think that’s a great visual explaining that when we have a challenge at hand, we tend to look at it quite face into the specific item. And we talk a lot about carbon accounting and all the emissions that we have equivalence to how much carbon it is. But there are many things that we need to confront our biodiversity. diversity. Our consumption is a really big one. At the moment, we’re consuming to planet Earth. And if everybody was behaving like we do in the Northwestern tiniest leader of the world, we will be consuming 5 Earth. So we need to confront these things at hand. How can we ruthlessly prioritize our process improvements, our products, the decisions that we take? and advocate for responsible source use consumption because we live in a finite planet. Again, we like it or not, that’s our reality.

Brion Hurley

Yeah, and you’re right that it’s more than just, you know, carbon emissions. It’s the pollution and it’s the clean water and air and all the health issues associated with that affect people. And ultimately, all of this affects people, right? It’s when we have sea level rise, that’s going to displace a lot of people and put them in vulnerable situations and overload resources in other areas. And that affects people, right? So it’s not about saving the planet. It’s making sure that we don’t create these disasters and situations that put people in difficult or dangerous situations. And trying to get ahead of those things is important because it’s going to be so much more painful to have to react to those things when they do happen. Yeah, that’s hard to get people to think like that.

Ines Garcia

Yeah, and those things are already happening. Like here in Europe, sea level rise is already creating some issues. So here in the UK, on the east side of the UK, they’re losing year and year, they’re losing land. And there is expected that 6 million people are going to move by the loss of land. And this is within the UK. So We shouldn’t be surprised people move.

Brion Hurley

Yeah, those are great. So thanks for all your work on that. Were you involved in getting that created? Did you spearhead that effort or a part of a team?

Ines Garcia

Yes. So we have the sustainability initiative within the Agile Alliance. And at the moment, there is three of us as co-chairs. And we have signed the manifesto, I suppose. But we have almost 300 people that sign since as well. So put your name on it. help guiding the million decisions that we take every day through it.

Brion Hurley

I think it’s also good to talk about the need for having the sustainability segments inside of our membership groups and organizations, whether it’s at your company to have a sustainability or green team or in an organization like Agile Alliance. I’m part of Institute for Industrial and Systems Engineers. We have a sustainable development division that I’m part of. And I think that’s really important to be involved. If this is a topic you’re interested in, get involved with any organizations or within your company to help push these ideas forward, help move the conversations forward. If you are part of a group or in a company, there’s opportunities to either get involved with existing teams or help set up one and spearhead efforts to have those discussions and get people moving in that direction. So I think that’s great that you’re able to be involved and get this going.

Ines Garcia

Yeah, and for the ones perhaps thinking, oh, how would I, you will be surprised. People, if those things are not set up, as you start bringing the conversation forward, you normalize the conversation and people want to do something about it. So you can bring yourself full self at work, including your concerns on this matter.

Brion Hurley

And with the UN sustainable development goals that you mentioned, there’s a lot of different challenges that we have to face and deal with. And there’s something in one of those goals that will appeal to you, whether it’s about water quality or education or gender equity, it’s a whole different spectrum of topics. And I think almost anyone should find some interest or get excited about wanting to help with that. So I think it covers more than just carbon. That’s only one small piece of it, a very big interest. impact, but there’s 17 goals and 16 others that are specific to challenges and issues we have. Hopefully, and I’ll post the picture of the goals and links to those as well for people, but definitely want people to be aware of those and see if they can get more involved or find a way to bring their skills to help with those challenges.

Ines Garcia

Yeah, absolutely. I’m playing with the side of the UN because each goal has multiple targets and sub targets. So things are very measurable. Are we getting there or not? And it’s called the sustainable development goals, but they are legally binded agreements, which like is halving emissions by 2030. Some are earlier than another because have bigger repercussions. So you can get quite specific and do things to help in a way that is also measurable.

Brion Hurley

Great. So you tell us about some of your work experience and how you got to where you are right now.

Ines Garcia

So I think maybe I explain a little bit of what I do because I explain lots of different things that I study and what I try to briefly explain. I work every day. I’m a freelancer. I help individuals, teams, and organizations to deliver better value and to reduce waste. We often think of waste in the agile arena as waste of time, but also waste of money, effort, and the people involved, right? And with the heart of circular economy and sustainability, how can we reduce waste of materials, of energy, and to focus on impact and essentially to live the team? place better than how we found it. And when I say the place is the product, the people, and the planet. Yeah, I work for myself, which I think it gives me the wiggle room to do so many things. Life is full of flavors. Why work wouldn’t be? And so my engagements kind of range quite a lot. So from one of the biggest utility companies here in the UK, I was already working in AI, which is a multiple different bundles of technology, specifically LLMs. before the GPT madness, that was a startup. We were churning more than one mill of revenue a year. One of my clients introduced me as a Swiss army knife. I don’t know what they are maybe, but this idea that we talk a lot in agile of T-shaped individuals, So you have a broad ability to contribute in multiple different areas, although you have your core of the expertise. And I think that’s what they were going for. And I really enjoy this variety. So yes, agile coaching, and yes, we’re architecture, design. From my comps background, I sometimes get called to sort of unravel the spaghetti design of a marketing application that no one knows why is behaving this way. So it’s this idea of extending your reach to leave the place better and can start very small. I also help companies to set their own or improve their current process for carbon accounting. We were talking about that. And often, I try to talk beyond that carbon accounting and what you need for auditing. to also start looking and extending that application for circular economy. So don’t only look at the expense of carbon, and it’s often related to also expense financially, so you have a lot to do with the procurement team. But what else can we do in terms of the type of products that we use, materials that we use, suppliers that we use, and what happens after the customer consume it? How we extend the life of the product? How can we reduce the pollution of that product throughout their life. So this is a group of freelancers that since 2023, we have been running, the main program is what we call Agile Sustainability in Practice. And it’s essentially a full month together, hands-on, where we help Agile professionals from Scrum Masters, Agile coaches, product people, UX designers, not only living with the knowledge about circular economy, sustainable development goals and complexity science, but also with experience because the whole month is about doing things in real life. So from urgency to agency. And yeah, the last adventures, as I mentioned with permaculture of doing regenerative land design from gardens to small holdings. I don’t feel at this point that big farms are ready for me yet.

Brion Hurley

Yeah, that’s wonderful. Can you talk a little bit more about some of the books and resources you put together? Maybe we start with biomimicry. Can you explain that? Oh, there it is, yep.

Ines Garcia

Yeah, so this last book that just got released this year has been with me for some time. It’s published with Taylor R. Francis, and it’s called Nature’s Blueprint for Business. It’s about this, the hidden power of edges. And so biomimicry is this concept of, to its core, is understanding that the solutions to our problems already have been solved. And they have been solved by the living beings around us, not by the fossils. The ones that are around have the answers to our problems, and they have been refining it for 3.8 billion years of existence. So tapping into those solutions for innovation, rather than start from the blank canvas thought process, and really looking at mechanisms, patterns, really specific ways that nature solves these problems. So that is biomimicry. Now this book comes from researching the work that I do in some software organizations. And specifically this idea of edges in the corner. There is so much going on in nature. If you stop hovering the corner of your house, you very quickly say you will start gathering resources on the other four resources, then you’ll have lots of things going on over there. Or if you stop mowing a corner of your garden, you will see what happened. So why in companies we put ourselves in boxes? For example, organizational charts have been around from 1800, but that is not the reality of connections and behaviors and patterns in organizations. So how can we use this idea of edges? And I go through specifically 6 different principles. to help us harnessing the most of everybody involved and living the people involved in a better state. We look at those sorts of things from like mycelium networks to a flock of birds, the murmuration. It’s all about the gaps in between. Gaps in between you and the rest, in between you and the predator. Like it’s so interesting and we don’t think about gaps. Music is also the spaces in between the notes.

Brion Hurley

So you feel that If we could bring in more biomimicry into innovation, new product designs, and in our brainstorming of solutions to problems that we could find a lot more ways of solving problems, maybe simpler, easier than more mechanical or more technological ways that nature’s already figured out.

Ines Garcia

Exactly, that’s it.

Brion Hurley

Yeah, I think that’s a great tool that I think is very new still in the process improvement field. I know I’ve read a lot of material on it, but haven’t gotten a chance to do much practice on that. So definitely feel like there’s a big opportunity to bring some of those concepts into our design and development and also in our process improvement work of existing processes and products.

Ines Garcia

The book is also made in a way that the reader is part of the process. So you’re creating your own project as you go. And you have stories of practitioners to give you a flavor as well, what people are already solving today. I think stories are very powerful to convey. How could it be done? It doesn’t mean you need to do it exactly the same, but that’s how they got to it.

Brion Hurley

Is there one that stands out as your favorite of applying something from nature into a real solution or a product?

Ines Garcia

With biomimicry, you always start by the function. What’s the problem that you have and which function you need to solve? And we are quite bad, I think, about the structure of things. as a function, we tend to think of the looks of things rather than the structure of them. And because of that, and to help people move from this meta layer of people behaviors and stuff into something maybe more tangible, I like to explain the example of a company that were trying to reduce chemicals and water use on cleaning. They look at multiple different things, but one of the research things that became like a big innovation for them was the skin of sharks. So why sharks in comparison to other big fishes, they don’t have barnacles on things attached to them. And why is that? So they zoom in and zoom in at a nano level. The specific scale structure is very particular. And because of that structure, bacterials can easily hatch onto. And so if bacterials can catch on, then other things can grow on it. And just because you don’t have bacterias and they create this set of walls for hospitals and all other places, so you don’t have to use the amount of chemicals and fresh water use and stuff like that, it’s becoming more and more of a problem. So that’s one I think that is quite fascinating.

Brion Hurley

Excellent. That’s a great example. What are the other books you’ve put together? Can you go through some of those topics and why you wanted to put the book together?

Ines Garcia

Yes, so the first one, as a minimum viable product, if this is even a thing I like to do, I have a tiny e-book that is free. It’s called Better Estimates. And it’s five different mental models and practices that you can do with your team to become better underestimated. The future is unknown, but we can do things to increase our predictability and reduce our risk. That’s it. I did enjoy the process and got good feedback. I thought, all right, so what’s next? The next one is about becoming more agile. And specifically, I talk about stories on the Salesforce ecosystem because I do a lot of work around that. The book is full of real life stories with teams. The good, the bad, and the ugly. We can learn from all of them. And with a lot of very specific experiments that you can try. You don’t have to go very dogmatic into a place and say, oh, here is the guide or whatever. A much more fluid way to understand the nature of the people involved with change. And that really came to fruition because in 2020, I was lucky enough. I was speaking at a conference in Japan. That was February. and what’s happened then. So got home, I’m going to do it. I actually just sat every morning with a cup of tea, didn’t look at emails, phone, nothing, gave myself target of words, structured the things in a very particular thing. And every day, a little bit of something, also extending it publicly to see feedback, adapt upon that feedback. So that was a good fun of trying to do the whole book with the things I’m talking about. Then it came the sustainable, happy profit. I always tried to live by my values. And for me, over the last five, 10 years, it became more apparent that our business as usual, all this work thing I do, was rather unusual. Because if you think about air pollution, it’s killing almost 4 million people a year. And that’s preventable deaths. We already have 1,000,000 species threatened with extinction. We converted 75% of land that is not covered by ice. Six of the nine greatest threats to the world is because of the ongoing destruction of nature and destruction made by us, one species. So I could no longer dissect my work from all of this, but embed it. How can I make all of this sort of fabric layer of what I do. That’s how. So how could these big ideas, SDGs, ESGs, circular economy, how could I apply these things, downscale them at this level so that I could side scale it, upscale it to my customers as well? And that research was insightful, but also was very conflicted because this sonance in between what is being said and the actual operations of organizations, or call it greenwashing. But also to the very clear patterns and mechanisms that I found on the two years research for the ones that actually embedded sustainability as a fabric player. And so the book came out, Sustainable, Happy, Profit. And that’s the sort of compilation of the learnings so that I can share what I learned from my own company to be on one talk, one client, one session at the time. And then as a collaborative group, especially in the Salesforce community, there is a very nice community and we send each other recipes and all this very random thing. And it became apparent that whilst we were all sort of coming out of COVID-19, we share all these wonderful things. We were very privileged in comparison to many other sites. the world. So why couldn’t we put our love of food for our love of others? And it’s the one-on-one plant-based deliciousness of the world. So we looked ourselves and thought, For the love for food, this thing we’ve been doing of sharing recipes, we should be really using it for the love of others. It’s a book of 101 recipes. It’s called 101 as well because not only the number, but it’s made in a way that is very easy. Anybody can do it. And it gives you a structure of creating very nourishing places and plates in your belly and in your heart and in your head. So there are recipes from all over the world, a lot of different contributors, and all the money goes to Action Against Hunger. So now that we’re coming to the gifting season, think about the purchases that you make. For me is if you are going to buy something, do something of purpose that benefits beyond just who you’re going to give it to.

Brion Hurley

Great. Those are great. I’ll put a link to all the books in the notes. So where can people go to?

Ines Garcia

My website, which is inesgarcia.me. or you can also find me on LinkedIn.

Brion Hurley

And do you also have a podcast?

Ines Garcia

Yeah, so the series that we’re doing in LinkedIn about agile sustainability is really like a spin from the Agile Alliance Sustainability Initiative. And this is about learning from peers, normalizing conversation, making more voices to be heard. We want to go far, we better go together. And we don’t have time to waste, so we better learn from one another.

Brion Hurley

Anything else you’d like to share or talk about?

Ines Garcia

I feel like that sometimes in the climate coaching, people can feel quite overwhelmed that what we ought to achieve as a species, it can feel A lot. It doesn’t have to be that high. Not to minimize the fact that we don’t have big problems at hand and we do not have time to waste, but it’s also helpful, I find helpful to remember that tipping points are not linear. Start, we can. And really the question is, Are you willing to be part of the solution? Because the time is now. You don’t have to ask for permission.

Brion Hurley

Yeah, that’s great advice. Just internalizing some of these things and looking at ourselves and our impact. Every little decision has an impact, positive and negative. And we can’t eliminate all the impact we have, but we can definitely minimize or reduce quite a bit through our actions, understanding that and seeing how we do have the ability to make changes, even though it does feel like a very big problem.

Ines Garcia

And same ideas that we do with work. process improvement for ourselves. We can just do everything at once. Prioritize, what are the different things that you can do? Which one will make the biggest difference? Let’s tackle that. How can we learn? How can we do the next one? So this idea of, this is me throughout many years of my life, making small decisions to adjust how I live. You can’t just do one thing for another in one day, but what makes more sense for you today in your concept? There are races against nobody really. Every improvement matters and it needs to be something that you can hold for longer. So yeah, everybody can make the difference.

Brion Hurley

Yeah, and I think that’s important too, that if you’re just trying to copy someone else, it doesn’t work for you in your situation. You know, you might say, I don’t want to have an electric car for my work or whatever reason. So, okay, you don’t have to get an electric car. You can choose to Reduce your impact in other ways. So pick something that fits your lifestyle. And I think by seeing other people act those behaviors, I think people are willing to try things out when it’s not because of pressure or trying to embarrass somebody, but just show, here’s how I live. Take what you like out of it, but choose your own path. I think that’s the way that’s most. open for people to embrace it versus why aren’t you doing this and you need to do this and you need to do this. It just doesn’t work. People resist that kind of pressure. So I think by showing people through your work and actions, that’s really the best way.

Ines Garcia

And the ripple effects of a snowball, keep on going. We’ll get there.

Brion Hurley

Great. Well, thank you so much for your time and it’s great learning about your work and help others reach out and connect and builds more support for the manifesto.

Ines Garcia

Thank you so much for all the work that you do.

Brion Hurley

Okay, thank you.

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