Next week I’ll be re-launching the Bottom-line Bookclub in it’s much-improved format (big lesson I’ve learned: obstacles are there to help you refine your ideas and make them better!) I’ll tell you more about it soon, but for now, just imagine a way for you to filter through all the masses of information on personal development and get the best ideas and change tools in a concise, ready-to-apply format that’ll help you bridge the gap between knowing and doing. Oh, and a cool way for you to meet like-minded people too…

Anyway, the first book I’ll be Bottom-lining for you is Pam Slim’s recently published book, “Escape From Cubicle Nation: From Corporate Prisoner to Thriving Entrepreneur.” This fabulous book, and Pam’s incisive coaching has been one of the things that has helped me to develop the Agile Momentum necessary to re-launch the Bottom-line Bookclub, and to mine the resources in the obstacles that have popped up along the way this year, so that I’ll be able to launch something better than I’d previously conceived. So I wanted to share with you what I learned about Agile Momentum, from Pam Slim.

Agile Momentum

Agile Momentum is my made-up words for Pam’s strategy of moving forward in small steps, testing, adapting and tweaking along the way. I know it’s an age-old cliche: “the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step” and “how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time…” all that stuff you’ve heard before. I’ve certainly heard that stuff before, and I’ve always seen it as a good fear-management strategy and a good planning strategy. But I’ve never realized before what a great risk-management strategy it is, and how useful this strategy can be in developing, evolving and improving your ideas. And I think I’ve always under-estimated the momentum that small, consistent steps create, and how they can bring you to a place where you’re suddenly surprised one day at how far you’ve come.

So here’s one of Pam’s tips on using Agile Momentum to escape your cubicle (which is what she specializes in helping people to do) or anything else cool that you’ve been wanting to do:

Prioritise imperfect action and real-world feedback over perfect plans that haven’t been tested in the real world yet.

Planning is obviously important, but a lot of the time, we let the need for more information hold us back, and we sit with our paper plans and we over-analyze ourselves into paralysis. And we don’t want to put anything out the door until we feel we’ve got it perfect. This is a big risk, because if the real world’s feedback is that they aren’t going to pay for your thing, then the cost of your failure is bigger than if you had gotten early beta versions out into the real world and enabled the opportunity for lots of smaller failures that would allow you to evolve your thing into something that works. Pam calls this “failing fast” – the faster you fail, the more quickly you can adapt and refine your plan and get to what works.

So think about how you can create a prototype of your service or product (or the thing you’ve been wanting to do or change in some area of your life), and test it in the real-world, to see what real-world feedback you get, before you make big financial investments and changes to your life. In other words, before you invest loads of time, energy and money into your business, look for smart, small ways you can start doing it more cheaply and use that to test out and refine your model. Once you’ve found what works, then you can start investing in creating a solid set of structures and systems to enable you to grow your business form there.

Online businesses are well-suited to using Agile Momentum to move forward. Because they’re so lean, don’t require huge capital outlay to get started, and provide immediate and measurable feedback in the form of your traffic analytics and other great tools, online businesses allow you to take prototypes, or even just ideas of prototypes to the market and see whether people indicate an interest, before you invest further time, energy and money (if you’d like to learn more about this, then have a look at the Location Independent Business Course).

And if you’re employed but wanting to change your line of work, and struggling with your decisions about your new directions, think about how you can test out the areas you’re considering moving into, even before you move. Can you job shadow someone? Can you negotiate with your manager to start taking on some of these tasks in your current company? Can you start volunteering and learning in that field before you take the leap? Can you start doing it part-time?

For me, one of the most powerful realities of Agile Momentum is that, rather than putting your plans on hold until they’re perfect, you start doing and being what you want, in small ways, right now. I think this may well be the fastest, most resilient way to make the changes you want. What do you think?

Buy Pam’s Book

If you’d like to get ahead and start reading, even before I launch the Bottom-line on Escape From Cubicle Nation next week, then you can purchase Pam’s book below, or if you’re serious about creating a plan to escape your cubicle, then check out Pam’s excellent Quickstart program here.

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