How to change mindset – the Jahnun lesson

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Pinterest
WhatsApp

As a coach helping organizations become agile, I’m asked how to change the mindset of the people, how to help them see things in a different way, and notice new possibilities. Will it be a good video? A game? A powerful lecture? While these may be good for some initial motivation, we learn about the real change from the kitchen.

Jahnun is “a Yemenite Jewish pastry, originating from the Adeni Jews, and traditionally served on Shabbat morning” (Wikipedia), and let me add that it goes very well with an egg and tomatoes. Jahnun has some deep tastes which come as a surprise considering it mainly consists of flour, butter, oil, and some sugar. How come?

I learned to prepare Jahnun from my friend Vered. The secret is in the long process of preparing it. You need to wait a lot. If you want it to be ready on Saturday morning, you need to start working on it at noon, Friday. It is not a lot of work, just a lot of waiting.

To prepare Jahnun you have two main phases: kneading and baking.

To make the dough, I mix the ingredients and knead for around 15 seconds. When I’m done it still doesn’t look like dough. Then I cover it with a towel and wait.

Ten minutes later I remove the towel and something has changed. I knead again for a very short time and wait. The next time I remove the towel it already looks like dough. The trick here is that the kneading kicks some process that continues after the kneading has stopped. After two or three more rounds I let the dough stay for almost two hours.

Baking is done in a heat of 100 degrees Celsius. That’s a very low heat. I was quite skeptical that it will work at first time. However, since you bake it for the whole night, it appears to do the trick. The result is excellent taste.

And so, as I’m gaining more and more experience in working with organizations, the Jahnun recipe comes to mind. If I want to get deep flavors and an excellent taste of agile, I need to help the organization do the change slowly, with minimal kneading. The cadence of scrum and other frameworks does just that: The retrospective, the planning, and the daily scrum are that minimal kneading that makes the dough so great.

When you start, you see many good people working together: developers, testers, architects, product managers, and others. As the cadence kicks in, teams emerge and bloom. This minimal kneading, this regular cadence, is what makes the mindset change – it takes some time but the result is astonishing.

Categories:

Tags:

Operational Value Stream
Enterprise DevOps
Entrepreneurial Operating System®
Release Train Engineer
Advanced Roadmaps
Planning
Lean Agile Organization
Kanban Basics
Slides
NIT
Jira Plans
Quality Assurance
Nexus
Agile Basics
ARTs
Continuous Deployment
Lean Risk Management
Kaizen
PI Planning
TDD
Agile for Embedded Systems
DevOps
Agile Exercises
Frameworks
EOS®
Effective Agile Retrospectives
System Team
Lean and Agile Principles and Practices
Agile in the Enterprise
Scrum and XP
Development Value Streams
Nexus vs SAFe
Agile India
Agile Program
Lean-Agile Budgeting
Kaizen Workshop
POPM
Certified SAFe
Agile Mindset
Implementation of Lean and Agile
Implementing SAFe
Legacy Code
Legacy Enterprise
Presentation
Tips
Jira
Hybrid Work
Covid19
Continuous Improvement
Managing Risk on Agile Projects
Software Development Estimation
Lean Budgeting
IT Operations
Scrum Master Role
Agile Release Management
Agile Techniques
Professional Scrum Master
Atlaassian
Reading List
Agile Assembly Architecture
Video
Scrum Guide
Kanban Game
Business Agility
Webinar
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
Artificial Intelligence
Managing Projects
BDD
Lean-Agile Software Development
AgileSparks
Lean Agile Leadership
Agile
Elastic Leadership
Value Streams
Accelerate Value Delivery At Scale
Applying Agile Methodology
Agile Contracts Best Practices
Change Management
A Kanban System for Software Engineering
AI Artificial Intelligence
ScrumMaster Tales
Jira Cloud
RTE Role
Nexus and SAFe
Professional Scrum with Kanban
Perfection Game
Lean Software Development
Lean Agile
WIP
Introduction to Test Driven Development
Agile Israel Events
Large Scale Scrum
Lean Agile Management
RSA
Agile and DevOps Journey
Engineering Practices
System Integration Environments
Scrum Values
Kanban 101
Agile Games
LPM
Achieve Business Agility
Sprint Retrospectives
Code
Agile Delivery
Lean Startup
Continuous Delivery
Software Development
Kanban Kickstart Example
Product Management
Manage Budget Creation
Scaled Agile Framework
Continuous Integration
SAFe DevOps
Story Slicing
Scrum
QA
Agile Product Development
Risk Management in Kanban
What Is Kanban
SPC
The Agile Coach
ATDD vs. BDD
An Appreciative Retrospective
Program Increment
SAFe
Pomodoro Technique
Scrum Master
ART Success
Kanban
Self-organization
ATDD
Lean and Agile Techniques
Built-In Quality
Nexus Integration Team
Agile Outsourcing
Agile Development
SA
Games and Exercises
Amdocs
Agile Project
SAFe Release Planning
Risk Management on Agile Projects
lean agile change management
Certification
LAB
Product Ownership
Continuous Planning
Risk-aware Product Development
Scrum With Kanban
Scrum Primer
Agile Community
Iterative Incremental Development
The Kanban Method
Rapid RTC
Principles of Lean-Agile Leadership
GanttBan
Systems Thinking
Limiting Work in Progress
speed @ scale
Sprint Planning
ROI
Agile Project Management
RTE
Agile Risk Management
Test Driven Development
Agile Product Ownership
PI Objectives
LeSS
Introduction to ATDD
Lean Agile Basics
Coaching Agile Teams
Spotify
Agile Testing Practices
Agile Release Planning
speed at scale
Agile Marketing
Process Improvement
Scrum.org
Portfolio for Jira
System Archetypes
Agility
Sprint Iteration
Daily Scrum
ALM Tools
Releases Using Lean
Agile Games and Exercises
Nexus and Kanban
AgileSparks
Logo

Contact Us

Request for additional information and prices

AgileSparks Newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter, and stay updated on the latest Agile news and events

This website uses Cookies to provide a better experience
Shopping cart