Inspiring everyone to be Agile

I’m Carsten Lützen, an Agile Coach at the LEGO Group, and I’ve been working here since May 2015. My first job was as an Application Developer in a newly formed LEGO Education team where our purpose was to push how we develop IT solutions. It was an awesome team to be part of, with room to be curious and learn about a lot of new technologies such as Scala, Akka, Play, Rancher, and a lot of other cool things. I later transitioned into the Scrum Master role. I wanted to influence the team’s way of working, as well as the surrounding organization, and help us to become even better by creating the right environment.

Now, I’m working in our Group Business Agility team. We’re a diverse group of coaches that spend a lot of time and effort on many different projects across the entire company. We always try to shake the tree and find new and better ways to collaborate inside the teams, and across the organization.

“Only the best is good enough” is our official spirit, but that doesn’t mean we have to be perfect every time. It helps guide our energy into improving our products, our teams, and ourselves. The overall goal is of course to make awesome LEGO products for kids and adults around the world, but personally, I want to make sure people can bring their entire self to work. We have to keep being energized every day for us to live the motto, and a great way is through learning and development on the job.

I spend quite a lot of time and energy learning new skills and offering them to my network. I’m one of the main people behind our Scrum Master community where we meet and share experiences, tools, challenges, and so much more. Our hope is to move the organization even closer together and create more informal networks.

I also spend energy outside of work inspiring people in different ways, ranging from webinars, videos, coaching, teaching, and lecturing. One way is to share my knowledge online through my YouTube channel for everybody to use – it’s a great way for me to meet a lot of inspiring people and learn from them. In the beginning, it required a lot of bravery to publish those videos, host a webinar, and teach. The channel has been running for two years and has opened a lot of possibilities to talk with some of the most awesome people.

To help inspire the developers of tomorrow I'm teaching a 10 ECTS course at The University of Southern Denmark on the topic of Software Engineering. It is amazing how much you learn from trying to teach others! It requires curiosity to stay up to date, bravery to teach, and curiosity to find the parts of the curriculum not covered sufficiently.

I often get asked in private messages how people can join the LEGO Group. In general, the two most important things to know are the LEGO Brand Framework and the Leadership Playground. Yes, it might sound like something that only exists on paper, but we use the values and the promises every day at work.

The Leadership Playground creates the space so that everybody feels energized everyday. It was created by LEGO colleagues, for LEGO colleagues, and is an inclusive model which makes sure that you’re heard, seen, valued, respected, and able to make a bigger contribution.

Our spirit is “Only the Best is Good Enough“, both on paper, and in real life. That might seem counter-intuitive to even be talking about Agile at the LEGO Group, but in reality, it sharpens our focus and makes this one of the coolest places to meet extremely talented and passionate people.