Ready to spark real change in your organization? In this episode, Brian Milner sits down with April K. Mills, founder of Engine for Change, to reveal how anyone can become a powerful change agent—without waiting for permission. Learn how to drive meaningful change, navigate resistance, and reignite Agile practices with strategies that actually work.

Overview

In this inspiring episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner talks with April K. Mills, CEO of Engine for Change and author of Everyone is a Change Agent, about what it truly means to lead change.

April explains how effective change agents focus on clearing obstacles rather than forcing compliance, and why fostering curiosity, empowerment, and collaboration is key to sustainable change.

From navigating corporate roadblocks to revitalizing Agile practices, April shares actionable insights and tactics to help you take control and make a lasting impact—whether you're in a small startup or a global enterprise.

References and resources mentioned in the show:

April K. Mills

Everyone is a Change Agent: A Guide to the Change Agent Essentials by April K. Mills

Change Tactics: 50 Ways Change Agents Boldly Escape the Status Quo by April K. Mills

Certified ScrumMaster® Training and Scrum Certification

Mountain Goat Software Certified Scrum and Agile Training Schedule

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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is SVP of coaching and training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

April K. Mills is an engineer-turned-change-evangelist and author of Everyone is a Change Agent and Change Tactics, empowers individuals and organizations to thrive through change using her proven Change Agent Essentials. With a passion for turning ideas into action, April helps people drive meaningful change with the time, title, and budget they already have.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian (00:00 )

Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast. I'm with you as always, Brian Milner. And today I have April K. Mills with us. Welcome in April.

April K. Mills (00:11 )

Thanks for having me.

Brian (00:13 )

Very happy to have April with us. April is the founder and CEO of an organization called Engine for Change. That's engine-for-change.com. That's her website. She's also an author. There's a book that she put out called, Everyone is a Change Agent, a Guide to the Change Agent Essentials. And that's what we wanted to have her on to talk about today with a little bit about being a change agent. Now I shouldn't say from the outset, April is a request. We had a listener request for April to come on. And I always love that. I always try to push those people to the top of our list and get them on as soon as possible. And it was such an interesting topic. I thought this would be just a really great way to have a great topic to have early in 2025. So April, let's start with just trying to understand when we say change agent, how do you define that? What do you mean by change agent?

April K. Mills (01:09 )

Yeah, a change agent is someone who takes action to bring about the change they want to see in the world. So rather than waiting for a boss or a corporate program or somebody from HR to come in and say, hey, let's improve this process, the change agent sees the need for a change and takes action. And the big thing I talk about in my books and my work is the difference between what typically happens when somebody sees a need for a change in an organization where they decide, I'm gonna go get a boss to go make everybody do my idea. I call that driving people. And I draw the contrast with that and driving change where you choose the change for yourself and you clear the obstacles for others to choose it too. And I love talking about that with Agile audiences especially because Agile is a change agent movement. of folks who want to drive change. I see a better way to create this product and I want to be part of it. And that's always what's drawn me into the agile space.

Brian (02:13 )

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. And it is a big change, right? To think about the dynamics of someone kind of sitting back and saying, yeah, I see something that needs to be done. I see something that should be a different way, but you know, who am I to say anything about this? Who am I to do anything about versus the person who actually takes action and does things. So that kind of leads to a question about change agents. What kind of skills or traits do you think are really helpful or beneficial to someone to be a better change agent.

April K. Mills (02:46 )

Well, the key is that difference between driving people and driving change. It's not what degree do you have, it's not how long have you been in the industry, it's not are you a people person, are you more focused on the data or some of those factors that we usually like to talk about. It really is, are you willing to take the step yourself first and clear those obstacles and encourage and invite people to join you? Or do you want somebody to make them obey you? And that choice is really the key for anybody to be a change agent. Because so many times we've seen people who might be able to convince the boss, hey, our team should be agile. And what happens, right? It goes on for about three months. The team gets frustrated. The boss gets angry. And then everybody starts to have a reaction when you bring it up, right? I'm sure plenty of the listeners have gone into an organization. If you're passionate about agile and you go, hey, have you guys heard about agile? And they go, ooh. And they make like a face. That's because they've encountered somebody who is driving people. And so that's the big focus I always try and talk with people about is can you show up with that willingness to let people join you and understand what their obstacles are to doing it.

Brian (03:57 )

What are some kind of warning signs or signals you'd look for to kind of recognize whether I'm actually approaching this from a driving people perspective versus driving the change?

April K. Mills (04:08 )

So a lot of times the key is how are you thinking about or talking about in your own head about the people around you or even yourself? We have a tendency to drive ourselves as well. So you can hear it in the language, right? I'm frustrated because so-and-so won't listen. I wish I could get more attention. It's all this sort of vague or... putting the action onto someone else and then complain the action isn't happening fast enough. You can hear it in the language. And so when someone's driving change, you don't hear that. hear, you know, I'm working on, I'm doing, the next thing is my action is I'm going to go talk with this person. I want to understand. I'm going to be curious. And you get this agency, this power coming back into your body almost, and then taking taking the next step from there. And so it's almost easy. You can almost say, well, how far outside your body would you put the power to make this change happen is a useful question to ask people. And if they say, well, it's in the CEO of the company, it's in the industry, it's in my tech lead, but it's certainly not me, well, then you're not a change agent.

Brian (05:20 )

So that brings up a good point because I think I can try to channel what the listeners might be thinking here. I know that in times I've been in organizations where, yeah, you have the ideal, you have the thing that you think is the best thing to do. But because the power dynamics in the organization, you don't really have the power to make that change and you depend a little bit on others that have the power to to help affect it. And so there is a sort of an aspect of, I don't really have the capability or the power to cause this change to happen. How can I still stay with that mindset of driving change versus driving people when I know I need someone else's help?

April K. Mills (06:03 )

Right. So that's a great conversation. And I've started to call it phase one Agile versus phase two Agile. I'm old enough in this space where when I first joined, a lot of Agile was team-based. Somebody on the team or several people on the team said, yeah, I want better. And these are the things that we can do as a team to deliver better. And let's do them together. And then the problem was the teams could do it, but they couldn't scale it. And they were like, if only we could get the senior leaders to pay attention to us, that would solve all our problems. And then you get phase two agile, which was e