What Happened to Agile? And Where Do We Go From Here

Let’s be honest. These are “interesting” times for being an agilist.

Whether you’re in the “Agile is Dead” camp or not, it is clear that the movement is not well.

Agile took over the software development world in a storm.

As that happened, the demand for agile outstripped the supply.

Agile became practice-focused. A commodity.

Mainstream organizations didn’t have the patience or desire to think from first principles. They preferred to implement agile rather than to evolve in an agile manner. The consulting and training industry obliged to provide products and certified people to support these products.

Anyhow, Perfect storm.

Here’s an alternative approach that you can use to get out of this mess or avoid it in the first place:

Focus on agility rather than agile—principles instead of practices.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Are we focusing on the end-to-end flow of value?

• Are we continuously improving how we work?

• Are we leveraging autonomy? Organizing people around value and empowering them?

• Are we maintaining a sustainable pace? Of work? Of change?

• Are we aligned? Are our goals and measures outcome-oriented?

• Are we energizing people/teams?

• Are leaders serving? Enabling? Nurturing? Focusing on systems?

• Are we valuing speed and empiricism as a key way to derisk innovation? Change? Growth?

Which of these questions resonates the most for you? Why?

These are the questions I explore with organizations when we get together to either explore agility or accelerate/fix it. It’s about establishing an agile-oriented intent that might pull in agile practices and frameworks based on context.

PS You can now leverage these questions for conversations about your agile agenda. My principles-based agility assessment goes into more depth into these aspects of agility and helps you drive this conversation. Get it for free here