How to be Agile

Being agile refers to the ability of individuals, teams and organizations to be quick and adaptable in their structures, processes and behaviors. It involves responding flexibly to unexpected situations, changing and evolving demands and being able to change direction easily.

Traditionally businesses had been organized around static structures, complicated and slow processes and meticulously planned projects with a focus on (assumed) predictability and the seeming elimination of “surprises”. Being agile in a business setting involves embracing change as the norm, breaking up ineffective structures that make change difficult, throwing out processes that slow down value delivery, revolutionizing the way projects are managed by putting early delivery of value, feedback loops and adaptation over long term predictability.

Modern businesses and organizations have adopted agility with great success in many areas from cutting edge innovation in digital product development to “boring” business administration, leading up to a vision of overall business agility as a capability of the organization as a whole to become more adaptive, flexible, outcome focused, developing a completely new culture of work and collaboration in the process.

The Agile Manifesto

Published in 2001, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development came out of a meeting of senior software engineers and experts at Snowbird ski resort in the Wasatch mountains of Utah who had found the then common way of developing software lacking in several ways being not adaptive, flexible, fast enough to meet dynamic demands of the dotcom era economy as well as not sufficiently honoring the human factor in knowledge work.¹

The core of the agile manifesto is in these four relative value statements:

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.
Agile Manifesto²

These values are not to be understood as binary opposites, i.e. the suggestion is not to reject processes, planning, documentation, contracts or in an anarchic or chaotic way throw away all methodological discipline. On the contrary:

The Agile movement is not anti-methodology, in fact, many of us want to restore credibility to the word methodology. We want to restore a balance. We embrace modeling, but not in order to file some diagram in a dusty corporate repository. We embrace documentation, but not hundreds of pages of never-maintained and rarely-used tomes. We plan, but recognize the limits of planning in a turbulent environment.
Agile Manifesto History³

The wording “by doing it and helping others do it” shows the empirical and pragmatic approach that puts doing (e.g. develop software, build stuff) first, talking or theorizing about it second.

In addition to the four values, they also agreed on twelve Principles behind the Agile Manifesto that provide guidance for many practitioners of Agile around the world until this day:

We follow these principles:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.

Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.

Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done – is essential.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Agile Manifesto Principles⁴

Origins of Agile

The Agile movement can be traced back to ideas of Lean Development originating in late 20th century Japan from companies that had previously reached high levels of sophistication in Lean Manufacturing and a mindset of continuous improvement (e.g. the Toyota Production System / TPS).

These ideas were popularized in the West since the late 1980s. One example is Nonaka/Takeuchi’s article “The New New Product Development Game”⁵ (1986). Based on research in Japanese companies the authors compared development methodologies that we now describe as Agile to a rugby game and introduced the term “scrum” as a metaphor for the condensing project phases into what was later called Sprints or Iterations (“moving the scrum downfield”).

In parallel there were several attempts to go in a similar direction, away from plan-driven predictive project management to more “lightweight”, dynamic, faster and adaptive methods. These methods are today often also simply put under the umbrella of Agile.

Some examples of these ‘proto-agile’ approaches and methodologies:

Rapid Application Development (RAD) by James Martin
Dynamic systems development method (DSDM)
Extreme Programming (XP) by Kent Beck
Crystal by Alistair Cockburn
Pragmatic Programming by Andrew Hunt & David Thomas
Feature Driven Development (FDD) by Jeff De Luca

Agile Frameworks

When people talk about Agile they usually refer to Scrum as the most widely used Agile framework. Sometimes the two things are even confused as synonyms due to the great success of Scrum.

Scrum was developed by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, two of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto. It is arguably the most concisely defined Agile framework, codified in the official Scrum Guide⁶ which went through a number of significant updates since the early 2000s.

Scrum is often explained in tandem with Kanban, introduced by David Anderson in 2010. Kanban identifies itself not as an Agile framework but a Lean management methodology inspired by ideas from Lean Manufacturing (where also the term kanban i.e. “signal card” originates) and the Theory of Constraints by Eliyahu Goldratt.

Other Agile frameworks include (far from complete and in random order):

Lean Software Development by M. and T. Poppendieck
Applying Lean principles and tools to Agile development⁷
Scrumban by Corey Ladas⁸
A loosely defined combination of elements from Scrum integrated into a Kanban system
Modern Agile by Joshua Kerievsky⁹
An attempt to revolutionize the Agile “mainstream” focusing on aspects of personal safety and continuous delivery of value (maybe it’s already old, formulated around 2015)
Flights by Simon Høiberg¹⁰
A lightweight no-ceremonies alternative to Scrum
Other more recent approaches are e.g. “Heart of Agile”,¹¹ AgileSHIFT,¹² FaST Agile¹³

Agile Outside of Software

While starting out in the world of software development, Agile is now a much larger movement. It is has been applied successfully to contexts such as:

Hardware development
Manufacturing
Development of cyber-physical systems
Organizational development
Human Resources
Healthcare
Education
Marketing
Government and public administration
Research & development and technology innovation
Trending technologies such as AI and Data Science

The list is constantly growing.

The Agile Mindset

What do all these frameworks, methods and approaches have in common? Apart from referring back to the Agile Manifesto, most serious practitioners would say: “The Agile Mindset”!

What is the Agile Mindset? It is an elusive term – like “mindset” in general – and notoriously vague. This shows in the English term “mindset” being hard to translate into other languages. E.g. in German you would translate “the agile mindset” as “das agile Mindset”. In other words, the Agile Mindset is a unicorn.

It has become common in the Agile community to say: to understand the Agile Mindset you have to fully embrace and embody it, you have to progress from “doing Agile” (following Agile practices) to “being Agile”.

The gradual progression towards such a state of “being” is sometimes compared to a model from martial arts describing the progression of a learner from beginner level as one who follows what they are taught to an intermediate level of one who is able to deviate from prescribed teachings, “break the rules” to finally reaching a level of transcending all given forms and becoming “one” with what they are doing, leaving rules and techniques behind. This model is also known as “Shuhari”.¹⁴

Models of Agile Coaching and of developing the competency of individuals and organizations towards an Agile Mindset are sometimes described along such lines.

From a Pragmatic perspective it can be noted that distinguishing between “doing” and “being” begs the question if such a “being” can not also be considered as a form of doing (“to be is to do”). The elusive Agile Mindset can be made more clear by grounding it in specific ways of doing, reducing vagueness and esotericism. This will be covered in a separate discussion.

Large Scale Agility

Agile originally grew out of small “two pizza” teams¹⁵ for whom it was relatively easy (but still hard enough) to put the principles and values of the Agile manifesto into practice.

Witnessing the success of agile approaches on the level of small, startup-like development teams, more and more large organizations started experimenting with Agile on a larger scale with the aim of delivering more complex products in a coordinated way with the speed, flexibility and adaptiveness of an Agile team of teams.

Scaling Agility to levels beyond single or small numbers of teams turned out to be no easy task. Therefore the need for guidance on how to bring Agility to large groups of people without sacrificing its values became a challenge. This led to the – still ongoing – development –

A number of scaling approaches and frameworks were developed, from simple to complex, many of them based on or built around the Scrum framework:

Scaling Frameworks Based on Scrum

Scrum of Scrums (SoS)
The most straightforward way to allow alignment between several Scrum teams by adding a level of direct coordination of work between them.
Scrum@Scale¹⁶
Jeff Sutherland’s take on scaling up Scrum, extending the SoS to SoSoS (Scrum of Scrums of Scrums) with additional roles, events and artifacts.
Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)¹⁷ by Craig Larman
Integrating “one-team Scrum” into larger setups up to “LeSS Huge” scaling over one backlog and centralized product ownership.
Nexus by Ken Schwaber and Scrum.org¹⁸
An extension of Scrum adding accountabilities, events and artifacts to organize integration across Scrum teams and their delivered increments.
Enterprise Scrum¹⁹ by Mike Beedle
Applying the core ideas of Scrum to large enterprises.

Other Agile scaling approaches are not so tightly interwoven with Scrum:

Scaling Beyond Scrum

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)²⁰
The most widely adopted²¹ and most ambitious “Lean-Agile” framework on the market, created by Dean Leffingwell. It adds concepts such as Don Reinertsen’s Principles of “Product Development Flow”,²² John P. Kotter’s ideas on organizational design and many other elements from DevOps to Design Thinking making it the most comprehensive Agile framework.
Flight Levels by Klaus Leopold²³
Actually a model, not a framework, dropping a versatile business agility care package from high altitude to help organizations manage dependencies, speed up delivery, prioritize and adapt to change across the board.
“Spotify Model” made famous by Henrik Kniberg
which was never meant to be a model – and maybe not even actually used by Spotify.²⁴ It represents a snapshot in the evolution of the Spotify engineering culture and way of working involving squads, tribes and other fancy structures that seemed attractive to other companies who felt compelled to copy it.
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
a hybrid approach combining classical and agile methodologies on different levels promoted by Project Management Institute (PMI)²⁵

Business Agility

While Agile frameworks focus heavily on the level of teams – either small individual teams or scaled-up teams of teams,

including the scaled ones are mostly just scratching the upper strategic levels of organizations focusing instead on organizing execution – from ideation to development, delivery and operations, there is still the broader more universal aspect of Agility that is applicable to an enterprise as a whole. Consequently we speak of enterprise agility, agile enterprises or business agility.

The idea here is that the whole enterprise – all the business – can become Agile, from top management and business owners “down” to individual teams and employees and everyone on all levels follows an Agile mindset in line with the Agile Manifesto values and principles.

Just some aspects of what this means in practice:

Support high level organizational models that allow Agility to grow and flourish
Base strategic thinking, planning and decision making on an Agile mindset,
Connect business strategy with agile execution establishing back-and-forth feedback loops

Some Agile scaling frameworks – e.g. SAFe – try to provide concrete guidance on how to get to this level of Agility connecting an Agile process and delivery organization with the higher strata of a larger enterprise.

Business Agility is typically harder to achieve in large corporations that have grown to where they are in times before Agile became a thing. In startup or middle sized companies it may come more naturally together with an adoption of Agile methodologies in daily business. However this does not mean that it comes automatically. Achieving Business Agility typically involves a rigorous analysis of the status quo and willingness especially of top leadership to allow profound cultural change.

In a wider context there are overlaps between the idea of an Agile organization fully embracing Business Agility and some post-modern organizational models such as Sociocracy,²⁶ Holacracy,²⁷ “Teal Organizations” (according to Laloux)²⁸ or the “New Work” movement kickstarted by Frithjof Bergmann.²⁹

Agile Leadership

Agile Leadership is the art of applying an Agile Mindset to leadership practices. It emphasizes leading in a way that supports an Agile way of working. This includes encouraging teams to be self-organizing, fostering continuous improvement, and adapting to change. But it does not stop here. It incorporates traditional leadership paradigms, leading by example, providing room for decision making and empowerment on all levels.

This is reflected in the Kanban principle:

Encourage acts of leadership at every level
from individual contributor to senior management
David Anderson³⁰

A tangible example of how a Agile Leadership paradigm can play out in practice is David Marquet’s “Turn the Ship Around”, the story of a US Navy captain who completely transformed the leadership structure of his nuclear submarine with a form of Agile Leadership he describes as “Intent-Based Leadership”:

Captain Marquet began treating his crew as leaders, not followers, and giving control, not taking control. It wasn’t long before operations took a dramatic turn. Santa Fe went from “worst to first,” achieving the highest retention and operational standings in the Navy.
davidmarquet.com³¹

Effective Agile Leadership is a crucial skill that can help companies and organizations to:

Build resilience and psychological safety in the face of uncertainty.
Increase employee engagement and empowerment keeping your crew on board and motivated.
Establish a culture of continuous improvement and learning as a basis for innovation.
Raise speed and efficiency by tapping into the collective brainpower of employees who make their own decisions rather than getting tasks assigned or being micromanaged.
Rigorously focus on creating value for everyone involved based on empiricism and with flexibility and adaptability that enables competitiveness and survivability in dynamic and complex environments.

Agile Transformation

For organizations that have grown from traditional, hierarchical, “tailorist”³² foundations and still operate along models of predictive planning, top-down optimization, hierarchical structures of command and control and task assignment carried over from the past Industrial Age, the journey towards any form of Business Agility involves substantial – not to say painful – change. This is why it has become common to describe the introduction of Agility in such environments as a process of transformation.

Much more than, say, introducing a new ERP system, rolling out a new workflow tool or the next feelgood initiative launched by HR to make a difficult work culture feel more bearable, introducing Agile has the potential to change things on a more fundamental level.

It affects not only middle or upper management but also other employees who are often not used to taking charge of things, having relied on managers who more or less told them what to do (even where the reand took responsibility for failure.

It should always be said in a disclaimer or as a word of warning: A successful Agile Transformation needs serious change management Some aspects to keep in mind:

Expect resistance to change.
Transforming to Agile can have deep consequences for individual career paths, work related identities, even life choices, that need to be addressed.
Don’t fall for the illusion of changing a culture over night.
Generally speaking: culture follows structure, but switching to new structures without a carefully implemented transition invites cultural misalignment and conflicts.
Don’t underestimate the time and space needed for learning.
People affected by an Agile Transformation should be given sufficient means of learning and getting to understand the why, the what and the how.
Expect a need for continued guidance and reflection.
No two Agile Transformations are the same. Continuously adjusting to the context regularly over the whole course of it should be factored in.

These points are even more crucial when an Agile Transformation comes in tandem with a Digital Transformation of the same organization or is triggered by it (“We have to digitize our business to survive – and have to become more agile to be able to run it”).

To sum up: Agile Transformations are not easy. They require high levels of awareness (and investment) in terms of organizational design, change management, and maybe even more sensitivity and empathy.

Agile Coaching

Wherever Agility doesn’t just evolve by itself, it needs coaching.

In the Scrum Guide, the role of the Scrum Master is defined – among other things – as a coach not only for the Scrum Team but also for the organization:

The Scrum Master serves the Scrum Team in several ways, including:
Coaching the team members in self-management and cross-functionality
[…]
The Scrum Master serves the organization in several ways, including:
Leading, training, and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption;
Official Scrum Guide³³

Starting from this idea, a new species of experts has evolved in the Agile ecosystem: Agile Coaches.

Why are Agile coaches called coaches? The term comes from the world of sports. A coach in sports is someone who works closely with an athlete or a team of athletes, is sometimes even considered to be part of the team but does not directly engage in the athletic activity (apart from occasionally yelling at the team when they are doing something very silly during an intense match). The coach is a guide, a mentor, a facilitator whose aim it is to make the athletes able to perform at the best of their ability, unlock their hidden potential, make them grow and improve by giving direction, feedback, setting goals for their coachees’ self improvement, sometimes pushing them to new limits.

While the term is inspired by sports coaches, Agile coaches do much more than that.

Agile Alliance describes Agile Coaching as:

“An evolving practice encompassing many disciplines including individual, team and systemic coaching, facilitating, teaching and mentoring”
Code of Ethical Conduct for Agile Coaching³⁴

Typically, Agile Coaches:

Lead and guide Agile Transformations through facilitation and “servant leadership”.
Teach, educate, consult people in Agile principles and concrete Agile frameworks
Help teams to find their individual way of doing Agile for themselves and within a broader organizational context.
Help teams interact between each other and with people outside the team in large scale Agile working environments.
Help with overall moderation, facilitation, sometimes also mediation and conflict resolution.
Support everyone to see things from a system perspective opening up ways for organizational change.

Agile Coaching can come in many shapes and colors – sometimes to a degree where it is hard to nail down the specific competence of an Agile Coach. Agile Coaching is hyper-individual, contextual and as diverse as the widely varying contexts its practitioners are working in. This makes hiring Agile Coaches difficult. There are no common “objective” standards to compare or evaluate Agile Coaches and each coach is in a way a category of their own. This has led to attempts to systematize and professionalize the profession (so far with limited success).

One influential model of Agile Coaching that provides a structured approach is the “Agile Coach Competency Framework” developed by Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spayd.³⁵ It can be put to use with tools such as the “Agile Coaching Growth Wheel”:

This provides an initial basis for further professionalization – along with intitiatives such as Agile Alliance’s “Code of Ethical Conduct for Agile Coaching” (mentioned above). But there is still a long way to go for Agile Coaching to become an established and mature profession.

Isn’t Agile Dead Already?

Every few days, Agile dies on LinkedIn.³⁷ So how come it still seems so much alive?

The down-to-earth answer is: Because it’s not even close to death. It might smell funny at times, or develop symptoms of overuse, like a marathon runner who was training a bit too much and needs a day of rest. It may also have become sort of a hypochondriac who is in reality quite healthy but overthinks every itch and mild irritation into a life threatening disease.

On a global scale, the Agile movement is still developing and evolving and far from being old, stable an boring like so many other disciplines (take e.g. classical project management).

Controversy about the direction of Agile can be seen as a sign of good health. Criticism shows that there is something people find worthy of their criticism. In short:

There’s life in the old dog yet.
Source unknown

But speaking of dogs …

Dog Agility

Fun fact: When you google “agility”, many search results tend to be related to the respectable competitive discipline of Dog Agility.³⁸ If you came here from a search query looking for insights on this topic we have to disappoint you. Unfortunately we do not have sufficient expertise in that field. We hope, however, you can still take away some value. Feel free to recommend us. And if you have a spontaneous idea how to bring together the cognitive agility of humans with the physical of their best friends in a sensible way, we strongly support it. Reach out any time to info@pragmatic-agility.com!

The Agile Manifesto

Origins of Agile

Agile Frameworks

Agile Outside of Software

The Agile Mindset

Large Scale Agility

Scaling Frameworks Based on Scrum

Scaling Beyond Scrum

Business Agility

Agile Leadership

Agile Transformation

Agile Coaching

Isn’t Agile Dead Already?

Dog Agility

Footnotes and References

Like this:

The Agile Manifesto

Origins of Agile

Agile Frameworks

Agile Outside of Software

The Agile Mindset

Large Scale Agility

Scaling Frameworks Based on Scrum

Scaling Beyond Scrum

Business Agility

Agile Leadership

Agile Transformation

Agile Coaching

Isn’t Agile Dead Already?

Dog Agility

Footnotes and References

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