To the classes of 2020 - an Agile invitation

By Scott Downs and Gerald Doyle

We salute the graduating classes of 2020, whether you are graduating from secondary school, university, professional training, internship or apprenticeship. We congratulate you on your achievements … and ... we acknowledge that you’re launching into your next chapter at a challenging time. 

Worldwide, the COVID-19 pandemic has cast a pall over economic growth. Forecasts vary widely about how, when and how quickly the world economy, and national and local economies within it, will recover. This uncertainty clearly has implications for new graduates’ career prospects, whether you already have your next career move lined up or not. Existing employment and contractual commitments may be in jeopardy in a degraded economy, and organizations may resist new commitments in order to mitigate economic risk. In the U.S. and elsewhere, people are in the streets demanding disruptive change to long-entrenched patterns of abuse and discrimination.

With all this uncertainty, we’d like to offer some principles and practices we believe will help you navigate a complex world. We expect they will make you a more valuable leader, change agent, team member, colleague or entrepreneur, whatever the economic and social outlook. They may assist us all to see our constraints and challenges as openings to a more creative, abundant and equitable future.  

This post serves as a short introduction to what we call Agile principles and practices. For those who are already familiar, we invite you to use these resources actively and energetically, to share your experience, and to help others explore this creative space. 

There are many definitions of what “Agile” means, perhaps as many definitions as there are Agilists. Our definition, offered in humble deference to the views of others, is as follows:

Agile is a set of principles and practices for creating value in complex environments. These ways of working arose first in the software industry, but are now regularly applied in a wide range of industries and organizations, in the private, public and third sectors. We wish they were taught, shared and used even more widely than they are. 

Agile practices seek to:

• Deliver large amounts of customer and stakeholder value, early and often
• Encourage rapid learning, improvement and innovation
• Help people flourish and do their best work – in teams

Agile finds its foundations in:

• The Manifesto for Agile Software Development (The Agile Manifesto)
• The Scrum Guide
• Kanban Principles

The embedded links above will take you to original sources for the first two and a representative description for the third.  

Agile builds on earlier and parallel practices from

• Lean manufacturing and product management
• Extreme Programming (XP)
• DevOps (integrating software development and business operations)

We may seek to apply Agile principles across larger organizations through scaling frameworks including 

• SAFe (the Scaled Agile Framework)
• LeSS (Large Scale Scrum)                               
• Engineering practices often identified with Spotify, the music streaming company

We may use technology for Agile transparency and collaboration, for example 

• Jira/Confluence from Atlassian
• Trello
• Azure DevOps from Microsoft

As a leader, manager, “maker” or creative, or as someone doing a “normal job,” doing “normal” things, why should you care about Agile?

We answer that, in our experience, employed with reasonable skill and generative intention, Agile ways of working and learning are regularly highly successful in meeting the goals set out above.

• They help people get things done, deliver value and “make good art” quickly, flexibly, early and often. They help people deliver “hard” objectives and highly concrete goals sooner and more effectively. Your results could include getting a job or starting a venture in a difficult market - or succeeding better once you begin.
• They help people, especially in teams, unlock their creativity, helping them be predictably and reliably more innovative. These teams could be work teams, community teams or family teams, all more effective because of Agile mindsets.
• They help people create great working cultures, where people tend to flourish in their uniqueness, welcoming and leveraging difference and diversity, equity and inclusion, the expert and the novice. Agility may help you to be happier, more fulfilled and more creative in life and work, and create happier, more creative, more fulfilling spaces for others.

There is widely published data and a great deal of lived experience to support these claims.

We would say that Agile practices achieve these ends by applying the following "levers for growth":

• Planning in a joined-up but flexible way, where big goals are clearly and directly linked to small units of value-creating work, the work we are doing today or in the next few days. 
• Calling forward real teams, where diverse groups of people self-manage to take ownership of work as teams, not as individuals, and not to work as order-takers or functionaries
• Consciously listening at all times to the “voice of the customer,” through clearly defined channels
• Working incrementally and iteratively; delivering big things in small chunks, learning and improving through each delivery of value and its associated feedback loops
• Consciously reflecting, learning and continuously improving as core parts of working practices for everyone  
• Being intentionally transparent - always making work and work processes visible to all participants and stakeholders
• Focusing on how to make work flow as smoothly and quickly as possible through productive systems

We suggest that, while there are countless approaches available for doing good work and stepping into leadership, Agile practices can be a crucial resource to almost anyone we know:

• to anyone who wants to be a “maker’ in some way
• to anyone who intends to deliver value or change
• to anyone who intends to offer a product or service, personal or organizational.

This invitation absolutely includes those seeking to effect social and political change, at a time when, in the U.S. and in resonant communities around the world, there is an outpouring of demand for racial and social justice.  

We encourage you to follow the links to original sources and to spend a little time with them. They are evocative, short and accessible. A little research and networking can lead you as deep into this field as you would like to go. There are many public case studies available. If you’d like some additional help exploring the Agile space, please be invited to get in touch with us. 

As we all confront a complex and challenging world, we intend to use our Agile resources to the fullest. We hope they may be useful to you, as graduates and change-makers, as well. What will you, and we, make of the ‘20s? — perhaps your 20s?

Let’s begin together in an Agile state of mind. Health and strength to you for the journey. 

Scott Downs is an Agile Coach with Fractal Systems Ltd. His recent work has included Agilist support for major programmes at a global asset management firm and hosting development journeys for Agile leaders.

An educator grounded in Chicago with extensive international experience, Gerald Doyle co-creates strategic approaches to student-centered learning, enrollment, and life/career success. His work embraces equity, inclusion, diversity and well-being as foundations for personal leadership. He advises several edtech companies including GetSet and Upkey and serves on the faculty of Wolcott College Prep High School.

Scott and Gerald are co-authors of 9 Questions for Leadership in Life & Work. 

They share ideas on leadership in education, life and career at TriCosain