Doing or Being Agile? Choose wisely.

After facilitating Agile Transformations in Organizations, it is not difficult to realize the main differences between Doing and Being Agile regarding the challenges you face in the ground.

Being Agile is related to Mindset, to make people really live the Agile Principles and Values and start making decisions based on it. That is a very important topic and can really change your organization, helping you to build a strong culture of commitment, empowerment, innovation, and value delivery to the business.

Doing Agile means following Agile frameworks and enjoying all the benefits that the "new" structured way of working will bring to your squad. Basically, it will mean you will have a specific cadence to plan, to sync tasks, to show & tell what your Team has achieved and to reflect about learnings. This part will help your teams to be more predictable and transparent, while delivering with a constant pace.

When you have a “Weak-Doing-Strong-Being Agile” environment, in most of the cases you will work with passionate people composed by missionaries, that really want to deliver value to the business. The risk here is those empowerment and passion should not make Teams overlook some basic practices that agile frameworks foster us to follow. I am talking about, for example, keep investing time to refine/really understand/discuss the user stories, or to sync teamwork daily, or even track and forecast our velocity every iteration, or keep always reflecting about how we are performing as a team to the business. During the time, the lack of those basic points can prevent our team to keep evolving, to be effective, predictable and adaptable, leading us to fail as our objectives and products also evolve, mature and get more complex over time.

On the other hand, a “Strong-Doing-Weak-Being Agile” environment can have very disciplined teams that follow agile frameworks strictly, but do not move business metrics. As these teams do not feel/live what really means the Agile Principles and Values, they do not understand the real opportunity and benefit of each agile event. They are story-point burners with low business impact and achievements. Most of the time these teams do not dare to bring them to the right direction or even to realize anything is wrong and needs to be fixed. The dialogue or action points about thought situations and problems are avoided and the team does not evolve, generating a low impact as a result. 

As an Agile Coach you should be able to help those teams to figure out what is happening and what we can do to solve each scenario. Your experience will help you to use the right approaches and techniques in each situation, but the most important point about both of them, in my opinion, is the following: You can not focus just in solving being agile and forget about doing agile, or even foster them to do agile and disconnect about being agile. A strong agile team should Do and Be Agile, as it will enable them to keep adapting and evolving during their journey.

So forget about Doing or Being Agile. We should work to make our teams Do And Be Agile at the same time and always.

Peace and Hugs for all. Eduardo Rodrigues Sucena