Insights from the World Agility Forum & XA

‘A Flamenco dancer wearing a Flamenco costume and talking about Flamenco without mastering the art of Flamenco'. Sound familiar? This was the honest description Steve Denning shared in a Forbes article within his insightful summary of the World Agility forum when describing ‘Fake Agile'. At Radtac this is something we are passionate to shout about from the rafters when embracing the Agile Mindset, the desire to ‘be’ not simply ‘do’ Agile. 

The World Agility forum took place in Lisbon followed by the XA Conference which included a day dedicated to DevOps shifting the lens from business to technical agility, as well as a day devoted to Human Factors with a focus on teams before frameworks and methods. Returning for the 4th time I got to experience first-hand an array of cutting-edge insights from a diverse line up of thought leaders from the world of XP, Lean, Business Agility and DevOps. Whilst the topics were varied, ‘Customer Focus’ was a strong theme that permeated from the talks.

From customer first value delivery playing centre stage within the ground breaking ‘Toyota Flow System Model’ showcased by Nigel Thurlow, to continuous delivery driven by an intimate understanding of your customers in order to build better products.

As Hugo Lourenco summarised perfectly, “Inside organizations, we are often more obsessed with our project and our frameworks than with the customer’s problems. We need to understand what agile really means in the 21st Century economy. We need to observe, empathize, and experience our customer’s experiences at first hand”.

If you weren’t fortunate enough to attend this year’s World Agility Forum and Experience Agile Conference in Lisbon put it on your to do list for 2020 and make sure to peruse the summary by Steve Denning. Here’s a video montage that gives you a feel for what you missed.