The Undiscovered Country

“Agile” is dead. Or is it? You don’t have to look far in the business community to find a host of possible answers this seemingly unusual question. These answers are based on scepticism of an industry built around the theme of agility, but also on the hope that a bigger change in how we approach complex problems has begun. To decide if we should bury the agile movement or celebrate its potential to reshape ways of working, let’s take a quick look at how it all started and how we got to today’s at times confusing landscape.

The Past – A time of rediscovery:

Around the turn of the millennium, a group of experienced software developers and successful business people got together to exchange ideas about a better way to delivery technology. In 2001, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was born out of a frustration at how sequential ways of working had been badly suited to their craft. Ever since, the manifesto has been helping companies rethink how they deliver value—and wreaking havoc with the way we see the business world.

The publication of the manifesto was not a singular event that defined the start of iterative ways of working. A host of frameworks and looser, self-discovered ways of organising popped up before and after the official publication of the document. As early as the 1960s, NASA had already thought of ways of putting a man on the moon using multi-functional teams that were autonomous and that organised around a solution to a really ambitious goal. They had learned from the monumental failure of trying to keep up with the USSR by having specialised silos that optimised for functional outcomes. More recently, the US armed forces adopted a more autonomous “team of teams” structure to defeat Al Qaeda in 2003. The success of their enemy convinced the armed forces that it had to reorganise into cross disciplined teams to compete on equal terms, with the freedom to operate around a tightly defined mission. Kanban, Scrum, and Extreme Programming were some of the frameworks that had already been adopted at scale by those who appreciated technology as an iterative, scheduling concern with a high standard of quality built in. Even as early as 1990, management consultants realized that big changes in how businesses operated would be vital to future success and that cultures would have to adapt. At the time, John Clarkeson, then-CEO of BCG, wrote:

“Our modern organisations often encourage specialists to pursue the goals of their specialties at the expense of the other functions, the firm, and the customer. As a result, the biggest leadership challenge in business today may be leading specialized professionals from various functions to achieve the overall aims of the firm in a rapidly changing environment.”

What we now call “agile” was very much alive in the early 2000s. It was probably alive well before then in many forms as organisations who had discovered the power of experimentation and self-organisation rushed to put these practices to use to achieve great things. These seemingly early years were happy and care-free. People who understood the applicability of this way of working wondered at the potential benefits. It only took us 200,000 years as a species to rediscover that iteration is how we think by default. As we celebrate the 18th birthday of the formal existence of the agile movement, we should all raise a glass to the youthful, teen spirit that has made us re-think how we approach complex and ambiguous problems.

The Present – A time of exploitation & adoption at scale:

Let’s move to today. The agile industrial complex conspiracy theorists are running around spreading news of the demise of agile frameworks. They claim that their own framework is better than the originals, because it has had the chance to improve its utility within a very specific context. Then there are purists who swear blindly that teams should never re-prioritise work in the middle of a sprint because, these guardians of the past say, the Scrum Guide says you shouldn’t. Heavy handed, bureaucratic and profitable administration of frameworks has led to a cynical view of why they exist. Managers shudder at the prospect of consultants dropping in to restructure the organisation and trying to remove the seemingly permanent separation between business and technology functions.

So is “agile” really dead? Many would say it is, if for no other reason than the word has lost meaning as an adjective and is widely used as a noun. That’s like me saying that I will fix your business using “digital.” There is also the modest bar to entry set to become certified in this way of working. I have hugely enjoyed learning through certification, but those credentials would be diminished in value if they weren’t taught by experienced practitioners or hadn’t been battle tested by dealing with real world implementations. Certifications are often just the start of the learning process.

But in reality, all of this is just the side show. Under the main tent is the enormous progress that agile natives are making in the world around us with minimum fuss or need for affirmation. It’s their default mind-set and a barely used word. If you listen to any technology firm or start-up leader, they will talk about releasing prototypes for fast feedback, about guiding people by inspiring them with vision, about using machines to maximize the time available for the highest-order tasks—human creativity, design, and innovation. In the agile world you’ll probably hear about MVPs (minimum viable products), servant leadership, and DevOps. For agility’s current true adherents, it’s more important to operate with common sense principles in mind than to allocate mystical tags.

In its supposed 19th year, the agile movement is, in fact, alive and kicking. You might say that it has run away from its original, software-centric home and is living a non-descript life among people who take it for granted. If anything can be judged by the excitement of people who work at forward-thinking, agile-by-nature firms, I would wager that “the framework formerly known as agile” is having a lot of fun and delivering more value than its creators could have imagined nearly two decades ago. The question has moved well beyond “should we try it?”. Clients I’ve worked with in retail, consumer goods, insurance, banking and even an NGO, use these practices for everything from experimental pilots teams to full blown, multi-year cultural transformations across thousands of people.

The Future – The Undiscovered Country:

The next 20 years will be a time of heavy experimentation at a larger scale across the enterprise. With it will come some good/bad choices and occasional trips into the wilderness. Sometimes agility may resurface as a fad—sometimes as a genuine attempt to be better. These different paths will help us understand how to improve this way of thinking, and how to embed it as a standard in complex working environments. Hopefully, we are nearing a time when it won’t be considered strictly “agile development” for a business team to self-organise around a problem, for motivated employees to feel empowered to innovate at will towards a mission, or even for visualisation to be used to eliminate process bottlenecks or predict what could be achievable within a time frame. It will just be the way things are done because of the willingness of more agile natives to try, based on previous and tangible success.The latest generation of knowledge-based workers will have moved on from blanket administration of frameworks to discover the next way of responding to the world around them and the next way to serve the customers who are the lifeblood of their businesses. “Agile” may even have reclaimed its status as a bonified adjective by the time 2041 rolls around. Maybe then it will be time for it to settle down, fade into the background, and be content with quietly helping groups of people achieve true business agility, in a world where it will be necessary to compete.

As a participant in the transition of the agile movement from an awkward teenager to an accomplished adult, my hope is that the concept of agility helps people see the world around us in an experimental and adaptive way to deliver value in ways we never imagined. Agile ways of working are an important vehicle to help us find levels of innovation we have yet to tap into, particularly with the advent of machines to augment our ability to do the things that humans do best. Perhaps we should not mourn the death of “agile” but celebrate in the undiscovered country that common sense business principles will help us find.

POSTSCRIPT:

Since writing this piece back in 2019, a lot has changed. We're living through the biggest disruption in living memory. The global pandemic that has forced everyone to rethink every aspect of our society. There has been an acceleration of the trend towards adaptation and resilience being core to how organisations compete.

I'm lucky to have joined an organisation that has lived through most of the history described above. IBM has had to make some very brave decisions in its 120 year history on how to pivot as the world around it has changed. One of the lesser noticed decisions in 2014 was to begin what is arguably the largest agile transformation in history within its CIO organisation, which has seen huge proportions of the company transition to a new operating model centred around agile values. It's not perfect, but IBM believes in it enough to take the first steps and learn how to make it better. That initial bold move has now meant that other parts of IBM are exploring how to build a more organic operating model that responds to the environment around it. A more well noticed decision in 2019 was the acquisition of Red Hat, which has injected a fundamentally more innovative and adaptive DNA into our culture. It's incredibly refreshing to learn more about the default way in which Red Hat operates, which will seem incredibly alien to many executives, as shared by Jim Whitehurst, now President at IBM:

I'll leave you with a quote from Jim which encapsulates the challenge ahead for leaders as they rethink how a firm can thrive through uncertainty:

“I realised in the 21st century, in dynamic environments leadership wasn't about controlling environments. It's about creating the context that allows the best answers to emerge.”