What are the Future Challenges We Should Address? My Takeaway from the Agile 2021 Conference Keynote

This word cloud resulted from a poll taken during the opening Keynote of the Agile 2021 conference. I found it fascinating because the topics that emerged are ones all humans need to care about, in everything they do, and are not limited to "Agile." I can't help but wonder, can Agile really address all the problems of humanity?

For those of us in the Agile world, Agile is in our toolbox, and when faced with serious problems we naturally want to use the tools at hand to tackle them. As Agile practitioners, we know that Agile is very powerful and a great way to enhance collaboration, transparency, and many other things that lead to better organizational outcomes.

Later in the day, I heard Mary Poppendieck say, "What really bothers me is that the technical things have been left out of Agile," and "We seem to be trying to solve our technical and architecture problems with process." Alistair Cockburn also touched on this theme during the keynote, when he lamented that the conference doesn't attract enough engineers or technical people.???

You may be wondering, why is that? I wondered the same thing myself a while back after a long conversation at Agile 2019 with Orit Hazzan, who shared her surprise upon discovering that most conference attendees were not engineers. She asked me, “How could Agile have abandoned its technical roots?” This is why I took a year-long class with Cliff Berg called "DevOps for Agile Coaches." I didn't want to become an engineer; I just wanted to understand what my engineers were talking about! You know what? It wasn't hard to learn - I just needed to focus and think, and I got it. You can too! Learn about DevOps, you won't regret it.

My response to all this is an emphatic yes, and. YES, Agile is a great tool to tackle the problems of humanity, AND Agile needs to embrace technical topics, AND, as the word cloud reveals, beyond topics like climate, diversity, and ethics we also need to think about culture, leadership, and scalability. And yes, these are all in Agile 2 - you can read our values and principles here: Agile2.net.