What Reimagining Agile Needs to Be

Recently two of the authors of the Agile Manifesto, along with Heidi Musser (outgoing Agile Alliance Board Chair) and Sanjiv Augustine (CEO of LitheSpeed), announced an initiative called Reimagining Agile.

It is a little late in the game for that, but it might also be just what is needed at this point, since the Agile movement is in rapid decline. There have been lots of reports of Agile layoffs, and how coaches are finding difficulty finding gigs. I just heard of another: the head of the Agile program at a global 100 fintech company was laid off. And a colleague of mine reports that in his discussions with over 100 CEOs over the past year, none of them are thinking about Agile anymore. That’s hearsay, but the person I heard that from has a lot of credibility with me.

Note that while I am saying that the Agile movement is in decline, I am not saying that the need for agility is in decline: companies need agility more than ever. How many foresaw or prepared for the changes that have happened in only the past five years? Very few – inarguable proof of a deep lack of actual business agility .

The problem is that so-called “Agile methods” have not created true business agility. Agile methods have drawn attention to the dysfunction of big up front plans for tackling complex things; but Agile methods have not created truly agile companies. Any agility that companies have is a result of the effective leadership of individuals, and those individuals’ abilities to internalize the Agile ideas that are correct and dismiss those that are not.

Thus we see the great wisdom that is represented in the four values of the Agile Manifesto, which begins with “Individuals and interactions over processes…”

It is individuals that matter – not teams, and not workflow processes – and in particular, the leadership that those individuals exhibit.

So there is a lot that a Reimagining Agile effort could do. But to be successful in a lasting sense, it needs to depart from what happened the last time. The main things that went wrong the last time were:

1. People viewed the Agile Manifesto as a definitive “last word” – as something that prescribes the behavior that is needed for agility. (Hint: it’s not that. I cannot be that. There can be no prescriptive set of rules of behavior for agility.)
2. There was no clear statement about what does not work, specifically (A) process frameworks, (B) certifications about process frameworks, and (C) Agile rollouts.
3. It was based on practitioner opinions – not research.

The reality is that since agility is about human behavior, there can be no simple rules to follow. If there could be, then there could also be simple rules for how to have a happy marriage, or how to raise children well. But there aren’t, for the same reasons that one cannot define a set of rules for how a company can be agile in a true sense. It’s all about behavior and individuals.

The issues are complex: attempts to reduce them to short maxims result in statements that have meaning for people who already have all of the wisdom; but short maxims will be seen as rules by those who do not have the wisdom.

In other words, those who understand agility don’t need a manifesto, and those who need a manifesto will not understand it.

A Viable Path Forward

It needs to begin with the research – not opinions.

It also needs to be inclusive: a lot of people have already performed a “reimagining Agile”. Agile 2 ’s many months-long effort was arguably one of the most diligent of those, but there have been many more and all embody significant insights.

It is unfair and un-Agile to not bring these prior initiatives into the tent of Reimagining Agile, in a way that they are explicitly included and treated as full partners in the attempt to reimagine Agile yet again.

Otherwise, this new effort will be yet another sideshow. It will not become a foundation, no matter how well the Agile Alliance promotes it. Because the Agile movement is in decline: it no longer has the ear of business. To be heard now, this new initiative needs to be materially different, larger, more inclusive, use more robust methods, and include representation from communities that business leaders respect.

Going back to beginning with research: The new Reimagining Agile “tent” needs to include respected people who have conducted respected research in the fields of,

1. Behavioral psychology.
2. Leadership.
3. Cognitive science.
4. Business operations.
5. Finance and budgeting.
6. Product marketing.

You might be surprised by some of these, but all of these are critical elements of how a business operates, and all have a huge impact on actual business agility.

Today most “Agile” thought is about product development. That’s a component of business operations (number 4 above), and it is arguably the least important. It needs to be included though, because the way that products get built impacts lead time for getting a new product or feature set to market. It also concerns how product development risk is managed, and cost of development.

Behavioral psychology is important because it informs us how individuals and teams behave. For example, the Agile community often cites the Tuckman team behavior model to explain why self-organizing teams must first experience storming before they become performing. But these citations of the model usually misrepresent it, because the Tuckman model presumes that there is a team lead, and is clear about the crucial role that a team lead plays in ensuring that a team does not get stuck in the storming stage. The fact that the model is to often misrepresented is a symptom of the fact that Agile thought leaders are often practitioners who are light on the theory and research.

This time around, we need to get it right, and we need people with the required expertise. If we are going to do this, let’s do it for real: are we going to fish or cut bait? If we are going to fish, then let’s include experts in the above domains.

Practitioners are included too, however. I am a practitioner, even though I have read a lot of the theory and research in numbers 1-5 of the domains listed above. Practitioners can educate themselves, and when they do, and when there are experts to check on them, practitioners add an important real world perspective.

Prior Reimagining Efforts

Practitioners have already conducted myriad efforts to reimagine Agile. Some of these are, in no particular order,

• Heart of Agile: https://heartofagile.com/ ?
• Disciplined Agile: https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile/ ?
• Large Scale Scrum: https://less.works ?
• XScale: https://lnkd.in/gW3azpVQ ?
• TameFlow: https://tameflow.com/ ?
• ShapeUp: https://lnkd.in/gQCdCciU ?
• Agile 2: https://agile2.net/ ?
• Systemic Agility: https://lnkd.in/gYVU2QsY ?
• Unfix: https://unfix.com/ ?
• Amplio: https://lnkd.in/e_Tdkrva ?
• Flight Levels: https://www.flightlevels.io/ ?
• Modern Agile: https://modernagile.org/ ?
• Ammerse: https://www.ammerse.org/ ?
• Fast Agile: https://www.fastagile.io/ ?
• Blue Dolphin: https://www.dhirubhai.net/company/dolphin-universe/ ?
• Gyshido: https://gyshido.com/ ?
• AIAgile: https://www.aiagile.org/ ?
• Essence: https://lnkd.in/eG_XE7KW ?
• GROWS method: https://lnkd.in/ej7xkPAj ?
• EDGY: https://www.enterprise.design/ ?

There are surely others – please forgive me if I have omitted someone.

I did not include Scaled Agile (SAFe) because it is a heavyweight, and is very process focused, and having them included would probably skew the effort. But that involves the issue of whether anyone who is heavily invested in the status quo should be included. The Agile team thought no, but it is an important question.

There are also relevant domains of thought, including Lean, Flow, and Theory of Constraints.?

To not explicitly include those in the list (and others who have already done a lot of work reimagining Agile) would be a travesty: a lot of work went into them, and these people are thought leaders. They deserve a seat at the table. And indeed, if Reimagining Agile does not include these people, they it will have made enemies of the people who are most vocal about Agile.

And I don’t mean that their opinions should be obtained with a thank you and a footnote. These people need to be at the main table. They are the ones who have been trying to make Agile work all these years.

How to Do This

Synthesizing the ideas of a lot of people is not easy, and it takes a lot of work. The Agile 2 team consisted of 15 people, and we spent several months sharing and synthesizing ideas, mainly through written documents, because we were a global team. Also, when there are more than a few people, group discussions are very inefficient because too many people need to speak, and speaking is very slow. So the Agile 2 team used written exchanges via nested emails, Google docs, and Slack.

But there is the matter of coordinating and organizing. In the Agile 2 Foundations course we describe the “organizer” as an important type of leadership: keeping things organized so that a group can be effective. So organizing needs to occur. But there is also a need for intelligently synthesizing, because groups of people do not efficiently combine what they are each saying. It takes one or more people to sift through the ideas and recognize when two people are saying the same thing, and combine those – combine them into a cohesive and concise idea that becomes part of the evolving shared narrative.

And as I said, doing that is a lot of work. For the Agile 2 team, organizing and synthesizing became my full time job for those months.

How to Govern the Outcome

An important point to understand from the start is that when a group of people is assembled, there are biases among the group. Thus, if one takes a vote on a given idea, one does not necessarily get the right answer.

For example, suppose that 100 years ago, one had taken a vote on whether women are as intelligent as men. I am not sure that the majority would have voted yes. But today, I think that most people would vote yes. (I certainly would.)

Indeed, when James Hutton realized from studying geology and fossils that the Earth was not 6000 years old, but rather was millions of years old, he was censured by Edinburgh University: the opinion that the Earth was only 6000 years old was so embedded in our culture that few people could accept the evidence – despite that it was all round them, visible in the Cliffs of Arthur’s Seat nearby and many other places in the region.

The same is true when obtaining consensus on any issue, unless the decision process is carefully governed. And remember: this is not an “Agile” situation, where we will be able to try something and then pivot: we need to get Reimagining Agile mostly right the first time. There will likely not be a second chance.

This means that the initiative needs more than facilitation: it needs governance. That’s a very non-Agile word, and this illustrates how one size does not fit all: this situation is different than the typical product development situation that most Agilists exist in. This is an intellectual effort, and it must produce a scientifically credible result. Otherwise, there will be no reason for the business community to reconsider Agile: they already heard what the practitioners had to say, so to be credible, this new version of Agile needs to be based on very solid ground, and the voices need to come from those who the business community respects, such as professors from Harvard Business School or Wharton and/or some very respected Fortune 100 executives – or at least people who those leaders already listen to and respect.

Otherwise, it will be perceived as just more of “what those Agile coaches are saying – those people who themselves have not created and led companies”.

To govern the Reimagine Agile initiative, we need a methodology, and it needs to include principles for:

1. How people will be chosen for inclusion.
2. How issues will be discussed.
3. How issues will be decided.
4. How decisions will be validated and possibly revised.

I think that the entire process can be visible, in an information radiator, so that people see the evolving work. And I think that it can be done in an agile way, in the sense that issues progress at different paces, and the work accumulates over time. It definitely should not be done as a closed process that eventually publishes a finished document. Instead, it should be like a Michelangelo sculpture that people see being refined and then polished.

A new Agile is there already: we just need to remove the wrong ideas that surround it.