Why Agile 2 and Flow are Innately Integrated

by Hans van Bommel and Cliff Berg

Business agility is crucial, but “Agile” has not delivered it.

One can blame how the original ideas were applied. One can also blame the original ideas: they were too micro focused on teams instead of the ecosystem. They were incomplete. They were not sufficiently explained. Perhaps they were not even quite right – close, but somewhat off.

And then there are the many process frameworks. Some of these claim to not be processes but they actually are, because they define roles and activities – that’s a process.

But organizational agility does not arise from installing purported “Agile” processes. True agility arises from behavioral norms that leaders establish in the organization’s culture. It also arises from knowledge of Lean and Flow solution patterns for solving problems.

Agility manifests this way: circumstances change; that breaks the flow; in a truly agile organization, just the right people collaborate rapidly and effectively, and create a new flow.

There is no process for this: it is about how people behave. Our evidence for that comes from studying highly agile companies, including SpaceX and Spotify. Those companies do not impose so-called “Agile” processes on their people.

But what are the behaviors that leaders should instill? Some guidance can be found in both Agile 2 and in the Flow Manifesto.

These are not processes to follow. If you had read a book about how to be successful in business, and it laid out a set of precise steps to perform, would you expect those to work? Similarly, if you had read a psychology book that listed a set of precise steps to follow to have a good marriage, would you expect those to work?

There is no precise process for agility. There are only ideas. It is like a parent giving advice to a child about how to live their life. Each person needs to apply the advice in their own way: as a child grows older, they often remember their parents’ advice, and apply it in a way that their parents did not imagine (unfortunately often too late for them to say “thank you”). The same is true for business advice – and agility ideas are business advice –? there is no process: each leader needs to apply the ideas in their own way, hopefully before it is too late.

Ideas are vague, but they are important. They remind us of situations; they give us a mental framework for interpreting situations and help us to plan for better outcomes.

So the ideas in the Flow Manifesto and Agile 2 are not a prescription for what to do. They are reminders of business life lessons. And they are much better than the guidance in the Agile Manifesto, because Agile 2 and Flow are informed by a broader perspective, and by reflection after twenty years on what has worked within the Agile community and what has not worked.

Let’s look at just a few of the ideas that intersect between the Flow Manifesto and Agile 2.

Flow Manifesto:

• Principle: Moving forward while responding to change over following a detailed plan
• Principle: Autonomy of groups and human interaction over processes and control
• Principle: Just enough substantive governance over comprehensive architecture and reporting

Agile 2:

• Principle: Any initiative requires both a vision or goal, and a flexible, steerable, outcome-oriented plan.
• Principle: Provide leadership who can both empower individuals and teams, and set direction.
• Principle: Favor mostly-autonomous end-to-end delivery streams whose teams have authority to act.

All well and good you might say: “There is nothing here that I don’t know.” But that is true of wisdom: if you have wisdom, then an articulation of that wisdom will sound very familiar. The ideas in Flow and in Agile 2 are not novel: they are reminders – pearls of wisdom. The Agile Manifesto is the same way, except that it is not quite right or is at best very incomplete. For example, while it advocates for self-organizing teams, it turns out that there are a lot of prerequisites for a team to be able to self-organize well, and the Manifesto does not mention those.

Viewing the values or principles in any of these sources as great revelations is the wrong way to look at them. One useful way to use these thought frameworks is as a set of reminders. Another way is as a crucible for examining the behaviors we see in our organization. Yet another way is to check whether we are encouraging these behaviors, through our training programs and through our leadership actions. But none of these behaviors are absolutes, as in “always do this.” There are always tradeoffs; each situation is unique.

Nor is any set of guidance sufficient. One cannot enumerate all of the ideas that might apply in a given situation involving human beings. Ideas about human behavior are open ended. That is why the Agile 2 book’s Preface states “Agile 2 claims to only be a set of useful ideas for how to achieve agility in human endeavors, and encourages people to include other ideas and fields of thought as well” – ideas like Flow.

In the end, you have to think for yourself: there is no correct how-to guide for how to organize or lead people.