What Does It Mean to Be Agile?

This article is my attempt to present and define basic view of what agile is. It won’t answer all your questions. My intent is to spur some thinking and constructive conversation. Once you understand what it means to be agile, the practices (doing agile) make more sense.

The Summary

For the busy executive who wants the summary in points here you go (not exhaustive, but hits the highlights):

Agile is a mindset, not tooling or methods
Agile is values embodied in principles which drive practices
Agile is servant leadership with broad participation and decision-making where the information is
Agile is transparency, consistency, and predictability, but not the way you think of it now
Agile is focused on value, innovation, and relentless improvement
Agile, when done well, creates an amazing work environment

If you want to dig in and understand what Agile is all about, then read on.

The Basics

“Agile is a mindset” is a common refrain uttered by passionate agilists everywhere, including me, but what does it mean?

Entire books have been written on what it means to be agile, so answering it in the span of a few paragraphs seems foolhardy. This will not be an exhaustive treatise on agile, but hopefully the start of a longer discussion over many articles. In that light, please be kind and patient.

For many of you, your first response will be something like this, which I have heard many times:

“We’ve tried standups, sprints and all that stuff, but it didn’t work. It was so stressful, created chaos, and we lost some good people as a result.”

To you, I say this:

“I totally get it.”

This is the plight of many places that try to do agile without really understanding WHY they’re doing it – to be agile. You are not alone.

In fact, I have found that there are few that truly understand. I’m sure the LinkedIn comments will make the case for me.

For a company to be truly agile is a top-to-bottom thing, not just some isolated teams – everyone is involved.

When you learn how to be agile and adopt and adapt the Agile practices that work for your company’s culture and processes, it is an amazing, transformative way to work and will result in an incredible dynamic for collaboration, problem solving, and high levels of productivity.

Let’s dive into the world of agile…

What Agile is not

At my previous employer, I was typically brought in to lead programs at clients where agile transformation was a component of a larger initiative. On one occasion, I was speaking with one of our client leads from my practice group who wanted me to join the account as the Delivery Lead because it was a complex data & analytics program.

To confirm how delivery was being done, I asked for details and the response was:

“We’re agile. We’re using Jira.”

This was an executive who had gone through the Agile certification training pushed by our firm, and all I could think during this moment with my face buried deep in my palms was:

“Well, there’s another so-called leader who wasn’t paying attention in class.”

Why do I bring up that story?

Because the core point is this:

Being agile is not about tools or activities, but about mindset.

What Agile Is

The foundational component of the agile mindset is leadership leading by example. In the case of the so-called “agile” project, the leader did not value the training. I remember the training and it was good, but the lead clearly did not listen to or assimilate the training.

Neither the client nor the program teams exhibited traits of agility except for doing daily standups (loosely defined) and a tortured form of “sprinting”.

It was an “aha!” moment that drove home this insight:

If the executives didn’t value the mindset, why should everyone else?

At its core, an agile organization defines and believes in core values. Those values are broken down into Principles which provide practical guidelines for the Practices used to deliver. So, there are three interdependent layers.

Too often, companies start with a list of Practices without understanding why. In other words, they try to do agile without being agile. This is like being able to pronounce a foreign language without understand the words – you can read the book, but you don’t comprehend the story.

In the end, culture eats strategy. Changing your mindset changes the culture. Likewise, if you don’t change your mindset, your old culture will reassert itself and your strategy, full of good intentions, will be swallowed by that culture.

The Drill-Down

Values of Agile

Underlying any successful broad adoption of agile in a company, beyond disparate teams doing it on their own, is that agile is based on Values which originate from lean-agile thinking. Yes, agile originated from lean manufacturing, was adapted to software development, and is now being widely adopted in non-technical delivery. It’s a proven foundation.

Lean thinking is presented in the familiar House of Lean. It has several different representations, but here is a summarized version based on the old Scaled Agile picture:

Notice that Leadership is the foundation. The foundation means that leaders in an organization need to be involved and change their way of thinking. They can’t keep pushing forward the same as always and insist that everyone else changes. There are many reasons for this and additional reasons why they may be resistant to change, but those factors will need to be covered in other articles.

Value is the focus of every decision. It is the purpose for which the Agile house is built.

At its most basic, it is simple questions like:

“Who really needs to be in this discussion?”

“Which feature provides more customer value?”

Value is something achieved after the rest of the Agile house is in place.

Yes, you can achieve some value while neglecting the structure of the house, but the weaker the foundation and legs are, the less value you will receive, and the more quickly the house will collapse.

Agile Values are succinctly represented in the Agile Manifesto.

Most people are familiar with the words, but many do not attach them to a mindset – or they take parts of each statement while ignoring the rest.

That is a mistake – it is intended to be taken as a whole because it identifies the relative importance of actions, focusing on collaboration, adaptability, and value without eliminating stability and predictability.

Principles of Agile

Principles are simply a practical steppingstone between Values and Methods. The Values are philosophical in nature and not simply directly connected to specific methods a team or an organization wish to use.

SAFe, for instance, defines a group of principles. What may seem confusing to the newcomer is that they use two different sets of principles: high-level Lean-Agile principles and SAFe Lean-Agile principles. They connect the Lean-Agile principles to the Agile Value (the Agile Manifesto) to create their version of principles which are more easily digestible and can be translated into practices.

All the recommendations made within the framework can be traced through the Principles and the Values, which makes the framework powerful.

This does not mean that you must use SAFe – it’s simply a well-documented example to more easily illustrate the point.

Regardless of the framework you choose, the underlying concept is sound: as an organization, you need broad and deep support for the mindset. Otherwise, the needed changes in behaviors and processes will not happen and therefore, as a result, the practices will slowly be eroded and the value will dissipate.

Results of Agile

What I appreciate most about the agile mindset is that, when adopted well, it keeps you attached to your foundational values. Being diligent with changes to practices is crucial to sustaining your shift to being agile.

In the end, this means that, if you find that a practice isn’t working correctly and you need to change it, you ensure that your new practice fits within the construct of your values and principles. If it does not, then you need to come up with a new solution. Plus, you need to be diligent about not compromising, otherwise you lose credibility and you begin the slow erosion of the value you wanted to receive from your move to being agile.

Results Realized In Action

For example at one client project, the first thing we did with the development teams and the business teams (the customers/product owners, in this case) was to define our values and principles. I prepped the room with the values and principles on sheets of paper all over the wall.

When one of the senior participants walked into the room and saw it, he exclaimed,

“Oh, this is so cool!”

During one short workshop, the teams and other participants refined the values and principles and agreed on them – committing to adhere to them, as well.

During our first Planning Increment (we were following SAFe), we recognized that the team structures weren’t working as expected. We had constructed them “by the book” to maximize cross-skilling of the teams, but there were certain skills which truly needed to be on one team – an exception to the rule in this particular environment.

Before adopting the change, the client leaders, team members, and I set aside time to review the changes in the context of the values and principles before finalizing the revised team structures. The changes in team structure immediately accelerated the value delivery of the entire group – not just that one group of people with niche skills.

Three years later, long after I was gone from the facility, one of the teams of teams (an ART, for SAFe people), tried to adopt a practice which truly made no sense. The lead enterprise agile coach went to that group, pointed to the values and principles, and said they had to adhere to them.

The change they needed to make was very different than the one they originally tried – it required some creativity and different thinking instead of reacting to the whims of someone in management who was new to the environment. By adhering to their values and principles, they not only maintained their value delivery, but were able to have a civil, productive conversation with that new person in management.

You may be having this thought: It seems like the larger organization still has old tendencies with a top-down command-and-control structure. If so, you are correct. A strategic part of the organization has shifted to agile ways of working, but the whole enterprise has not. They are, in fact, in process of making that change because of the success of the subset of this large corporation and this situation is being used to demonstrate the need for more leadership training.

Achieve Your Value

Too often, organizations begin with practices they are vaguely familiar with; but don’t understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. In their discomfort, they quickly revert to old habits and, more often than not, make things worse, not better.

When you begin with the foundation and create the agile mindset, your practices and subsequent results will follow. When you do that, you’ll realize your value and, as a bonus, make a great place to work.

Follow-Up

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agile ways of working
spurring innovation
making effective and honest use of data
creating great workplaces

We’d relish the opportunity to have a no-pressure conversation about where you are and where you would like to go. Please contact us to begin the conversation.

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