Being agile means truly having an agile mindset. You can do agile without it. Or you can simply say that you are doing agile because you implemented a few practices or tools. Michael Sahota talks about doing agile as only practices, with about 20% of benefit, and being agile as a mindset with 80% of benefit. I see this in teams all the time. Some think agile just means not having a plan or any documentation. Others want to just be told what the “agile process” is, so that they can get on with their work and go home. Many teams practice “cargo cult” agile, where someone (manager, leader, whatever) reads a book and then enforces a few procedures with no real understanding of the cause of success. They expect that by doing x, y, and z that they are agile, and that good things will happen. Teams hope they can “go agile” and that all of their problems will disappear. Agile is not a process, or a methodology. It is an idea.

There is no silver bullet for agile. No set of practices or tools can make an organization agile. Agile is not a prescriptive process that you can just follow or institute. It takes dedicated organizational transformation and commitment from people in the teams to both each-other and their work. As discussed in The New, New Product Development Game (Taekuchi & Nonaka, 1986), and then adopted by Jeff Sutherland, the best teams are transcendent, autonomous, and cross-functional. The best teams are on journey from Shu (learning fundamentals and principles) to Ha (breaking from tradition and inventing) to Ri (transcendence – fully being agile).

 Understanding this distinction is important for any practitioner, but it is particularly important for agile coaches. They have to understand where their team or client is on their agile journey, and coach them to explore agile principles and the agile mindset. In this way, they can begin to be agile, rather than just do agile.

Until the next iteration . . .

Jason