The Age of Agile

Agile practitioners share a mindset that work should, in principle, be done in small, autonomous, cross-functional teams working in short cycles on relatively small tasks and getting continuous feedback from the ultimate customer or end-user. Big and complex problems are resolved by descaling them into tiny, manageable pieces.

It was the Agile movement that figured out how to create an environment that fostered consistent high performance in its teams. If there were a Nobel Prize for management, which there isn’t, and if there were any justice in the world

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

But frankly, in the first decade after the Agile Manifesto, customer focus received secondary consideration among software developers: Most of their attention was on getting the characteristics of the high-performance team right. In this period, teams often had very little contact with the actual customer. Instead, the customer was represented by a proxy representative who was mysteriously called a “product owner” and who supposedly knew what customers wanted.

competitive setting, it’s not technology itself that makes the difference. The key is how adroitly the firm uses the technology. The driver of sustained success is the Agile mindset.

The truth is that when we look closely, we can see that organizations that have embraced Agile have three core characteristics:

1. The Law of the Small Team

2. The Law of the Customer

3. The Law of the Network

But what exactly is Agile? What does it mean for an organization to embrace the Agile mindset? When I use the word “agile” or “nimble,” you might think about a squirrel or a ballet dancer or a champion soccer player. You probably wouldn’t think of a large organization— big, unwieldy, clunky, slow, out to make money from you, and fundamentally unfriendly. You generally don’t think of organizations as being nimble because generally they’re not. We’re accustomed to dealing with organizations that are frustratingly set in their ways and preoccupied with their own internal processes. Their motto could be

But in most cases, site visits showed that major corporations have large-scale implementations of Agile goals, principles, and values. In effect, Agile management in large organizations is actually happening.8

When Agile is done right, the teams are working within a business model in which the organization is generating value for the organization itself as well as the customer.

Moreover, bureaucracies, with their steep chains of command, can’t move fast enough to take advantage of opportunities in a VUCA marketplace as they emerge. In