Jul 01, 2024
The debate over whether Agile is Dead or not is flooding LinkedIn feeds, Medium posts, and conference topics. Is Agile dead? One might question whether it was ever alive. Perhaps then, the question shouldn’t be, “is Agile dead,” but instead “is the need for business agility - how quickly your organization can adapt to change - dead?” We can confidently say that volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity are increasing. So, the need for business agility is very much alive.
Authors: Alex Crosby & Andy Spence
The Misconceptions of Controlling Change
Scientists have long established that humans strive for certainty. It’s in our nature to seek control. When things go wrong, we look back at decisions and say, we should have known better. We ask ourselves, how can we be more certain in the future?
Traditionally, organisations have obsessed over this need for certainty by over planning and micromanaging their way to “effective change management”, sometimes even aiming to avoid it entirely. This has manifested in slow and costly change management processes, risk management techniques, scheduling processes and tools, forecasting models, etc., all with the expectation of being able to predict the future. Many organisations have treated “Agile” as a different method to limit change and predict the future with greater assurance. “Agile” ways of working, to them, were simply a new set of tools for achieving certainty. “By having Sprints, we can be certain we will meet our targets.” To others, “Agile” meant total freedom, a lack of focus, and bean bags and free cereal. “We didn’t generate any value, we missed all our deadlines, and we have a poor quality product, but it’s ok, we’re Agile,” understandably frustrating those striving for certainty.
These are huge misconceptions and are what has arguably led to its perceived death. The essence of agility was never to achieve absolute certainty, nor was it to lose focus and work without structure. Instead, it was to accept, embrace, and benefit from the lack of certainty by focusing on discovering better ways to produce more valuable products, to structure people, teams, and organisations around continuous improvement, and to create a continuous learning organisation. Why? So that we could build the foundations we need in order to both work with and navigate change, not fight against it.
Embracing Business Agility
You don't need to be an expert to see that the pace of technological advancement, environmental shifts, and societal diversity is accelerating. As these changes continue the ability to fortune-tell is even harder. Embracing business agility, therefore, is essential.
Central to this is a focus on value, as emphasized years ago in an article on the elements of value published in the Harvard Business Review. Concentrating on solving your customers’ problems and delivering impact will provide reason to choose you over your competitors. There was a time we celebrated success for simply completing a project, where output was most important. However, an outcome-oriented mindset will help reduce wasted effort and encourage innovation. Focusing on value is the key to staying ahead of the game. Creating transparency around value, goals, roles and responsibilities, and impediments helps create a structure that supports continuous improvement. Clarifying boundaries and empowering people and teams to experiment within them helps understand and respond to change. This lightweight structure is vital for agility, without slipping into chaos. Agility shouldn’t bring loss of control, instead increase your options, build resilience in domain and technical knowledge amongst your people and bring about greater transparency, meaning you can rely on your teams to share the load and win together.
Organizations that learn to learn are the most successful. Continuous evolution is key, as explicitly stated in MIT Technology Review Insights in 2023. To embrace change, organisations must learn to inspect and adapt, understand the difference between assumptions and empirical evidence, and treat product development with a scientific mindset. Reducing the time to learn, shortening feedback loops, and utilising data for evidence-informed decision making will help an organisation evolve.
Complexity Endures, So Does the Need for Agility
What brings these ideas to life is recognising we must provide customers with something they can experience (use, interact with, touch, taste, and so on) frequently. In order to focus on value, improve our structure, and become a learning organization, we must validate our ideas and plans by delivering to customers early and often. We must observe their experiences with our products or services to help work with change and complexity, rather than against it, to maximize value. Agile as a “methodology” is most certainly dead, in fact it should never have been “alive”. Is this a new realisation? No, but many companies continue to struggle with this. Our perspective emphasizes the increasing need for business agility to address real-world complexity. Complexity in business will never die. Traditional approaches can't keep up.
About the authors
Andy Spence and Alex Crosby are part of a dynamic team at Merapar's Agile Center of Excellence. Andy, as the Director of Agility and Transformation, focuses on helping organizations accelerate value delivery, stay relevant, and thrive in an ever-changing world. Complementing Andy, Alex serves as an Agile Consultant and Professional Scrum Trainer, bringing a wealth of knowledge on value delivery through product enablement and capability upskilling to create a more effective organization. Together, they leverage their combined expertise to drive meaningful change and innovation for their clients.