The evolution of agile

Setting the scene

In modern businesses, there’s no bigger inefficiency than the one caused by teams without purpose or metrics. It is not uncommon to have more work causing negative or neutral impact than positive impact.

With this in mind, we need to evolve what agile is today.

The burden of complexity

Agile frameworks have become too complex. They’ve become hard to understand, with too many rules, roles, techniques, and tools, just like an organization that as grown and developed all this legacy infrastructure that slows down everything.

Luckily, making things simpler, better, and arguably even easier, doesn’t require a fancy new framework.

Back to Basics

Ultimately, valuable work is dependent on 2 things:
1. Having a problem to solve with some hypothesis about solutions
2. Having the right tools to build the solutions

Only then, we decide on the ways to execute that ensures efficiency.

An overview of purpose vs reality

It turns out that the basics are often not present in the teams, especially when we talking in large, “non-digital-native” organizations.

Some years ago a person I worked with came into the room beaming. — What’s up? I asked him. His reply? — We ran our first A/B test.

There would be nothing wrong with this, but we’re talking about an online store, in the second half of the 2010s.

The promise of Agile cannot meet expectations when the tooling and available infrastructure does not enable fast-feedback loops.

This is one of the blockers of agility in organizations.

All starts with the problem space

Throughout my career, whenever I asked a team “what and who’s problem are we solving?”, or, “what value does your solution bring?”, more often than not, I was met with imprecise answers or no answer.

When implementing an Agile framework, we are doing it because we’re hoping for a positive impact on the business, yet the customer and business problem are not always top of mind in teams.

Much of this is due to Agile frameworks focusing more on the process than the purpose. They are hurting teams and businesses.

Somewhere along the way, the purpose of the short development cycles and fast feedback loops got lost. These cycles meant to help us learn about the problem space, the customer, or the hypothesis we wanted to test, and this needs to be the primary focus.

Without it, we’re leaving it to chance.

For simpler agile, one that creates purpose, one that does what the methodology was meant to bring to the table, just like Design Thinking or Lean Startup, we need to go back to the giant’s shoulder everyone stands on.

The Scientific Method

Right in front of us, responsible for the fastest rate of progress humankind has seen stands the Scientific Method. Simpler, problem-focused, with feedback loops, hypothesis, tests, and metrics.

Going agile, no matter if IT or not, needs to start with embedding the scientific method deep into the organization’s DNA. Then, run whatever framework you want, but keep in mind, when we forgot the problem, we stop being agile.

This is the evolution we should drive towards, removing complexity and going back to the basics.

And once teams unlearn all the complex processes that they can’t make sense of and move the focus to what matters, the problem-solving aspect of work, the quality of conversations, and the outcomes will get exponentially better, there’s a sense of flow, of purpose.