From Agile to Agility
Part 2 of 3
Last week I wrote about how agile started; today I am going to talk about what has happened since then, and how it has evolved to this day.
Very soon after the Agile Manifesto, progressive organisations started to adopt this new way of running projects; it wasn’t a super-fast uptake; it took a few years for the wider spread of these mindsets, practices and approaches. Usually, it was either start-ups or digital organisations that led the way, and initially always as a project management or product delivery methodology. Things like Scrum or the Lean Start up started to emerge in the way people spoke about delivery and innovation in organisations.
By 2007, organisations that were successfully using this approach to build better and faster products were starting to ask themselves how to do this with more teams; and the second wave of agile emerged: agile at scale.
This was about creating more speed and more scale in the way organisations created and delivered digital products in the market; we were in the midst of the growth of digital companies like Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple, etc… The way these companies were evolving, changing, innovating, creating and shipping new features or entire products at speed and scale, was something we had not experienced before. Remember, we came from a time when IT projects took years and years, and millions of dollars to see the market because they were driven by compliance and risk aversion.
By 2009 it was too late for many traditional companies to react. The paradigm had shifted. The new powerhouses were digital businesses that had embraced a new approach to delivering products and running projects. But it was not only that; these organisations were running differently as a whole. They’d been born as start-ups but had been able to maintain some or all of that essence through the scale up and consolidation period. These organisations were operating differently; their organisational design, their budgeting processes; their system of work was different. They looked and felt like start-ups, but they were multimillion dollar companies.
And the third wave of agile was born: business or organisational agility.
I believe that organisational agility is what most organisations are trying to achieve to this day.
They may call it something different; but that is what they are trying to achieve.
There are many definitions of organisational agility; I would say it can be defined as the ability of a company to:
Adapt to external and internal changes.
Rapidly meet customer demands and expectations.
Lead change by improving culture, practices, and outcomes.
Maintain a continuous competitive advantage.
In my mind and experience, the way to achieve these things is by using the same mindsets and principles I discussed last week when I was talking about the agile principles: trust, transparency, collaboration, communication and respect.
I remember in 2014 we had a lot of “traditional” companies come to REA to see how we worked; by then we had become a little famous for our approach to agile and agility. I remember showing our practices (stand ups, visual boards, etc..) explaining our rituals for planning, execution and review; but making it clear that for it to work, the most important elements were the agile mindsets and the system of work designed around it all. Fast-forward a few years later and I saw a lot of the practices, some of the rituals and very little of the mindsets and systems of work applied to these traditional organisations. I used to say that beanbags, table tennis tables and post it notes were not what made an organisation agile and sadly that was most of what I saw.
I remember when I was consulting for Shopify, they had a sentence that encapsulated very well the essence I am talking about. They used to say that they wanted to become a 100-year-old start up.