Lowercase agile

I don’t care for uppercase Agile. It’s a buzzword. Overloaded. Hyped.

What I care for is lowercase agile. It’s a way of thinking, working and living. Adaptive, nimble, lightweight.

Three principles of lowercase agile are:

• The Law of the Customer—an obsession with delivering value to customers as the be-all and end-all of the organization.
• The Law of the Small Team—a presumption that all work be carried out by small self -organizing teams, working in short cycles and focused on delivering value to customers.
• The Law of the Network—a continuing effort to obliterate bureaucracy and top-down hierarchy so that the firm operates as an interacting network of teams, all focused on working together to deliver increasing value to customers.

Concepts & influential people

In no particular order.

• Systemic Coaching & Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory
• Servant Leadership
• Manifesto for Agile Software Development
• Principles behind the Agile Manifesto
• The New New Product Development Game, 1986
• Peter Drucker’s concepts of New Work (“The Future of Knowledge Work”) and “Management by Objectives”
• Kanban
• Scrum
• Extreme Programming
• Objectives and Key Results (OKR) based on Drucker’s “Management by Objectives”
• Plan, do, check, act
• Build, measure, learn from The Lean Startup
• Inspect & Adapt
• Lean Software Development