Being agile, not fragile

“Nothing endures but change.”
Heraclitus

Organizations are having to adapt to change like never before. For many, it’s adapt or die. Sadly, the last 18 months have culled away those either reluctant or unable to meet the impact of this unexpected and relentless pandemic.

One of the best ways to build a process of change and some resilience into your culture is by helping your people adopt an agile mindset. That’s agile with a small “a,” as in agile principles but also as in agility, or the ability to move quickly and easily, to think and understand quickly, or, in the dog agility world, to be quick and nimble, mentally acute, and able to navigate through and around obstacles quickly.

Agile with a capital A has its roots in software development, or, in the words of Matt LeMay, author of Agile for Everybody, “Agile is a completely made up thing that 17 people dreamed up on a ski vacation two decades ago.”

It’s true; in 2001, those 17 people developed and signed the Agile Manifesto, which has since became the foundation for an evolving (lowercase) agile movement that has defined new ways of working together to deliver more value, more quickly.

One of those 17, Jim Highsmith, puts it this way: “Agile leaders lead teams; non-agile ones manage tasks.”

Since then, the process has become both a highly specific, sometimes problematic, methodology yet also generic in that mature agile principles are being successfully applied to challenges outside of software development, especially in the areas of management, innovation, and uncertainty.

How agile is your organization? Here’s a collection of agile quotes to inspire you.

One great thing for 11.09.21 – Matt LeMay, author of Agile for Everybody,  gets to the heart of agile in just 4 words – collaborate, improve, deliver, reflect. His talk, “Why agile is for everybody and everybody hates agile,” was a part of JAM London 2019, a 2-day event for product makers from top companies around the world. His talk is 28 minutes long and more traditionally Agile-focused, but don’t miss his One Page One Hour Pledge. (Sadly, JAM did not survive the pandemic and announced its own demise last May with a quote from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: So long, and thanks for all the fish.)

More great things…