Episode 1: What community members say about State of Agile?
When I started thinking about the year 2019 as of the last year of a decade and as such a natural time for a decade worth retrospective of Agile movement I started asking members of Agile Community about their personal reflection. There is lots of people who spent 10+, 20+ years pioneering in Agility and introducing it into organizations, so the experience we have accumulated is huge and throughout. As you will see in the below my subjective set of collected opinions, I found a wide set of reflections, starting from complete satisfaction and enjoying the comfort of the comfort zone, through moderate optimism to lighter or heavier frustration. As you can imagine those who were satisfied were not very creative in thinking about necessary improvements for the next decade of 2020s. On the other hand those who felt moderate optimism or were frustrated were actively contemplating the ways and opportunities to improve. Only a hungry artist is credible the proverb says. What I also observed is that the global Agile Community is, of course one may say, not free from confirmation bias and group bias and not any better in being able to building the objective perspective than any other group, say the poor waterfall guys at the dawn of "The Age of Agile". After all, we are all contained within the same system of evangelism for Agility. Yet, I must admit, I did not expect that much of self-satisfaction and in general that much of symptoms of the Warren Buffet's ABC of business decay (Arrogance, Bureaucracy and Complacency). And what is coaching about in the first place if not about the ability to transcend the barriers of the self. So I keep smiling to myself about this discovery and to my naivety that the global community of coaches can do better when it comes to fighting human built-in biases :)Anyway, The most interesting voices in my opinion, came from the practitioners, who spend their career plowing through the rocky daily reality.
Personally, as long as I am quite doubtful about the ability of the generation of Agile fathers to evolve (since they are not very hungry anymore and in fact became the dominating predators of The Age of Agile), I am very optimistic and pleased to see all the novel thinking and feeling arising in the younger generation of leaders empathizing with concepts beyond Agility. Clearly we have had enough time and learnt the strengths and limitations of Agility in practice and we know that both exist.
So I leave you to it - a non-representative, subjective sample of opinions on the State of Agility I collected between 2019-2020 during various Agile events and on social networks. My questions had a form of a typical retrospective questions in the context of the decade of 2010s: How would you compare the Agile world 10 years ago and at present? What has changed systematically? What do you think about this direction? Is the direction good? How close it is to your heart? What you would do differently? What are the obstacles to Agile adoption? What will be the systemic change in 2020s?
Enjoy and share your perspective!
p.s. This blogpost belongs to a series of blogposts under the title Tthe State of Agile on the evolution of workplace and future of work. The related blogposts I shared earlier on the topic are:
