(2018-09-16) Denning Why Finding The Real Meaning Of Agile Is Hard

Steve Denning: Why Finding The Real Meaning Of Agile Is Hard. It has become a huge tent with varied jargon monoxide.

As recently as 2017, a survey cited in Computer Weekly concluded that “Three-quarters of the 300 U.K. and U.S.-based CIOs surveyed said they were no longer prepared to defend agile. Half said they now think of agile as ‘an IT fad.’ Over half of the CIOs have discredited agile development.”

Surveys by Deloitte and McKinsey suggest that more than 90% of executives give high priority to business agility, even though less than 10% see their current firm as “highly agile.”

For many, Agile (or business agility or organizational agility, or whatever you want to call it), has come to mean a paradigm shift in management, a fundamental rethinking about how work gets done in the 21st century.

To make sense of the confusion, anecdotal inquiry makes less sense than examining the actual differences between firms that are “highly agile” and those that aren’t.

We found that the “Agile haves” have a mindset with three keys or “laws”:

The Law Of The Customer

The Law Of The Small Team

The Law Of The Network

Without a mindset with these three keys, what we saw was 'fake Agile’ i.e. Agile in name only. And there is a lot of fake Agile around. (Dark Agile)

In effect, Agile is eating the world.