First generation Agilist & our Advisor Gervais Johnson explains the 4 quadrants of the Agile Ecosystem and talks about rise of Agile over the past years.
When I started my career in software engineering, we embraced the new structured software development life cycle approach; like the one James Martin and my other fellow IBMers created because we knew what it was like without it. Now it’s labeled Waterfall and not a right-fit for today. We were successful and created some great solutions, but also failed monumentally many times as far as budget and meeting expected completion dates. Waterfall fit our technology, business demands, and human-systems at that time.
Today technology is pervasive; it is changing our society and way of life profoundly. Most companies depend on it to be in business. Many people depend on it to be productive and happy. Business markets, customer demands, and technology changes and their related impacts are outpacing human consumption and adaptation abilities. Technology and social advances create a symbiotic relationship with Agile, allowing us to deliver faster and sustain customer delight in the digital and interconnected world.
Agile today consists of: an open mindset, an empowering and safe organization culture, a pragmatic set of practices and tools, and a visionary relationship between internal and external environments. Collectively, these form an open and coherent ecosystem. Waterfall is not relevant for today and is replaced by Agile, mainly due to the constant need to sense, respond, and adapt. Agile is pervasive and changing our organizations and individual interactions as well as our social fabric.
Agile today consists of an open mindset, an empowering and safe organization culture, a pragmatic set of practices and tools, and a visionary relationship between internal and external environments.
I am a first generation Agilist; witnessing, and to some degree, influencing, today’s mass acceptance and adoption of Agile. Over the last 16 years, especially the last five years, Agile has matured via obvious successful outcomes in pure business efforts without a technology enablement component, as well as being applied in the typical software development efforts. We see a continuum of Agile implementations; from startup companies using Lean Agile to large companies using a Scaled Agile Framework. Many large enterprises are building close relationships with new startup disruptors resulting in the Agile for Innovation movement.
Agile is an ecosystem and involves four quadrants: the Agile Humanity, the Agile Practices and Tools, the Agile Organization and Culture, and the Agile Environment. These quadrants need recurring alignment and constant synchronization. The Agile Ecosystem is a human-system that needs ethnographic focus to succeed and evolve.
The Agile Ecosystem
Agile Practices and Tools
This is where most implementations of Agile focus primarily within the IS/IT departments at the enterprise, and more Lean Agile and Design Thinking practices for startups. The focus is on individual and team proficiency so the team and organization becomes high-performing. There is additional focus on the exterior organization to bring in latest practices and tools to be tailored. It is more fluid than the others because many new ideas and vendor solutions are arriving on the market and are concentrated here. The increase of market solutions in the quadrant generally indicates that it is easier to tackle, and this is where Agile started in the software engineering arena.
Agile Humanity
This is the most commonly neglected with most Agile Adoptions, Transitions, or Transformations. We think humanity is a good name for this quadrant as it expresses an all-inclusive participation of individuals in a human-system. This is where the “Being Agile” starts for each of us, as we reflect on our internal readiness to change. Today we are not seeing increased speed of focus in this area except for leadership training and coaching offerings. Emerging focus on ethnography, happiness, sense-making and stories, crews, competency tribes or communities, high-performing team practices, along with internal self-evaluation and awareness practices and tools, are shaping this area.
Agile Organization and Culture
This is commonly missing with most Agile Adoptions, Transitions, or Transformations. This quadrant looks at interior organization structure and the organization collective. We are seeing increasing focus in this area especially with newer and high-tech companies. With increasing frequency, we are seeing relevant Social Sciences findings interwoven within Change and Organization Design. In addition, we are seeing some companies use this information to experiment and adopt more purposeful business models. For example, replacing yearly performance reviews with more frequent or continuous feedback or changing our skill concentration to more customers’ needs focus.
Agile Environment
This is where we have seen focus but rarely outside the IT/IS external software or staffing vendor relationships as we build software solutions. There is some significant movement is this area. For example, the financial services sector is using Agile more as they work with appropriate parties to simplify regulations. The U.S. Department of Defense has mandated that software vendors submitting proposals demonstrate Agile competency, while simultaneously simplifying the contracting and execution processes. Many disrupted companies like Financial Services are determining how to partner or integrate with FinTech companies. Some companies are integrating hardware and software Agile environments aligning practices, tools, and mindset.
Since 2001, Agile has been successfully implemented thousands of times with real, positive business results and human-system positive outcomes. It’s had some failures, too, but the root cause is not Agile but misalignment with one of the Agile Ecosystem quadrants. Of course, for many of us, when we fail we have a difficult time looking within to learn and adjust. Instead, we tend to point at the external idea as the reason; after all, we are flawed humans. It is easier to look outward, but doing so puts our business, government organization, or non-profit existence in peril.
Agile is more mature and in hyper-demand. For new ideas there is a common maturity progression. Most think Agile is in the “late majority” or “trough of disillusionment” phases, where there is: a plethora of practices and tools, self-identified experts, expert infighting, cottage certification and validation industries, and increased usage complexity. We are left with an ever-complex task to determine the right fit for our needs.
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