The Heart and Soul of Agility
Combining Modern Agile and the Heart of Agile
I’ve been a big fan of the Heart of Agile, ever since I was introduced to it back in 2018. Its radical simplification helped me better articulate what it meant to be agile without having to tie it immediately back to software development. Whenever I run training, I define agile as being a mindset described by 4 values, defined by 12 principles, and manifested in unlimited practices. This is the Manifesto, but it is the Heart and it’s four imperatives that I use to ground learning. Collaborate. Deliver. Reflect. Improve.
Recently I have also begun to favour the four principles of Modern Agile. To me, it contains the imperatives of the Heart, and goes further by providing a higher purpose: make people awesome. How cool is that? And on the long road to recovery from the global trauma of Covid, and the re-normalizing and re-harmonizing our work-life balance we really, really need to make safety a prerequisite. Overall Modern Agile provides a greater sense of wholeness.
Given that these models feel mutually inclusive of each other, I’ve been trying for a little while now to fit the two together. I’ve seen the heart nestled into the inner circle of Modern Agile, but this felt unsatisfactory when the imperative didn’t align with the principle it was matched with. Yesterday, inspiration struck (possibly just heat stroke) and I would like to introduce a graphic for bringing the Heart of Agile and Modern Agile together into a unified view.
Make People Awesome remains in the upper quadrant, as it is like a compass pointing north. This is the purpose and promise of what it means to live an agile mindset. Not just to build great products or services, but to make our customers awesome with whatever they do with them. To make our organizations and our people awesome. And our families. And the world.
Make Safety a Prerequisite remains the central pillar and acts as a grounding anchor. Making people awesome is not achievable without people feeling safe to deliver value continuously or to experiment & learn rapidly.
I have switched these two last principles around so that Deliver Value Continuously is on the left. This allows the four imperatives from the Heart to read from left to right. This first principle has been split to include Collaboration, which is essential to achieving the rest. It makes sense to use the principal language over the Deliver imperative to highlight the importance of an incremental and iterative approach. Reflect has been nestled into Experiment & Learn Rapidly, which replaces the fourth imperative of Improve as this is contained with the intent of that principle.
Ideally, Collaborate would have been in the top quadrant, which was a design decision made in the latest iterations of the Heart as collaboration comes first. However I decided ultimately that collaboration was equal parts making people awesome and requiring safety, and the compass metaphor above too powerful to lose. The four imperatives present visually as arrows moving rightwards. They continue to describe a continuous loop that should be as short and fast as can be sustainably maintained.
How does this combined model resonate with you? Does it feel coherent? Can you see ways to further refine and improve this graphic? Or how to better describe the convergence of these two models, which are useful and inspiring in their own right?
