The origins of Athletic Development
Too often, in the comforts of our daily professional lives we settle; we compromise and adore the status quo or gruntingly tolerate mediocracy.
Our way of working is dictated by inefficient configurations of tooling, which limit human capacity, creativity and interaction. We’ve built up our individual ‘walls of safety’ through keeping our expertise nicely separated by domains.
Well, until a very hopeful Manifesto was written that aimed to change the game; a movement that brought us ‘Extreme Programming’, ‘The Lean Startup’, ‘Service Design’ and ‘Scrum’; scientific approaches to complex product development and start-ups. These helped make us Agile.
But do Agile teams naturally demonstrate excellence? In the Agile playing field, we do what is most natural to us even more vigorously, develop awesome products together by those who can actually do it. The Agile community is extensive and offers a broad set of values, principles and frameworks. Athletic Development echoes some of these; Scrum and ‘Extreme Programming’ in particular.
Athletic Development emerged by passing through the stages of “shu, ha, ri” exercising Scrum. It may be considered emergent to it. We certainly don’t value our approach over other practises and frameworks such as Scrum; we are athletic, not elite. We are proud that our experience with Scrum has allowed us to come to this design.
“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ― Pablo Picasso
Scrum is universally practised and has a strong professional foundation. Although a lot is available in the public domain, there are, however, commercial activities at play, mainly in the area of commercial training, certifications and licensing. Valuable material and content is often locked behind paywalls. It can be said that (in Ken Schwabers own words):
[Scrum’s journey] “has been shaped by two opposing forces: the desire to do the right thing, and the desire to make money” — Ken Schwaber
Athletic Development is founded by Sjoerd Nijland, a full-stack developer who has a background in Digital Architecture and Agile Coaching. He directed and coached many digital implementations for various brands, including ones that are awarded or nominated for Red Dot Awards, Innovation Awards and Webby Awards. For this he worked with international specialists from various agencies and backgrounds.
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