Rooting for the Agile Alliance: A New Chapter or Business as Usual?
The world of agility is buzzing with the news that the Agile Alliance has entered a “strategic partnership” with the Project Management Institute (PMI). Some of my colleagues are clutching their pearls, calling it everything from the “end of an era” to a curious business move — or even a sellout.
But here’s the thing: as someone who teaches project management and researches organisational agility at a university, and practices agility in industry, I see this as an illuminating development. Not because it signals a radical shift, but because it highlights how we still treat “traditional” project management and agile approaches as fundamentally oppositional, when in reality, they’ve always been intertwined.
The Rhizome and the Taproot: Opposites or Partners?
To explain this, I often turn to Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the rhizome and the taproot of a tree.
The rhizome is a flexible, interconnected root system that can (and according to D&G, must!) connect any point to any other point. It’s non-hierarchical, adaptable, and constantly shifting — like agility, with its focus on relationships, adaptability, and working between formal structures.
The arboreal taproot, on the other hand, is structured and hierarchical, with a central trunk supporting branches and channels for resources. Traditional project management — and indeed, most formal organisational structures — are arborescent, with clear woody authority, roles, and control over resource flows.
It’s easy to frame these two models as being at odds. But the reality is far more complex: they need each other. Rhizomes connect trees, helping them communicate information about the world and threats around them, whilst helping themselves to the nutrients in the taproots. Meanwhile, the tree’s woody roots provide structure and stability, both to the tree and to the local environment, allowing rhizomes explore, adapt, and enable growth in the spaces between.
Tradition Isn’t the Enemy of Agility
We often think of agility as the rebellious newcomer and traditional management as the old guard clinging to control. But when you look at history — pyramids, cathedrals, cities across every continent — large, complex projects existed long before formal project management frameworks were defined. To suggest ‘traditional’ models aren’t new is to ignore centuries of human achievement in organising complex work without them.
The reality? Agility and traditional management have co-evolved, and are mutually constituted. They’ve developed side by side, shaping and challenging one another along the way. Traditional management relies on informal, flexible approaches to get things done, while agility often depends on structured frameworks to scale effectively. They’re not enemies; they’re (fractious) siblings in a shared system of working.
A Necessary Tension
This brings me back to Deleuze and Guattari. Their idea of reciprocal presupposition suggests that systems grow and evolve not in isolation but through tension and interaction. Agile and traditional approaches define each other through contrast and collaboration. Neither can be fully understood, or exist, without the other.
If we stop thinking of organisations as static entities and more as processes which are interdependent, it becomes clear that both approaches are part of the same evolving story. Genesis arises when models interact, cross-pollinate, and influence one another. And the end of one way of working is often tangled with the passings or beginnings of others.
So, What Does This Partnership Mean?
Is the PMI–Agile Alliance partnership a bold new chapter? The beginning of the end for one or both? Honestly, it’s hard to say. But what we can be sure of is that the most interesting part will be the messy middle — the process of becoming, where ideas and processes interact to create new patterns in a muddy, complex context.
That’s where innovation happens. Not in rigid categories but in the spaces between them. So, rather than mourning the “end of an era,” let’s stay curious and keep watching — because the dynamic dance between agility and structure is far from over. And the becoming is always more interesting than mere being…
