The Mindset Remains
Individual roles, agile frameworks, and certifications will come and go but, to me, one thing that is clear is that the ways of thinking about the new modern ways of working are here to stay. The mindset will remain.
In October 2023, the Scrum Alliance and the Business Agility Institute released a report titled “Skills in the New World of Work” that highlighted the shift happening in the way companies think about the agile skillset and skills vs roles in general. There are five key findings in the report. Human skills are more important than ever, more than functional skills. Companies are expecting individuals to have multiple areas of mastery, not just one. Agile is becoming so pervasive, it’s not expected to be a high-demand role (i.e. Agile Coach) but something that everyone masters to some degree. And training perhaps needs to shift to skill mastery over role mastery in light of these changes.
I’ve written about the Agile Mindset before (“What is the Agile Mindset”), describing it as the combination of seven different mindsets and cultures. The following is why I say agile is mostly common sense.
No matter what role or what framework you are using, these seven core concepts are unassailable. The agile mindset will always be important.
Thinking iteratively is undeniably smarter if you do it right. We aren’t slicing up work into sprints for no reason! You need to seek feedback and change your mind about what to work on next based on what you’ve learned, otherwise you may as well conduct a 12 month long experiment and seek customer feedback next year to see if they like it.
Companies that form a product culture can rally around what makes them great. Focus on only so many things. These are the products and services where we delight customers. Then organize around them, strategize around them, and drive improvements in those things to better serve your market. Anything else you do should be in support of those things or it’s wasted time.
You can’t just say you are customer-centric without talking to customers. So go get the data. Make empirical decisions. Measure your company’s progress through those strategic statements that drive customer delight and product success.
Being agile is about experimenting. What’s the smallest thing you can do to prove or disprove what you are about to do will work? Treat your requirements like they are hypotheses and do not be afraid of failure so long as you are learning and adapting.
Trust your teams to evolve. In fact we must expect them to evolve and continuously improve because we are always striving to learn new things, share our skills with each other, and improve our understanding of what works well. With a culture of learning, this becomes the new normal.
None of the agile mindset works unless we have a culture where people are respected and anyone can contribute their ideas to the cause or point out where something might go wrong sooner. Without psychological safety, the agile mindset will be stifled.
Companies that focus on these seven cultures and mindsets will build great things, delight their customers, and create amazing organizations where employees enjoy working.
I don’t care what you call me. As long as I’m part of these kinds of things, I know we will be successful together.
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Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
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