“Agility is something very, very individual.”
(Richard Seidl)
Frustration is spreading. Agile ways of working get more eye rolls and wrinkled noses these days than joy and motivation. We don’t really notice, because we’re all busy tinkering with our prompts and agents. But underneath, it’s bubbling. And it has been for a while.
Why is that? We humans want simple solutions to our challenges. And one of the biggest challenges in software development has always been this: How do we work together with joy, motivation and productivity? How do we balance basic needs like self-efficacy, individuality and belonging so that something emerges that none of us could create alone?
The consulting and tooling industry is happy to hand us simple solutions. Buy this tool, it solves your problems! Use this framework! Implement this model! So we threw test automation, Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, DevOps, New Work, etc. at our challenges with a lot of energy, hoping they would go away. They didn’t. Oh, and now we have AI, too: let’s throw that on the pile as well and solve our human “problems” with something simple and technical.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s great stuff in all of that, and all of it has its value. But when I look at the Agile Manifesto, I don’t think that’s what it meant.
What the Agile Manifesto Is Really About
For me, it’s about communication and how we treat each other. How do we build understanding? How do we work together with respect? And above all: How do we become a self-learning system that develops its own, entirely individual processes, rituals and strategies? I believe agility is something highly individual for every team. It’s a goal. It’s a process that keeps changing and adapting to what the team needs. Rigid concepts don’t fit in there, things like: you now have to hold a 15-minute daily, run these particular sprints and throw story points around. Those things can be inspiration, a buffet of best practices that worked well somewhere else. That doesn’t mean they work for us.
Why Agile Ways of Working Matter Now More Than Ever
For a few years now, AI has been part of the game. Right now we’re focusing on something very, very technical and leaving something else out: ourselves. That’s fatal, because in the end, we matter far more than the technical part.
With all due love for prompting and Claude Code: we have to look after ourselves and the people around us.
And that’s exactly where Agile comes in. I don’t think Agile is dead. Quite the opposite: it’s time we do it “right.” And right is something different for every team. Maybe we can’t call it that anymore, so we’ll find another name. But if we still want to work well together in the future, there’s no way around putting the ideas and the attitude into practice.
