What Is Agility?
Agility is the ability to keep working effectively when the environment is uncertain and keeps shifting. It rests on agile values, principles, and an attitude rather than on a fixed procedure. The word goes back through French to the Latin agilis, meaning nimble.
Agility shows up almost everywhere today, and it has become a buzzword. Many companies want to work in an agile way to become more efficient, more resilient, and more flexible, and to drive innovation. Those are reasonable goals. But a company that buys agility as an efficiency tool misses the core: values and an attitude that help a team make good decisions even after the plan has stopped matching reality.
Where Agility Comes From
Working in an agile way isn’t all that new. Iterative and incremental approaches go back to the 1950s and 1970s, when the computer and software industry was still in its infancy. The agile movement picked up speed in 2001. That February, 17 people met at the Snowbird ski resort in Utah, among them the authors and advocates of Extreme Programming, Scrum, and other lightweight methods. They were unhappy with how projects were run and wanted more focus on results, on the customer, and on what the customer wants. What came out of it was the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.
The manifesto shifts the weight in four pairs. Both sides matter, but the items on the left matter more:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
Twelve principles back these values. Among them: deliver working software frequently, have business people and developers work together daily, and let the team reflect at regular intervals on how to become more effective.
That set off a paradigm shift in software development. Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming became the best-known agile methods and brought new ways of working into projects and companies. It didn’t stop at software, either: agile marketing, agile finance, agile logistics, the agile craft business, the agile classroom, even the agile family. Services, consulting products, certifications, and new models followed. So did at least as many answers to the question of what is agile and what isn’t.
Why Work in an Agile Way?
Traditional ways of running companies and projects rely on planning and optimization. That works as long as the environment holds still. Over the past decades, though, social, economic, and technological change has practically exploded, with one innovation hard on the heels of the next. Globalization, the internet, and information that’s available around the clock speed things up even more. A plan worked out meticulously over months can be obsolete tomorrow.
People often call this environment the VUCA world: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Agile methods are one response to it. They help teams hold their course on this VUCA sea, even when the wind keeps changing.
What Are Agile Values?
Any definition of agility has a built-in catch. An approach meant to help with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity can’t be a rigid procedure itself. Working in an agile way is a systemic process built on values, principles, and an attitude.
Agile values are all the values that help a team deal with VUCA. A few examples: courage, openness, personal responsibility, transparency, communication, optimism, and appreciation.
An agile mindset lives these values every day, in day-to-day work and beyond it. That includes
- welcoming change,
- questioning what exists, again and again,
- accepting that being agile means constant adjustment,
- acting with a focus on solutions,
- widening your own options for action.
Taken to its logical end, agility is above all individual. Every team has to find its own agile path and its own answers to VUCA. Values and attitude are the lighthouses. They help you steer, but they don’t do the work on deck.
What Role Do Scrum, Kanban, and Similar Frameworks Play?
Frameworks such as Scrum or Kanban are a good place to start. They’re proven best practices, drawn from what worked for successful teams, projects, and companies. In software development, they’re the shape agility usually takes. The ISTQB glossary describes agile software development as a group of lifecycle models based on iterative, incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Teams can experiment with these frameworks and use them to start living agile values.
Still, they’re other people’s best practices. What counts more is what a team learns when it tries an approach for itself. Whatever works gets developed further. Whatever doesn’t gets changed or dropped. Step by step, the team ends up with its own set of methods and tools that fits.
A Foosball Table Doesn’t Make a Team Agile
A bit of Scrum here, a foosball table in the break room, Casual Friday every two months. And then agile just works? With that approach, few teams get onto an agile path that keeps growing. Isolated, one-off measures end, unsurprisingly, in eye-rolling and frustration among the people involved.
Agility shows what it can do only when people, methods, tools, environment, and mindset work together. That’s when innovation picks up momentum and the methods turn into the way the team works.
Agility Beyond Software Development
As a business concept, agility showed up in agile manufacturing as early as 1991, but it grew up in software development. It outgrew that field long ago. Agile approaches are more a way of rethinking work than a method tied to software. That’s why they fit almost any context: logistics, insurance, banking, skilled trades, medical technology, mid-sized companies, startups, social institutions, families, or scaling across large corporations.
The Future of Agile Work
The boundaries are already blurry. Many views on the work of tomorrow share common values and a similar mindset, whether they’re called agility, New Work, or something else. Their goal is the same: a working and living environment that meets today’s challenges and lets people stay effective and creative despite all the uncertainty.
I believe these approaches will become even more systemic and look at people in all their contexts: in companies, in teams, and in how each of us thinks and acts. Maybe the word agility will then disappear from our vocabulary again. Ideally because this way of working, living, and thinking has simply become normal.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do traditional planning approaches reach their limits in projects?
Because a plan that has been meticulously crafted over a long period of time can become obsolete as early as tomorrow. Globalization, the Internet, and the constant availability of information are accelerating developments. This is described as a VUCA world: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Traditional business and project approaches, on the other hand, rely on planning and optimization. Agile methods aim to make navigation in this environment possible.
Is agility a method that can simply be implemented?
No. Something intended to help deal with fluctuations, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity cannot itself be a rigid procedure. Working agilely is a systemic process consisting of principles, values, and a mindset. That’s why agility takes on a unique form for each team: every team finds its own answers. Values and mindset serve as lighthouses: they help with navigation but do not replace the work being done on deck.
Does working in an agile way mean that plans and documentation no longer play a role?
No. The Manifesto for Agile Software Development reorders priorities; it does not eliminate anything: individuals and interactions over processes and tools, working software over comprehensive documentation, collaboration with the customer over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. Both sides are considered important, with the one on the left deemed more important.
How can best practices from other teams benefit your own agile journey?
They offer a starting point, nothing more. Frameworks and methods like those in Scrum or Kanban are derived from real-world experience because they have worked for other teams, projects, and companies. You can experiment with them. More important are your own experiences: what works is refined; what doesn’t work is changed or discarded. This is how you develop your own tailored set of methods and tools.
Is it enough to introduce a little bit of Scrum and make the work environment more relaxed?
No. Isolated, sporadic activities (a bit of Scrum here, a foosball table in the break room, the occasional Casual Friday) usually end in eye-rolling and unease among those involved. The full potential only becomes apparent when people, methods, tools, the environment, and mindset all work together. Only then does a leverage effect for true innovation emerge, and agility becomes the team’s mindset.
Do agile approaches also work outside of software development?
Yes. Agility originated in software development, but it is not a method tied exclusively to that field. Rather, it is a way of rethinking work in new and different ways. Examples include logistics, insurance, banking, skilled trades, medical technology, small and medium-sized businesses, startups, and social organizations, even extending to the family. By 2021, agile work had already made its way into nearly every sector, from marketing to financial control.
How are agility and “New Work” connected?
The boundaries are blurred; both share common values and a similar mindset. The goal is the same: to create a work and living environment that meets today’s challenges and keeps people capable of taking action and remaining creative despite uncertainty. The 2021 article predicted that such approaches would become even more holistic and that the term “agility” would disappear once this way of working had become the norm.
