Agile Journey Program: Let’s Build Your Agile Journey Based On Your Values


Very often organizations decide to use agile methodologies without knowing why or what to expect. From time to time, an organization is trying to survive and they will take the first “train” to lead towards change, and today, the best “train” is the main stream agile methodology. However, it is not the ‘silver bullet’. In the end, organizations could have mixed feelings and they are not sure if agile works or not. We really believe that there is a big difference between the agile mindset and the agile methodologies. Our focus is helping an organization with the agile mindset first and afterwards we will evaluate the agile methodologies together to see which the best solution is for you.

What can you get with An Agile Mindset?

  • Improve your revenue
  • Increase your speed-to-market
  • Improve quality
  • Increase visibility
  • Improve risk-management practice
  • Add more flexibility in your teams and organization
  • Improve cost control
  • Increase customer satisfaction
  • Dramatically increase transparency

Agile Mindset vs Agile Methodology

Agile mindset is embracing and respecting the agile principles and the agile values.

Agile principles are expressed in the agile manifesto, you may have already heard of these:

  • Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  • Working software over comprehensive documentation
  • Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  • Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more. A full list of principles is found here.

For agile values, depending on the book you read, there could be different sets of values, but in the end you will always find:

  • Respect
  • Openness
  • Courage
  • Trust
  • Commitment
  • Focus
  • Responsibility
  • Self-Organising

That is it. That is the agile mindset. Did you notice it? I can explain to you what the agile mindset is in less than a page. Simple, very simple (unfortunately, it is not easy).

Agile methodologies are light process frameworks to guide people and organizations in this agile journey. It is here where you will find:

  • Scrum
  • Extreme Programing (XP)
  • Kanban
  • Lean start-up
  • And their combination

It Works, but, is Agile the Right Solution for My Organization?

If you visualize agile as a miracle process for your organization, there is a good chance that your agile transformation will fail. Now, if you realize that agile is a journey, and you embrace the agile values and your values, and forget all about best practices, there is a good, really good chance that your agile journey will be successful.

At the core of the agile mindset is a collection of principles and values. However, in the last 10 or 20 years, people started to write books with “best” practices, advice, and more about agile. Nothing wrong with that, we love to read books about agile because we always get inspiration and good ideas to try. So far as we know, every book we read was written with very good intentions. What is wrong with that? The wrong is that organizations are taking what somebody wrote as something that will work for their customers or their organization as a “best” practice to try when they want to become agile. It is here where we personally disagree.

As we said, agile is a collection of principles and values. As soon as you have that clear and you are on your way to building your agile journey; you should have a set of emergent practices (of course, you could be inspired by “best practices”; you don’t need to re-invent the wheel). It is very difficult to deploy agile in any two organizations in the exactly same way. Our Exploration Program addresses exactly that. We believe that every organization is unique, so we focus on agile values and principles, and we help organizations to create their emergent practices to build a successful agile journey. We avoid any practices “from the book”, we take into consideration your culture, values, business model, customers, product, and expectations. We help you to build your journey and create your emergent practices, rather than impose best practices.

Best Practice vs Good Practice vs Emergent Practice vs Novel Practice

Are you curious about all of these kinds of practices? Great, let us share with you a framework on what we based this exploration program:

What you see is the Cynefin Framework from Dave Snowden. Here is a video where Mr. Snowden explains this model and the difference between the practices in less than 10 minutes.