Agile & Agile Ways of Working – what is it?

Do you want your organisation and teams to produce higher quality, faster, and be able to pivot on changing requirements or terms? Read on, and get inspired on how agile could benefit you!

Agile is a way of working where you constantly factor in any new information and adopt to changes around you, learn from everything you have done so far, and ongoing seek to optimise what to do next.

Agile is a fun way to work and collaborate that acknowledges knowledge workers and motivate them to engage with their insights. And a way of working where people and knowledge drive the solutions faster, more steady – more efficiently.

Agile is not a tool – it’s a Way of Working

Agile is not just something you say. It is how you do it, how you are in the midst of it, how you listen and how things are delegated. Trust and confidence to that everyone is doing their best. Respect and recognition so that ‘mistakes’ and ‘issues’ short term will become improvements on short, medium and longer run. Where decisions are made by those with the best knowledge, in due time – neither too early nor too late – and where success stories thrive and more are added. Where it is just more fun to contribute and the best want to be. And where ‘challenges’ are not just someone elses headache but our joint responsibility.

Agile solutions are not just useful and excelled by a special breed of employees. In reality, it is possible across sectors, age, ethnicity etc. Being agile is a skill that can be acquired and mastered by just about everyone. Just as most people learn better and speedier if they are having fun doing it.

The agile way of thinking is condensed in the described in the agile manifesto and is more or less impossible to disagree with. That might explain why it is so complex to make operational in companies and integrate as a natural part of the everyday. A way to success, can be to pin out the roles and the cooperation between all parties, and thereby support the continued optimisation of the process through inspections and adaptions.

If what you do does not work, do differently!

Agile is easy to learn and difficult to master. Honestly, it cannot be different when you look at the four more or less vague formulated statements in the agile manifesto, that it really takes someone to disagree with. Further supported by the number of companies that has tried implementing agile – and still struggles.

You CAN, if you WANT to. No matter who YOU are, is my experience.

It’s about getting started (or restarted) right, to get all the wheels to snap in correctly, to get it all to fit like a glove. And frankly speaking, there are two ways. You can try your way until it works. That usually takes some time and a great deal of unnecessary frustrations before mistakes are detected and corrected. Alternatively, team up with a knowledgeable agile coach that knows all the pitfalls by experience, how to navigate around and as least as important, move on and beyond the mistakes made, in a constructive way.