Back in 2007, James Shore¹predicted:

I fully expect the big consulting companies to start offering Certified Agile Processes and Certified Agile Consultants - for astronomical fees, of course - any day now.

He followed his prediction with this warning; “Please don’t get sucked into that mess.”

It’s not my intent with this book to suck agile advisors into that mess, or to focus on certifications, processes, or practices . Agilists will, in any event, naturally resist any cult of experts, or any one “correct” path. My drive to write this book comes from a few simple observations from my 15 years as an agile consultant;

• Agility will expand beyond the software development function to influence the nature of work and of the enterprise.

• There’s a significant difference in the skills required to act as a practice-focused coach and as an enterprise-focused consultant.

• As agility evolves, our skills, influence, and responsibility as advisors must mature and evolve as well.

Many of our clients are not truthful within the enterprise, denying dysfunction and relying on illusory plans and meaningless estimates to reinforce their magical belief in control and prediction. Many are not collaborative, instead competing between silos, managers, and teammates. Many don’t particularly care about sustainability, and are instead focused on maximum productivity and profit no matter the human cost. Lean and agile aren’t mere theoretical or methodological frameworks; they’re pragmatic responses to these realities, and the failures they’ve engendered, with the aim of accommodating and nurturing creativity, ownership, honesty, and teamwork. Reducing waste, promoting collaboration, respecting truth and reality, and enabling sustainable, satisfying work practices are honorable pursuits, and most agile advisors engage from these motives, rather than the mere increase of profit and productivity.

For agile advisors, the purity of our intentions and the empathy we bring to our engagements are our governing success factors. Although we bring great enthusiasm to our efforts, we’re not here to guarantee a specific result or drive to our particular vision of agility. Enterprises become as agile as their potential allows, and we apply our knowledge, skill, and compassion to help them achieve that level within their constraints of will, desire, and legacy. Like kanban, agile consulting is a pull, not a push. The client brings us in because its leaders know the enterprise must change, and they engage us to help the enterprise achieve its goals. If we’ve prepared the engagement correctly, they recognize that there will be disruption, challenge, and conflict along the way. That doesn’t mean, however, that it’s our job to march them to the one true vision of agility. The opposite is true; each enterprise’s unique path doesn’t exist until we tread it together. Agile evolution is not a death march to agile purity; it’s an iterative, pragmatic, and collaborative effort to find each organization’s most efficient, lean, and sustainable nature. My recent encounters with many agile coaches have illustrated to me, again, that the rule book can be our worst enemy. Clients don’t care if they’ve achieved total compliance with the Scrum Guide. They want advisors who can accept them as they are and adapt their consulting advice to the client’s reality.

We’ve explored many factors, historical, cultural, and procedural. We’ve examined the evolution of the assembly-line, command-and-control business environment and explored the factors that made it successful, and have since made it obsolete. We’ve looked at many different approaches to helping organizations evolve from unsuccessful and unsustainable practices to agile, responsive, and humane methods. We’ve outlined the skills and knowledge that agile consultants must bring to the advisory relationship to guide their clients to their utmost agility and creativity. We’ve emphasized that, although agilists believe these techniques go far toward the goal of a more human business culture, clients don’t engage us to raise consciousness and promote happiness but to help them gain and sustain concrete business results.

Agile is cascading from information technology (IT) into sales, marketing, analysis, and leadership. It’s influenced everything from the design of office space² to our relationships with customers and partners. A simple web search will uncover everything from agile ticketing solutions (whatever that means) to agile aerospace design, and from agile guitars (!) to agile Australia (part of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s election platform³). Of course, there’s a hefty dose of camp-following here, as folks with little understanding of the agile mind-set tag along with the movement. Be that as it may, the widespread adoption of the agile language can encourage understanding and adoption of the accompanying ideas. Or so we can hope.

If we ignore the hype and concentrate on the substance, however, we find a global IT community that has embraced agile ideas, and has become the vanguard for a revolution across the business world. In IT, agile development has led to agile deployment in the form of DevOps and continuous integration. Agile infrastructure, through the flexibility and immediacy of the cloud, has had a significant impact on IT architecture and processes. Agile leadership has begun to replace the notion of an all-knowing leader, or a supreme project manager, with servant-leadership, participative decision making, and self-organization. As agile IT pushes against the constraints and boundaries of traditional management, strategy, and budgeting, the extension of agility to these realms seems inevitable. My sincere hope, and my belief, is that, unlike some management fads of the past, the mind-set of agility, sustainability, collaboration, and value focus will transform our enterprises and interactions.

Agile consultants, and the coaches, scrummasters, teams, and leaders who embrace it, have a central role to play in this evolution. If we can apply a kaizen attitude to our own work, hone our skills, and guide clients faithfully through the challenges and opportunities of agile evolution, we will fulfill our roles as wise advisors and indelibly influence the world of work. Agilists believe that the virtues of honesty, trust, teamwork , service, and value can unleash creativity and community across the global workplace. May we be proven right.