The Agile Fallacy

"That's not Agile!" - does it matter? My claim - no!

"Being Agile" isn't true/false - it's a spectrum from rock to photon. Everyone is somewhere.


When looking behind the "Agile vs. Not Agile" bifurcation fallacy, we can start asking more meaningful questions:

• Does the organization meet Market and Business Needs properly?
• Does the Product stay relevant over time?
• Are the Delivered Outcomes useful?
• Is the Total Lead Time acceptable?
• Is the overall Return On Invest of development positive?
• Does everyone Focus on the most important thing?
• Does development create up-to-date, Sustainable Solutions?
• Is Technology Debt under control?
• Is Improvement Potential leveraged effectively?
• Do Failures get addressed and corrected openly?
• Is there Continuous Learning going on?
• Does the company exhibit Resilience to market changes?
• Does the organization have a Sustainable Workload?
• Does the organization attract, grow and Retain Talent?

If all these questions are answered with "Yes", then I could ask "Why do you want to be agile?"
If the answer to some or all is "No", then I would ask, "Then what are you doing about it?"

Taking a closer look, even these questions aren't binary, but gradients which would usually range somewhere from "We need to do something immediately" to "Yeah, we might want to think about it."

All the above questions are merely indicators of whether an organization is sufficiently agile for its own good, so I would leave you, as a reader, with the initial question: If an organization is excelling in all the areas mentioned above, does it matter whether they're agile?