What Is An Agile Mindset?

These three Laws— first, small teams working on small tasks in short iterative work cycles delivering value to customers; second, an obsession with continuously adding more value for customers, and third, coordinating work in an interactive network—are the same three principles that enable Spotify to provide personalized music playlists to over a hundred million users every week, and Barclays to start becoming an Agile bank that can provide easy, quick, convenient, personalized banking at scale.

When these three laws—the Law of Small Team, the Law of the Customer, and the Law of Networks—are in effect, people in the organization share a different understanding of how the world works and how to interact with the world in order to get things done.

For the traditional manager encountering Agile for the first time, counter-intuitive ideas abound. Managers find they can’t tell people what to do. Firms make more money by not focusing on making money. Dealing with big issues requires building on tiny teams. Control is enhanced by letting go of control. Leaders are less like heroic conquering warriors and more like curators or gardeners.

When traditional managers enter an Agile organization where these seeming paradoxes are the norm, it’s like travelers visiting a strange foreign country where everything is different: yes may mean no, where no one pays fixed prices, and where laughter may signify fury. The familiar cues that enable travelers to function in their home country are absent. In their place are new cues that are weird and incomprehensible. The result can be bewilderment, frustration, and an inability to cope. Until the travelers grasp what has happened, learn the new cues of the different country and embody them in their behavior, they will find themselves disoriented and incompetent to deal with the different environment.

That’s why Agile can’t be implemented within the assumptions of current management practice. Agile means embracing fundamentally different assumptions. For traditional managers, the process usually isn’t comfortable. It isn’t easy. At the outset, it feels just wrong. It’s like learning a strange foreign language. It is only over time and through actual experience and practice that Agile becomes second nature and automatic. This is not about “doing Agile.” It’s about “being Agile.”

Ultimately Agile is about embracing a different mindset. When people in the organization had the right mindset, it hardly mattered what tools, processes and practices they were using. The agile mindset made things come out right. Conversely, if they didn’t have an Agile mindset, it didn’t matter if they were implementing every tool and process and practice exactly according to the book; no benefits flowed. Agile is a mindset.