Isn’t it clear? I don’t think it is clear for everyone how much Agile can contribute to the biggest necessity in the future of this society. Let me shed some light on that.

I love analysing stuff, always loved it, even from when I was a little girl. My parents told me a story from when I was about 5 years old. I had gotten hold of their alarm clock and I was taking it apart. When they asked me why, I said I wanted to know how it worked. I haven’t changed much since then, but instead of taking apart alarm clocks, I take apart processes, society and people. I can’t help it… at my core, I am an analyst.

Why do I do it? Curiosity and a desire to understand so that I can help improve. And isn’t that a little bit what Agile does? You look at what is reality, you inspect, and seek how you can continuously improve.

It’s the only way, one of the many purposes of life is growth, we continuously evolve, whether we want to or not, it’s part of our nature. The way we grow, that’s up to us, we are the masters of our destiny, because even though we can’t predict what is going to happen, but we are the master of how we react to it. And our reactions might not always be the most optimal, we can only shape our lives in a more efficient way when we learn to understand and evolve our reactions ( inspect and adapt ).

As a society as a whole, you must have noticed we are facing a severe problem, depression, disease, demotivation, unhappiness. What is life when you are living it in those circumstances? And at the same time, you try to keep your family fed, your relationships alive and a roof over your head. The pressures of work seem to rise and rise. And instead of businesses taking responsibility over their most valuable resource, what often happens is that they try and put a plaster over a gushing wound and send them back into battle. It’s not the right way, this is a typical example of loose-loose.

Agile provides us with an answer to win-win. It’s based on the core principals of decent human beings. You know, you can trust them. It’s like your kids growing up, at a certain time, you need to let them be their own person, responsible for their destiny and trust that they will do the right thing. Same with the people working for you, people care. They care about their work and they want to do a good job (there are always exceptions, but that is what they are, exceptions, not the majority)

The more you give people the freedom to contribute to your product, make it part of what they are passionate about, make it theirs… the more you will see productivity, innovation and creativity soar. And at the same time, happiness will go up.

I think we have only just scratched the surface of what we can do with Agile, I think we can take it much further than just letting teams organise their work, I am a strong believer that we should experiment with having teams determine to the fullest how they work. This means work hours, rewards, holidays,… I know some companies are already experimenting with this… but the way you do it, is, like in a family, in a safe environment where you continuously look back, review, adapt, grow.

If we follow this approach, I am convinced that we will reduce costs, increase happiness for the people at work but also in their immediate family, which will again have a side effect on other companies and people.

Will this be an easy road, no, it won’t be and you need the right people to guide the way, if you want to do this experiment, you will need a brilliant scrum master, a PO and a team who are mature enough. But if you do take this journey, you will most certainly have a huge competitive advantage.

Yours truly,

Brigitte