In echo to this old article from 2015, agile movements, I’m bringing this little presentation up to date, as I’m currently using it with several groups. Naturally, as soon as the history of agility is presented, the militias of proper agile thinking revolt. I propose letting them revolt and giving you my reading.

Don't tell the facts! Tell the truth! – Maya Angelou

Small visual panorama

The glossary

Lean

For methodologists and industrialists, agile’s uncle when the world was still complicated (and not complex, or was beginning to be). We could have added Lean Software, which is the IT counterpart of Lean. Be careful with the Lean label: read the hippie cowboys.

Lean is close to agile, but differs in the sense that adaptation serves standardization, whereas in agile, adaptation is queen.

Agile

Historically for IT and CIOs, as it appears with code. The term appears when almost twenty American beatniks are fed up with seeing their industry heading for disaster and want to change their ways of working. But since they have trouble agreeing, they settle on a simple term “agile” and on a manifesto. This frugality is fortunate.

Three main approaches that do not exclude each other, but complement each other!

  • eXtreme Programming (XP) Engineering practices (technical, code, etc.) and the social emancipation of the developer. It appears in the late 1990s, and is really the flagship movement at the time of Agile’s creation. But poor communication, or non-communication, or the extreme posture, or the associated political movement, or the difficulty, or makes it a fragile element that doesn’t manage to popularize itself all that much. The economic crisis of 2003 puts it on hold.

  • Scrum, Doing complex projects in complex environments. It appears in the mid-1990s. It gains popularity in the mid-2000s, and literally explodes in 2008 with the economic crisis. It is vilified by XP people who are jealous of this success and attribute it to the tool’s ease of use. This ease is real—it’s both an advantage and a disadvantage. Many of the criticisms are justified, but they address what we’ve made of Scrum, not Scrum itself. Well, that was true until the two veterans who created Scrum derailed out of greed. Read the agility and Scrum survival guide.

  • Kanban Continuous improvement of value creation flows (like maintenance, a sales cycle, event organization, HR activities, etc.). Close to yet distinct from Lean Kanban, it appears in this new form in the mid-2000s, championed by David Anderson, an intelligent character, but unpredictable and with erratic communication. It carries the same risk as Scrum: its adoption is easy and thus it can also easily be corrupted. A book on Kanban!

Software Craftsmanship

The guys and gals of XP (eXtreme Programming) are pissed off by the spotlight on Scrum. And so at the end of the 2000s they decide: we’re giving eXtreme Programming a makeover and reminding people that it takes time and sweat, unlike Scrum or Kanban: the entry ticket is expensive, but it’s harder to corrupt. We remind people that it’s an agile movement: craftsmanship trumps industrialization, the idea of code companions develops.

Devops

It’s Extreme Programming where we push practices all the way to continuous deployment (in addition to continuous integration) by integrating other populations like infrastructure. And thus on one hand with more perspectives, feedback, we enrich the product, and with a regular flow from idea to production release: we improve customer feedback, we improve quality (regularity + flow = quality).

Lean Startup

Agile for product management, for product management, for business lines, ideas, startups. Should have been called Agile Startup, but Lean sells better (Read the hippie cowboys).

Design Thinking

Agile with emphasis on user experience (UX): for designers, creatives, etc. But also business lines, product people, very redundant or complementary with Lean Startup. We talk about discovery (but what is my user actually doing?), and ideation (how could I think about things differently). It’s an approach from the 1980s recovered in all these movements.

Management 3.0

A set of easy and effective practices to adopt to start tipping your company toward modernity. The most important in my view: the delegation board. Because where decisions are located says a lot about your company.

Liberated Company

I don’t show it in the diagram—an Agile posture for entrepreneurs and managers, vision of the new company.

Holacracy - Sociocracy

Beyond flow-oriented or product-oriented approaches, a way of thinking about your organization organically and at scale. Sociocracy, Holacracy: methods to equip self-organization and Agile management in liberated companies. Small series on Holacracy. To summarize: the original historical movement in the seventies, sociocracy; an adaptation as a registered trademark to make money American-style: holacracy.

Spotify/Nexus/SAFe/LeSS

Manuals to better apprehend scaling agility. Draw inspiration from them without reproducing!!! SAFe was imagined to be a marketing success regardless of substance, and it has succeeded brilliantly. Today it’s the fig leaf for companies that want to call themselves agile without being so. Note: we don’t care about being agile, we want to be “performant,” but SAFe diverts you from both.

Openspace Agility

Tooling based on open space to generate engagement (and this is key) for your change management.

Value Focus

Organizations now begin to organize around the value they wish to create (impact teams) or how to apprehend value.

  • Beyond Budgeting/Noestimates An approach that highlights losses linked to planning based on estimates (time and costs), and that proposes an alternative by doing it as-you-go (by priority and measuring impacts). A slide series on #noestimates and beyondbudgeting.

  • OKR To be handled with care, as it’s becoming the new grail for companies lacking an agile badge. Allows articulating strategy and tactics around concrete objectives to improve analysis, execution, understanding. Best is to read this white paper on the subject by Laurence Wolff and Tiphanie Vinet Piloting the product by impact, thanks to OKRs

Don’t forget

The base sauce is the same. These are flavors developed to address often different populations who are interested in different entry points. Wild cards to facilitate change management too. In the end, it’s the same approach, the same philosophy, the same paradigm shift. Especially since in a company it would not seem absurd to me that all these movements be present—on the contrary. Even in small companies, very quickly several of these movements are necessary.