There was a time when this blog was called are you agile. But today with the fad effect (for organizations) and windfall effect (for charlatans), it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Even if it means reaching Godwin’s point immediately and disqualifying my remarks: like Hitler’s mustache, which carries all the meaning, no one allows themselves to wear Chaplin’s mustache anymore. The mimes, the charlatans, the frameworks and the adulterated tools forbid us from using the word “agile”.

We can no longer say agile?

• Good!
• Too bad!
• Who cares!
• Shit!
• Agile!

Good riddance actually. It’s even becoming very important to keep this in mind. And above all, it’s not up to those you work with, those you support, to stop talking about agile, it’s up to you, the supporter.

This is very important: people who refuse agility, the famous agile transformations, are legitimate in refusing. Agility, transformations, that’s not their concern. They have the right to throw them back in your face.

They’ve sometimes been in the organization for years, and they’ve seen transformations come and go. And then yours comes along, you show up, you and your certainties, your methods, your tools. They probably don’t care about agility, worse they see it – and often rightly so – as a danger. So it seems completely normal to me that they tell you to get lost. That doesn’t mean they’re right, it means it’s normal.

But if you say “I don’t care about agility,” you, the agile coach, the agile thing, there’s a promising start, a somewhat systemic approach, a paradoxical injunction.

But then why are you there?

You’re probably there to solve difficulties, to address a challenge, to limit a risk. Something concrete, anchored in the organization’s reality. A purpose of the organization.

And if you’re assigned to these topics, then they can no longer legitimately refuse this discussion. Or else it raises a deeper issue: a) are they in the right place in this organization (if they don’t care about limiting a risk, solving a difficulty in their organization)? Or b) you should leave the premises (if you’re not assigned to a topic of this type, the starting point is probably screwed up).

• Let’s do a daily standup to apply scrum –> get lost young/old presumptuous person.
• How do we solve the synchronization problem within the team? I have some ideas (a daily standup that doesn’t say its name), but what do you suggest?

If you don’t care about agile we’ll be able to talk about the real issues, but you’ll need to know how to explain your approach without reciting a poorly understood recipe.

You can always be criticized for talking about agility, you can never be criticized for dealing with the issues.

• “I don’t care about being agile but there’s a synchronization issue between teams”
• “I don’t care about being agile but nothing tells us that the solution works”
• Etc.

Naturally it’s always good to be agile since it’s always a valid response to an often complex world