Have we lost the original meaning of agile?


Hi Ragavendra,

Did you celebrate Halloween last night?

I didn’t. I’m not much for mid-week holidays. And I couldn’t find an adult-sized costume of Sulley from Monsters, Inc. that I wanted to wear.

So instead of celebrating Halloween, I thought about Halloween and how it relates to agile.

Over time, Halloween has taken on a new meaning. These days it seems mostly about boosting the revenue of candy manufacturers, giving young kids an excuse to wear costumes, or giving adults an excuse to wear costumes and get drunk.

But Halloween didn’t begin that way. There’s debate about its exact origins but the root of the holiday is most likely in Celtic harvest festivals, especially the Gaelic festival of Samhain.

Those early harvest festivals were then appropriated by the Catholic church and re-branded as the celebration of All Saints Day.

Then the candy companies got involved and made it more about candy than anything else.

And much of the original meaning was lost. Sure, common Halloween symbols still include pumpkins, apples and other throwbacks to the original celebration of the fall harvest. But these symbols no longer reflect the reason for the celebration.

The same can be said of agile.

Originally, agile meant valuing individuals and interactions, working software, customer collaboration, and responding to change. Agile was about cross-functional teams working closely together to innovate new products or solutions that couldn’t have been developed any other way.

These days agile seems to be about
  • improving productivity,
  • reducing work in process,
  • Increasing velocity in any way possible,
  • holding teams accountable for finishing everything they say they will, and,
  • doing just enough that an organization can call itself agile without really being agile.
Many of these are good things. But they are the candy manufacturer version of agile: sweeter and easier to sell.

But, ultimately, these are as unrelated to the original meaning of agile as candy corn is to the original meaning of Halloween.

As you work to transform your organization or team with agile, be sure you remain true its principles. That’s the surest way to succeed with agile,

Mike Cohn



Courtesy & Inspiration: Mike Cohn of Moutain Goat, Authority on agile. This was published on 1-Nov-2018 through his newsletter. Shared here for information and reference purposes only.

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