Blog

What does organizational agility actually mean — and who's responsible for it? Six months after writing a definition of agility designed to keep no one off the hook (not executives, not specialists, not teams), this piece argues something important is still missing: societal value. Most conversations about value stop at customers, end-users, and knowledge. But agility, the argument goes, also has to be about leaving the planet in a better place. Through the lens of a milk bottling company experimenting with recyclable glass, this article unpacks the different kinds of value teams can deliver, why sincerity from leaders matters more than slogans, and offers an updated September 2019 definition of agility — one that explicitly includes caring about planet earth, shared purpose beyond money, and the courage to make a stand.

Why do so many executives struggle to genuinely embrace agility — and why does so much Scrum and Kanban end up sub-optimal as a result? This post introduces a five-step journey for 21st-century executive leadership, from "apprentice" to "custodian-of-the-culture," and argues that change agents need to stop preaching, start nudging, and meet executives exactly where they are.

Scrum operates in the complex problem domain, but what happens when teams genuinely can't deliver potentially releasable value in 30 days — or even 90? This piece introduces Kanplexity, a variant of Kanban designed for teams working deeply in the complex space, where unknowns outnumber knowns and team members' belief systems may sit closer to Kanban than Scrum. Built to complement what teams already do and support both the complicated and complex domains of the Cynefin sensemaking framework, Kanplexity uses rhythmic cycles instead of sprints, two roles (Teams and Servants), five events, and an emphasis on small self-managing cross-discipline teams learning from stakeholders in fast feedback loops. It supports discovery and delivery, attempts to avoid the Innovator's Dilemma through both disruptive and sustaining innovation, and offers tried-and-tested strategies for scaling beyond two teams. The price of entry: complexity sense-making, embracing uncertainty, optimizing WIP, explicit policies, and avoiding local optimization.

Toyota Kanban, Lean Kanban, Professional Scrum with Kanban, Flow — same word, very different things. This piece traces the lineage from the original Toyota Kanban on factory floors (where bins emptied, flags raised, and the warehouse chap kept just-in-time replenishment humming along) to the modern variants designed for knowledge work, where each card represents a valuable work item rather than a depleted part. Along the way: Toyota's six rules for Kanban, the mechanics of two-bin and three-bin systems, the prerequisites that make traditional Kanban work, and the key differences in how terms like cycle time and lead time get interpreted across approaches. Plus a comparison of where Lean Kanban, Professional Scrum with Kanban, and Flow overlap, where they diverge, and what each one is actually strong at.

Why is your organization growing agility? It's a question that often gets a hand-wavy answer — or no answer at all. This short piece offers 28 potential reasons your organization might be on an agility journey, and invites you to star-rate each one to see what's really driving the direction of travel. A quick survey, but a useful prompt for honest reflection on what you're actually trying to achieve.

In Certified LeSS Practitioner classes by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, system modelling is introduced as a way to dialogue your way toward a common understanding of "the system" — through causal loop diagrams and stock and flow diagrams. This piece looks at how that approach plays out in practice, from modelling the impact of implicit product backlogs (think Jira filters that quietly turn one backlog into many) to using tools like kumo.io and insightmaker.com to develop progressively wilder, more useful models. There's a social dynamic to this work — never ask people to review a system model by email — and a whiteboard with markers usually beats any electronic tool. Plus a real example where five people from five different countries, who'd never met ten days earlier, modelled a decades-old problem and found a potential solution in an hour. Sometimes the best thing a retrospective can do is help the team better understand the system itself.

Spoiled for choice when it comes to scaling beyond two Scrum teams? This piece is a long-form opinion walk through the major patterns — SAFe, Scrum@Scale, LeSS, Pulse, Nexus, Spotify copy-paste, Kanban, Flow, Disciplined Agile, Prince II Agile, WaterScrumFall, Scrum of Scrums, and even the option of no pattern at all — with honest pros and cons drawn from real experience. The first rule of scaling is not to scale. Get the best people and let them crack on. If you must grow, grow rather than scale. As one mentor put it, "something inferior done well in the right spirit is usually better than something superior done badly." Plus a reflection on which patterns truly hold a single product backlog (only Nexus and LeSS), why most frameworks are Shu patterns to get you started, and a teaser for "Broad and Deep agility" — combining Nexus+ for breadth with LeSS or Scrum Studio for depth, instead of choosing between broad-and-shallow or deep-and-narrow.