Thread by @jboogie

Agility is the publicized target condition for nearly every enterprise today. The challenge is defining exactly what that means.

Based on my experience I don’t believe most organizations are actually targeting agility as their goal but rather an implementation of Agile.

🧵👇

The difference is significant. Agile is an output -- a series of steps, processes and methods that dictate how people should work.

Agility is an outcome -- a measurable change in the behavior of our teams, leaders and executives.

Given the broad global adoption of the idea of Agile and the desire to fit in, many organizations seek the path of least resistance to be able to claim that they, too, are agile. What ends up happening is an application of a method

-- a recipe -- designed to decrease time to market, improve organizational response time, drive up collaboration and the customer-centricity of the organization.

However, that's not how success gets measured for these efforts.

Instead of actually measuring whether the organization has indeed achieved those qualities many companies are satisfied knowing that Agile "has been adopted" and training has covered a significant percentage of the staff.

The tricky business of increasing an org's agility requires a deep, internal look at how work is conceived, prioritized and funded, how success is measured and how leaders and managers do their job not to mention incentives and performance management criteria (a lot, right?).

When this work is done, agility takes root ultimately leading to mature organizations who care less about whether they're using Scrum or SAFe or any other recipe but rather how well they're serving customers and are able to react to their and the market's ever-changing needs. //