…or you have to be agile to be agile.
The above statement can either be seen as a given – if you are agile then you are agile – or it can be seen as a bit of a catch, how can you be something if you need to be it to be it, how do you start?
Enough of the word-play though, my point here is that in order to be agile, an organisation needs to take some sort of leap to new ways of thinking – hence the Matrix reference in the title. In the following my mindset of agile is centered around agility – meaning the ability to adjust to the situation, that being requirements, ways of working etc.
In the agile community I often see or hear the phrase “doing agile” as opposed to “being Agile”. In my interpretation this is a mis-communication of what is actually meant. I can accept the differentiation between being agile and doing agile techniques e.g. SCRUM, KANBAN etc. You can do these without being agile and you can be agile without using these. You can even have a retrospective, but if improvement proposals are not acted upon, you are still not agile.
Two central parts of agility is to break work down into manageable parts, and to continuously improve how you work. These also go together well, by breaking down into smaller parts, you are able to choose what to work on, being functionality or process improvements, and quickly get try it out and see if it works in real life.
A while back I was approached by a specialist from another department, who told me that they wanted to be more agile. After talking for at bit, I asked him what they did today, and he answered that they had their requests / requirements in an Excel sheet, and that they never planned more than two weeks ahead, because they new the priority of requests would change. I then told him, that they had already startet to think and act in an agile manner, but maybe some more structure around it could help them.
My point is that you can actually be agile without all of the tools and frameworks we often use as agile coaches, just by recognizing the need for agility and working from that recognition, and that can probably take you at least as far as doing SCRUM mechanically.
So to get back to the matrix metaphor… If you want to be agile, you have to swallow the red pill and start to approach the way you work in an agile manner, and akcnowledge that you can not work your way into it, you have to do it!