What is Agile?

What is Agile?

Agile describes a way of working and refers to a collection of frameworks, principles, and practices designed to help teams deliver value more quickly, collaborate more effectively, and adapt to change with confidence.

It includes methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, and AgilePM v3, but the term also encapsulates a broader cultural shift in how we think about work. 

It is a style of working where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organising, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, iterative development and incremental delivery. A timeboxed, iterative approach encourages rapid and flexible systemic response to change.

Want to know more? Read our Business Agility 101 article.

Agile describes a way of working originally defined in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, that values:

• individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• working solutions over comprehensive documentation
• customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• responding to change over following a plan.

Rather than delivering everything at once, agile promoted the delivery of small, manageable pieces of value. By including regular feedback loops, it enabled continuous learning and course correction when necessary.

While agility has its roots in software delivery, it has evolved far beyond this to become an organisational competency. It combines being agile (mindset, culture, leadership), doing agile (adaptive operations and practices), and thinking agile (ecosystem and people) pivoting strategically to sustainably create value.

Agility nowadays is fundamentally about developing the organisational competency to deliver the right value faster, adapt to change, and work more collaboratively through iterative and incremental approaches with integrated learning.

It is crucial to distinguish between agile and agility: agile refers to the set of values, principles and frameworks like AgilePM, Scrum, Kanban, Disciplined Agile,  LeSS, and SAFe designed to help teams work more effectively, while agility represents the broader organisational competence to adapt successfully to rapidly changing environments.

The organisation’s environment is changing more rapidly, more unpredictably. A common acronym used for this is VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity). Environmental, social, and economic disruptions, and of course technological advances like AI, create a pressing need for improvement, for adaptation.

Current organisation structures and ways of working, designed for predictable environments, often struggle to keep pace. However, organisations that embrace agility can respond quickly and effectively to opportunities and threats in their internal and external environments, turning change into opportunity while delivering sustainable value to customers, people, and the broader ecosystem.

An agile organisation can respond quickly and effectively to opportunities and threats found in its internal and external environments (be they commercial, legal, technological, social, moral or political).