What would it look like if you ran an entire organization using Agile? Agile in the executive suites, Agile prioritization, Agile teams, Agile funding, …Agile everything. The LibraryOfAgile.org is a community-led project that has been collecting, evaluating, comparing, and testing Agile techniques. Our goal is to explore together a scientific analysis of Agile techniques to test for causation and interrelation. In plain English: Does is work? Does it work everywhere? And does it mess anything else up?

In this case study, we will talk about some of the insights we have discovered in our research and lay out one design for an “Agile Utopia”. Each of the pieces of this Agile operating model are legitimate techniques that are being used in real-world organizations, though using them all together at once is (so far) theoretical.

The current name for this theoretical model is the “Pentacameral Governance Model”.  There are no managers, no budgets, democratic decision making, and lots of science, automation, and metrics. It is filled with psychology, checks and balances, and even a blockchain and a cryptocurrency.

If you could design the future that you want to live in, what would you include?

Solutions, solutions, solutions! Get your solutions here! We have technical solutions, DevOps solutions, automations, and metrics! ...The Agile community is caught in the middle of the Framework Wars — SAFe vs [email protected] vs Modern Delivery vs Kanban and XP — and following the rules has become more important than solving the problems that led us to Agile in the first place!

The Design Thinking Double Diamond teaches us to research and understand problems, separately from solutions. When was the last time you stopped to really think about your problems, separately from how you are solving them?

We also need to face the hard truth that yes, our teams are working hard, but sometimes they are creating more problems than they solve.

In this session we’ll walk through one technique for shifting people’s attention back to problems. It's called the “PEP Talk”. It has been used in fortune 50 companies, government institutions, and individual Release Trains to help refocus people on the right things at the right time, promote cross-team collaboration, and inspire them to design win-win solutions that solve multiple problems at once, while also unlocking intrinsic motivation. It works great as a part of a Lean Portfolio Management approach, in an Agile VMO, with a Lean Agile Center of Excellence (LACE), or a Scrum of Scrum of Scrums because it is solution-agnostic. (Plus it helps you win at Buzzword Bingo!)