The Agile experiment was only a partial success: Agile now needs to pivot!
The Agile movement took us away from big up-front plans, micromanagement, and projects-by-numbers. It shifted the focus from big initiatives to small teams, from big promises to incremental deliveries, and from handoffs between specialists to collaboration and self-sufficiency.
But it dismissed the importance of leadership, structure, forethought, and individual differences. It defined one-size-fits-all practices, often favoring some styles of work over others, and too often defined by frameworks or methodologies that were pushed in an all-or-nothing way by their most ardent advocates. Despite its technical roots, Agile also quickly devalued the importance of engineering; and it did not even mention the importance of information and data – things that were strategically important when Agile was born and are even more so today.
These are not small things. We therefore realized that a fresh start was needed – not an incremental one: a start that is informed by the first Agile experiment, but that does not hesitate to make major departures: a new beginning. We call it Agile 2.
If you want to read more about why we think a new Agile is needed, please read The Case for Agile 2.