Have you hit a plateau with your agile practices?  And are you wondering…what’s next?

At this point, your organization has ‘done agile’. You accomplished some improvements, and agile practices are just the standard way you get work done.  But now you’ve stalled. Teams are delivering reasonably well, but they’re not improving. They may have even regressed a bit.

Gallup reports that only 18% of U.S. employees say their company is agile.*

 So how do you get past this plateau?  You need to move past the superficial implementation of processes like scrum, Kanban, or scaled agile, and embrace the core principles of agility:

Fully empower people and teams.

A wise CEO who hired us once told me that his goal was to build teams of owners, rather than teams of order-takers. Are your teams fully invested in business outcomes? Are they proactive about adding value, or are they merely delivering whatever widgets someone asks them to build?

Cultivate a culture of continuous learning, not just continuous delivery.

Do your teams run experiments every week? Do they challenge the status quo on practices & procedures? Do they have the psychological safety to challenge their leaders in a constructive way?

Focus relentlessly on customer value.

Measure outcomes, not outputs: not just the features or widgets you deliver, but the impact on customer success and business outcomes.

 Agile is Dead? Long Live Agility!

Agility has always been about these principles, but all the superficial and bureaucratic agile implementations out there have given ‘agile’ a bad name, at least for some people. It’s time to move on to true agility!

Getting past the agile plateau isn’t easy, but the payoff is enormous. It requires your entire leadership team to have the right mindset, the right skills, and complete alignment on the strategy. 

Is your leadership team prepared for the journey to the next level of performance? Agility 11 can help. A good first step is our Certified Agile Leader® workshops. You’ll examine studies of transformational change at several organizations. You’ll learn proven frameworks for shaping culture and pragmatic techniques to increase your influence and lead change initiatives. Bring your entire leadership team for alignment on how to get past the plateau.

We also leverage the Path to Agility® framework for enterprise agility. It’s a comprehensive system to guide your strategy on achieving next-level agility and high performance.

*Read the Gallup article: In Search of Agility.