The Three Laws of Agile Organizations

In the age of agile, corporations must radically reinvent how they are organized and led, and embrace a new management paradigm that involves new goals, principles and values. It requires continuous commitment and leadership from management.

This new management paradigm can be interpreted by the following agile principles, aka the three laws of agile organizations:

1. The law of the small team: work should be done in small, autonomous, cross-functional teams in short cycles on relatively small tasks and getting continuous feedback from ultimate customers. Big and complex problems are resolved by descaling them into tiny, manageable pieces.

2. The law of the customer: in an agile organization, everyone is obsessed with delivering more value to customers; everyone has a clear line of sight to the ultimate customer and can see how their work is adding value to the customer — or not. The firm adjusts everything — goals, values, principles, processes, systems, practices, data structure, incentives — to generate continuous new value for customers and ruthlessly eliminates anything that doesn’t.

3. The law of the network: agile practitioners view the organization as a fluid, transparent, interactive network of players that are collaborating towards a common goal of delighting customers. The key is to make the…