Understanding Fake Agile

In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, going agile is becoming an irreversible trend. Among the countless organizations pursuing agile transformation, only a few have reaped huge benefit out of it while the vast majority failed miserably. Regardless, too many firms that have no substantial claim to any kind of agile are still eagerly trumpeting their “agility,” resulting in a “fake agile” phenomenon that’s obfuscating true agile values and principles. For organizations who want to triumph over competitors in this unpredictable business land, understanding fake agile can help them appreciate the essence of true agile and increase their chance of success.

Defining Real Agile

Based on Steve Denning, “the main fruits of agile are only generated if the entire firm is operating from the same script,” therefore real agile — as opposed to fake agile here — refers to business agility, or the agility of an entire organization, and is independent of terminologies, labels, specific processes or brands.

True Agile without the Label

There are highly successful firms such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix, etc., who shy away from the label of “agile,” because either they want to avoid being associated with “fake agile,” or some of the agile vocabularies, e.g. Scrum, are “unattractive to management.” However…