Sustainable agility of organizations

We believe that sustainable agility, that is, continuous adaptation to the needs of the environment, enables organizations to succeed in a low-growth and high complexity environment.

We know that, more than the idyllic description of desired practices, what matters and what is difficult is that the organization engages in a learning process of these agile practices over time.

By our own practice and helping others in their practices, we found values ​​and principles that, when shared, help organizations transition to organizational agility.

Values

Through this work, we have come to value:

• Creating value over blind cost cutting,
• Continuous adaptation to the needs of the environment over entrenchment on what has been done so far, and is mastered,
• Teams and collective intelligence over standardized processes and control tools,
• Cooperation with stakeholders over power relationship,
• Responding to change in order to deliver value over following a plan,
• Diversity of approaches over standardization of practices,
• Learning iterations over a linear sequence.

While there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Principles

In our actions, we respect the following principles:

1. The organization has an explicit purpose, that is shared and gives meaning to the actions of each individual.
2. Teams deliver and cooperate.
3. Each team member is individually accountable for developing their skills and collectively accountable for delivering results.
4. The experts serve those who produce. Those who produce make the decisions.
5. The organization adapts thanks to rapid and frequent feedback sessions.
6. Any action takes into account the maturity of the individuals and of the organization, and makes maturity grow.
7. The organization favors the voluntary commitment of the individuals.
8. Each team self-organizes to achieve the expected results. People are not planned, they are planning.
9. The action is paced by rare, respected rituals that focus on value.
10. The controversy is the most effective way to facilitate collective learning.
11. The individuals agree on the next step and start taking action immediately, without waiting to reach agreement on a long-term detailed plan.
12. An explicit information repository, known to all, enables decision making at the deepest possible level.
13. The organization distributes signs of recognition that are consistent with value delivery and agile practices.
14. The organization sanctions shortcomings and enforces discipline.

Text authored by Olivier d’Herbemont, Bruno Borghi, Frédéric Fleuret and Marlène Borghi.

This text is published according to the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

You can also read a version of this manifesto in French.

The celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto motivated me to republish this Manifesto for Sustainable Agility, which I co-wrote in 2016, under the leadership of Olivier d’Herbemont.

Like the many manifestos that have been inspired by the Agile Manifesto, our manifesto can be read as a tribute to the clean form of the original manifesto and its extraordinary power.

Since 2001, many authors have emphasized that The Agile Manifesto offers a framework at the level of the team, but not really at the level of the company. With Olivier, we tried to explicit what can make an agile approach sustainable in a company, for any type of activity.

Indeed, we observed that too often companies experiment with an agile project and then fall back into their old reflexes, losing the benefits of agility. This manifesto for sustainable organizational agility has been designed as a checklist, allowing any company to assess itself. The preamble of the manifesto attempts to express how our focus is different from that of the Agile Manifesto.

To design and write this manifesto, Olivier set up a multidisciplinary team. Olivier comes from the world of change management; Frédéric was a manager of cement factories; Marlène and I, from the world of software engineering, were already applying, like many, the principles of the Agile Manifesto more than ten years before its publication. Hopefully, this diversity of backgrounds has allowed us to avoid the trap of addressing only the world of IT.