There is a growing trend in our industry to distinguish between “Agility” and “Business Agility”. The idea here is that Agile is limited only to teams and to software and that more is needed. Many consultancy firms are now jumping into that gap with additional frameworks and models.

This makes no sense to me. I think that this distinction reveals a glaring misunderstanding of the purpose of Agile. More importantly, I think that the distinction between Agility and Business Agility only muddies the waters and distracts leaders away from what it is they should be doing.

We take a history tour to visit some of the precursors of Agile and learn what made them different from what came before, and why. With this historical understanding, we then revisit the distinction between business agility and agility to see if it makes sense. We also explore the notion that "Agile is only for teams" and "Agile is only for software".

This episode is an opinion piece. You may agree or you may not. Either way, we hope you learn something from it.

A transcript is available here (an account for Medium is necessary)

Support the show

We're building Columinity to help teams improve continuously based on scientific insights:
https://columinity.com

Check out our webshop for tons of powerful exercises and workshops to run with your team(s):
https://shop.theliberators.com

The music for episodes 91 and onward was written and produced for us by Basanite. The music for episodes 1-90 was acquired through Yummy Sounds. Post-production by Jasper Huiskamp.