Why 'Agile First' May Not Be The Best Answer

So I’ve had a bunch of conversations lately about “agile organizations” and the importance of organizations being agile. And I’ve had two thoughts.

First: No organization ever made a dollar because it was agile. It may have made a dollar because it delivered something sooner or better because it was agile – but agility is not in and of itself a value characteristic.

When I led delivery teams years ago, I got into a discussion with the team about the balance between “solving business problems” on one side and “building amazing technical solutions” on the other. I pointed out that the company we worked for was in the business of selling cars using technology. If they had a way of selling cars with rooms full of hamsters on little wheels, we wouldn’t be building systems, we’d be carrying 50-lb bags of hamster chow.

Second: Agility is important. But it’s only important in the context of a capability to actually do something at a cost that the organization can afford.

Imagine three cases – in Case A, the organization fails because it delivers a valuable solution at a cost it can afford – too late. Not agile enough. In Case B, it delivers something on time at a cost it can afford – but it’s not a valuable enough solution. In Case C, it delivers a valuable solution on time – but at an unsustainable cost.

These kind of define three ‘corners’ we need to stay out of at all cost.

And, I’ll suggest, we need to have flexibility between these corners to shift between ‘expensive’ and ‘cheap’, ‘responsive’ and ‘slow’, and ‘more valuable’ and ‘less valuable’ depending on the problem we face.

That’s ‘organizational fitness.’