The Agile Paradox: When Founders Fail Their Own Manifesto
The Incongruous Origins
The Agile Manifesto threw the software world into disarray when introduced in 2001. With its emphasis on individuals over processes, it promoted radical values like customer collaboration, embracing change, and empowering motivated teams.
However, over 20 years on, there is a glaring disconnect between the values espoused and how some of the founders themselves behave, according to the thought-provoking critique by @davenicolette. It’s a harsh charge – that the very people birthing the Agile revolution violate its core tenets through arrogant, domineering attitudes antithetical to the spirit of empathy and humility they advocated.
A Cultural Blind Spot
This paradox may stem from the homogeneity of the Manifesto authors as middle-class white males from individualistic Western cultures. @davenicolette posits that the teamwork and self-organisation urged by Agile were unnatural in such environments, hence the need for a “grand statement of the obvious.”
In more collectivist societies, these human-centric principles were ingrained, making much of the “Agile industry” of training and certifications more or less irrelevant. The coaching, tools and jargon were unnecessary “grabs for attention” in individualistic contexts.
Heroes to Humans
A core Agile principle was rejecting the old “hero-god” mentality of software development, instead fostering self-organising teams of empowered peers. Tragically though, @davenicolette finds some founders exhibiting that very domineering behaviour they aimed to dismantle.
In a striking role reversal, these “hero-gods of Agile” reportedly collaborate poorly, fixating on their own perceived wisdom over cultivating curiosity about others’ perspectives. A far cry from the humble facilitation prescribed by their own teachings.
The Agile Evolution: Organisational Psychotherapy
As Agile principles continue being applied beyond software, the future increasingly points toward an organisation-wide psychotherapeutic approach to workplace development and improvement.
Organisational Psychotherapy (OP) seamlessly blends the human-centric principles at Agile’s core with a holistic focus on group dynamics, emotional intelligence and cultivating synergistic team cultures. It’s a natural progression from the Manifesto’s original emphasis on prioritising individuals and interactions over processes.
In this sense, organisational psychotherapy represents the next evolutionary wave – taking the ideals of empathetic, self-aware collaboration and expanding them into a comprehensive intentional approach for nurturing the human elements that allow organisations to truly flourish.
As @davenicolette expresses, the fundamental “agile thing” boils down to simply allowing and enabling people to work in a manner innate to our species. Organisational psychotherapy provides a framework for manifesting that ideal across all kinds of organisations, while helping address cultural hang-ups and institutional obstacles.
By fusing the original humanist values with a strategic organisational focus, this approach can help transcend the personal contradictions of the founders and realise their full transformative potential across all industries. It’s the embodiment of “individuals and interactions” writ large.
The Multicultural Counter-Example
Contrasting this, @davenicolette shares an uplifting tale of coaching a diverse, multicultural team comprising six nationalities. Despite no native culture in common, they smoothly embodied teamwork and continually improved their approach – all with minimal resistance or guidance required.
This team’s seamless discovery and embracing of the ideas the Manifesto fought so hard to establish perhaps reveals the broader cross-cultural resonance when people transcend societal biases around individualism.
Simple Wisdom Lost
As Agile pervaded the corporate sphere, the original straightforward vision of “working naturally as humans” became increasingly obscured. Corporatisation, commodification of training, and standardisation into rigid processes corrupted and diluted the elegant simplicity at its core.
Organisational Therapy: The Next Level
Organisational Psychotherapy takes the Manifesto’s people-first philosophy to the next level. It blends prioritising individuals with cultivating healthy group dynamics, emotional intelligence, and vibrant team environments. It further evolves the idea of valuing interactions over processes.
The holistic approach helps us grow as individuals while optimising how we work collectively to achieve more together than we could alone. By applying psychological insights through an organisational lens, it charts an expansive path for making the Manifesto’s ideals a reality across organisations.
The Fruitful Future
From this perspective, the future feels absolutely brimming with creative potential. We can combine our skills, remove limits holding us back, and build supportive environments that increase what we’re able to do while appreciating our human nature.
It’s a wide-open opportunity awaiting trailblazers willing to forge an inclusive, self-aware path like Agile’s founders did. We stand poised to discover new ways to collaborate and unleash our collective genius to everyone’s benefit.
The Human Revolution Continues
With OP illuminating the way, we can realise more of our ambitions. This human-honouring revolution can now reshape the very core of how organisations operate – tapping into our need for continual growth and flourishing teams to build a perpetually evolving, thriving future together.
Ultimately, @davenicolette posits, the Manifesto’s powerful ideas may be best appreciated by disassociating them from the personal shortcomings of their originators. While honouring their revolutionary contribution, separating the philosophy from its founders’ “peculiar incongruities” allows its value to shine through – untarnished by human contradictions.
In its essence, Organisational Psychotherapy is a call to harness our truest, most collaborative selves through self-awareness, teamwork, continual introspection, and shunning of dogmas. A clarion call to humanise the workplace that likely resonates most purely when its ideas transcend the limitations of the Manifesto’s origins. How about we use the Manifesto as a stepping stone to better things?
Think Different 