Agility Means Effectiveness

Agility accelerates learning in uncertain and complex environments, but not the delivery of a well-planned scope.

The increasing hype about agility leads to much ignorance and misunderstandings. One basic evil is the assumption that agility, like a kind of concentrated feed, increases employee performance. Book titles such as “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time” by Jeff Sutherland (a book worth reading by the way) quickly leads the inclined manager, who because of his “busyness” could only read the title and the blurb, to this wrong conclusion. And after all, Scrum talks about sprints for a reason, right?

There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.

Peter F. Drucker, 1963. “Managing for Business Effectiveness.” Harvard Business Review.

But employees are no cows and agility is no concentrated feed. Agility aims at effectiveness and not efficiency. In this respect, Peter F. Drucker was an “agilist” from the very beginning. It is about doing the right thing in an uncertain and complex environment and not so much about processing a known and…