The Manifesto for Agile Organization

Jason SchreuderChange & Growth (Orgs

I recently shared an update on LinkedIn and Twitter about becoming a signatory of The Manifesto for Agile Organization. Peter Merel and his team at XSCALE Alliance have done something really interesting the arena of scaling Agile.

The premise is that the Agile Manifesto was focused on agile teams, not organizations.  The XSCALE Alliance posits that we need a new manifesto that focuses more on the collective ownership aspect of decentralized ecosystems that comprise agile organizations.  The Manifesto for Agile Organization states thus:

We are uncovering better ways of organizing value streams by doing so and helping others do so. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions 
over processses and tools

Business throughput 
over comprehensive accounting

Customer collaboration 
over contract negotiation

Responding to change 
over following a plan

Decentralized ownership 
over delegating control

That is, while there is value in the items on the bottom, we value the items on the top more.

 *Notice the trick of deliberately changing the physicality of the principles in the last sentence signified by their arrangement — top/bottom vs. left/right.
The site then goes on to explain how
Agile Organization is a pod of dolphins, not a dancing elephant. It doesn’t scale Agile to the organization. It de-scales organization to Agile via:

xscale alliance

Exponential Return by stacking growth curves.
Simple Design to the elegance of minimum.
Continuous Throughput optimization.
Autonomous Teams, self-managing streams.
Learning: triple loop, breadth-first, set-based.
Ecosystems thinking: whole-board & win-win.
**The first four have links to YouTube videos with some really great content. I highly recommend you watch them (each less than 15 minutes). I believe the other two are forthcoming.
To me, the XSCALE Alliance is working to bring forward some critical ideas about organizational change and design, human system dynamics, and system thinking that the handful of scaling models have struggled to address.  I am excited to see where this goes.
To take the words directly from the XSCAL Alliance
The XSCALE Manifesto isn’t the last word in Agility. We regard it as the next.
Until the Next Iteration . . .
Jason

1 thought on “The Manifesto for Agile Organization”

  1. Hi Jason,

    Many thanks for the kind words! I wasn’t aware that anyone was tracking our manifesto. We recently gave the values a refactoring to bring them more into line with the rest of our messaging – I’d very much appreciate your feedback. They now read:

    “Learning communities
    over training hierarchies

    Business throughput
    over cost accounting

    Leadership as a service
    over command and control

    Self-propagating transformation
    over big transformation up front

    Decentralized ownership
    over siloed responsibilities.”

    I hope you won’t feel that the intent of the earlier formulation has been lost, but in any case let me know. I’m actively working on the 5th video now. And a small refactor to the 4th …

    Cheers!
    Peter.

    Reply

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