I'm tired of hearing: "You're not agile if you aren't doing ..."

I hear this all the time and it drives me crazy: "you're not agile if you aren't doing <name a practice>." Just fill in the blank - automated tests, user stories, continuous integration, co-location, product owner in the room, and on and on. At a Certified Scrum Course taught by Craig Larman he used the term "perfection goal." That phrase stuck with me partially because it speaks to a future state where a high-performing team is adhering to the key agile principles and practices. Here's the deal. You don't have to do every best practice and you don't have to adhere to every principle to start being agile. You have to start somewhere - the more you can start with the better, but some aspects can evolve over time.


People need to think about this as a continuum. As individuals and teams begin to adopt agile, their skills and the organization's processes may only tolerate a certain amount of change. Not all change can happen instantaneously. In fact, I'm currently coaching at a large travel related corporation where our set of coaches were talking about Shuhari, which roughly translates to "first learn, then detach, and finally transcend." I'm sure you've heard - crawl, walk, run. Maybe you've heard of the six levels of initiative:

1. Wait until told
2. Ask
3. Recommend
4. Act and report immediately
5. Act and report periodically
6. Act on own

All of these speak to the fact that as you learn more you're given more freedom to make decisions based on a growing skill set; you become more capable of adopting additional principles and practices. It would be great if we could start a team off and list all the principles, processes, and practices, teach them and have them adopt all at once.  However, we have to think about where people, teams and organizations are and move them as far and as fast as we can towards the perfection goal without completely overwhelming them. If I'm coaching a team that is moving from a waterfall process and begins adopting Scrum and nothing more, they're more agile than they were and I applaud them for it.

This dogmatic mantra - you're not agile if you aren't <fill in the blank>, smacks of a prescriptive approach to agile adoption and, to me, that doesn't feel very agile. It's generally true that adopting more of the best practices makes teams more efficient, more effective and probably more agile. However, teams have to start somewhere on their path to continuous improvement. Sometimes they start small and guess what,  they're on the agile path and to me they're more agile than they were and that's a great start. Remember today's best practices may not be tomorrow's best practices. Just because we do iterations/sprints today, doesn't mean they'll be the best practice in the future. Understand the values and principles and you'll go far.

Once you start down the path just keep going, keep learning, keep adjusting and keep being more and more agile.