Agile Thinking

Over the last few years I’ve been looking to ideas outside the traditional software development community to help me understand and improve the way I work and help teams. I’ve realised that there’s something in common with nearly all of them; Lean Thinking, Systems Thinking, Complexity Thinking and in just the last few weeks I’ve come across an increasing number of references to Design Thinking. Did you spot the commonality? They are all regularly referred to as Thinking concepts. And then there’s Agile, with its silent Thinking. I’m pretty sure that anyone recognised as knowing anything about Agile will say that Thinking is a core part. A quick Google search with show that. But we don’t often say it explicitly and instead usually talk about doing Agile, being Agile or having Agility.

As we approach the 10th anniversary of the community adopting the term Agile, my contribution to the retrospection on what we have learnt is to propose we remove the silencer from the work Thinking. Lets talk about using Agile Thinking alongside Lean Thinking, System Thinking, Complexity Thinking, Design Thinking and  the rest.