Why You Must “Do” Agile Before “Being” Agile
I often hear that you can get people to do Scrum but it won’t last unless they learn to “be” Agile. I suggest Scrum often fails because teams never learned how to do Agile. Scrum is a framework, a potential path to Agile. Conflating these two has many companies adopt Agile by getting certified in Scrum and hiring a coach to help them fill it in with practices
The challenge with this is that teams were already busy with their work before their training and now they have even more to do because Scrum appears to be a set of practices & meetings. They haven’t learned the Agile “doing” yet.
You obviously can’t teach the doing of Agile in 2-3 days. Agile is a method of collaborating with the customer, defining small pieces of work to do, creating them & getting feedback to ensure you’re on the right course. Yes, a new way of being is needed, but it is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than think your way into a new way of acting.
Getting started with Agile means to take a sustainable step of doing with just enough of a framework to keep it going and to encourage improvement. The focus should be on the doing. Working together effectively may create the being. But the doing alone will be an immediate improvement.