Agile 2

Agile 2

Agile 2 defines a broad range of agility-promoting behaviors. Unlike the many “Agile frameworks”, Agile 2 is about behavior, culture, and knowledge. Knowing what behaviors predominate in your organization is essential for understanding how agile you really are, and what might need to change, at the levels of culture, behavior, and knowledge.

Created by:

Cliff Berg

Cliff Berg

Founder and Managing Partner, Agile 2 Academy LLC
Lead author of Agile 2: The Next Iteration of Agile

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What is Agile 2?

Agile 2 is a thoughtful reimagining of Agile. It was created by a global group of 15 highly experienced and diverse practitioners. Their fields of expertise were:

  • Leadership

  • Organization Change

  • Behavioral Psychology

  • Lean Product Design

  • Human Resources and PeopleOps

  • Engineering

  • Programming, DevOps

  • Program Management (in both an Agile and traditional context

  • Professional Coaching

  • Agile

They spent many months conducting a retrospective on the state of the Agile movement and deriving principles from their conclusions. They then published a website to document it, and wrote a book explaining it. Agile 2 is not a process framework - there is no “process” for agility. Agile 2 is informed by leadership theory, behavioral psychology, cognitive science, and operations research. The intention is not to replace Agile, but to refine and expand it, and in some cases adjust ideas that were too simplistic, extreme, or one-size-fits-all.

The Source of Agility

Organizational agility is the ability to quickly respond to problems and changing circumstances. This manifests as how people behave when unexpected events occur: new information that contradicts assumptions, unexpected issues or problems, or new opportunities. Do people react quickly? Do just the right people gather, have robust and inclusive discussions, and quickly decide and implement a course of action? These behaviors are not a process: they are ad hoc - they are what Spotify calls “controlled chaos”. It looks like chaos from the outside, but it is anything but. It is spontaneous and orchestrated by individual contributors and leaders in the moment.

The behaviors that create agility need to be supported by the organization's culture: how people are expected to behave by senior managers. People behave in the ways that are expected of them. They also need to have knowledge of solution patterns for solving problems: if they only know PMP methods, they will use those; if they know Lean and Flow approaches they will use those.

Sample Questions

Leadership

Senior leaders get the right people together to resolve cross-functional issues that go beyond the individual or team level.

Product Design

We actively collect and use customer data or feedback from customers to improve product features.

People

Within product development teams, specialists and generalists are valued and treated as equals.

Technical and Business Fluency

Our technical leaders genuinely understand our business.

Planning and Transformation

We validate new ideas through small experiments whenever possible.

Flow

We adjust how we work in order to improve security, for example by reviewing trends over time in our product security incident rate.

Top Features

  • Leverage the Agile 2 model for agility-promoting behaviors.

  • Give your people a voice - and allow them to express where you can do the most good for your organization.

  • Gain insights expeditiously - the results provide “smoking guns” for problem areas.

  • Using our analysis guide, the results are easily matched to the impact on things like agility and quality.

Cliff Berg

Cliff Berg

Founder and Managing Partner

Stephen Villaescusa

Stephen Villaescusa

Partner

Howard Wiener

Howard Wiener

Partner

Raj Nagappan

Raj Nagappan

Partner

Agile 2 Academy was founded by some of the authors of Agile 2.

Agile 2 Academy's mission is to help organizations to use the ideas of Agile 2 well. We help organizations to increase agility, performance, speed, and efficiency. This is done through workshops, training, and coaching that elevate people's knowledge and capabilities. Our methods are informed by proven approaches from leadership theory, behavioral psychology, cognitive science, and operations research.

Agile 2 is primarily a behavioral model; Agile 2 Academy has brought organizational culture into the mix, and defined the groundbreaking Constructive Agility model, which explains agility as arising from behavior, organizational culture, and knowledge of Lean and Flow work patterns.

There is no “certification mill” for Agile 2. We are authentic in our approach and methods.

Our leadership are shown above.

Cliff Berg was the lead author of the book Agile 2: The Next Iteration of Agile. He is a tech entrepreneur—the company he founded in 1995 grew to 200 people by 2000. He has degrees from Cornell in Operations Research, Nuclear Engineering, and Physics.

Stephen Villaescusa has led Continuous Improvement, Supplier Improvement Lean, Six Sigma, and other transformation initiatives with hundreds of companies around the world. He has a BS in Business Administration from the University of Arizona and has completed executive certificate programs at Columbia University (Personnel) and the UCLA Graduate School of Business (Procurement).

Howard Wiener has helped to define and implement transformation programs integrating diverse technologies, redesigned business processes, and organization restructuring. He has a MS in Business Management from Carnegie-Mellon University and a BA in Economics from Ohio Wesleyan University.

Raj Nagappan was also an author of the book Agile 2: The Next Iteration of Agile. He has over 20 years experience in software engineering, and holds a PhD in Machine Learning and Computer Science.

book

Agile 2

Website

Agile 2 Academy

Website

The Constructive Agility™ Model

Website

The Constructive Agility™ Journey