Agile emerged from new project management systems in software development 20 years ago – SCRUM, for example. Over time, it has become a term we use in all sorts of contexts. Now we’re talking about an organizational awareness that demands an agile culture. In other words: how do we adapt?
There are many methodologies within agile. The agile “Umbrella” is shown in the illustration on the right. Many of the methodologies are intertwined and share some of the same principles. For example, Extreme Programming (XP) works with the values of “Communication, Simplicity, Feedback, Courage and Respect”.
Executive management works according to linear rules, bureaucratic top-down hierarchy and long-term strategy.
Conversely, in short, you could say that:
Agile leadership is
1) participatory, 2) transparent and 3) evolutionary mindset,
that pushes the mandate for decisions as far out as possible.
The agile mindset is about ‘common sense’. It doesn’t really want to replace other methods, but rather to create a framework for an alternative approach to development. In this way, you get a balanced flow in the decision-making processes, where you quickly deliver an output to get feedback from the customer.
The agile methodology and architecture has recognized that the world is growing in complexity. We can understand some of this by looking at the VUCA world. This complex, uncertain, changing and ambiguous understanding of the world shows that a different flow for problem solving is needed. This flow is created, for example, by decentralizing the mandate into teams that have the overview, ownership, responsibility and trusted power to make decisions in the best interest of the project and the organization.
The Agile Manifesto describes 4 key values and 12 principles for working iteratively and human-centered. The Agile Alliance defines Agile as “the ability to create and respond to change. It is a way of dealing with, and ultimately succeeding in, an uncertain and turbulent environment.”
Denmark has a rich culture of working together rather than acting selfishly. Already the cooperative movement recognized that the shared trust in communities can be a powerful thing in relation to, for example, dairies.
But it has taken off. It took 75 years for radio to reach 50 million users. Television took only 15 years for the same process, and today we can deliver an app to the world in a matter of days. Development is exponential and because of this speed, constant feedback between the customer and the product development is needed to stay in sync with the customer’s needs. This is where the waterfall culture doesn’t work.
In waterfall thinking (see illustration on the right), you only deliver the product when everything is ready. Employees say it can be very heavy to carry around, and the plan creates unnecessary time and costs. Agile thinking turns this on its head so that it’s the vision that creates functional estimates.
If you only work on the technical side and aren’t aware of the whole agile mindset shift needed, it falls flat. Some also choose a special framework like Scrum as a solution to get started with something concrete.
To give an example of a successful transition in the near present, I will briefly describe Bankdata . Through this, we also get a view of what the agile mindset contains. Bankdata made an agile transformation over 5 years, and Berit Kuhr explains how they worked with structure, culture, mindset and framework through five agile and cultural principles:

1. “Leadership is in all of us” works with empowerment so that the decision-making mandate is distributed throughout the team. The leadership role has shifted from “the employee was there for the leader to the leader being there for the employee”. A good tool for distributing decision-making authority is “Delegation poker”. This builds trust between people, creating transparency and sharing.
2. “Continuous improvement”: We improve all the time – like Scrum’s retrospective, where you quickly get feedback on both product and collaboration.
3. “Incremental and iterative development” are the shorter sprints.
4. “Tecnical excellence” – craftmanship
5. “End to end business-understanding is about understanding the business value chains you deliver to.
6. in a previous assignment, I described Wenger’s social learning theory, which has an impact on how we gain trust in each other. It focuses on what you feel right now. The learning from the classroom is secondary. It is problematic if learning is only acquired by ear and not in practice.
7. The longer you’ve known each other, the better you know each other’s engagement, context, traditions, stories and humor, so you can skip many introductory and explanatory remarks and get straight to the task at hand.
   Constructivism believes everything happens in process. Psychology and newer leadership theories such as Brinkmann and Elmholdt argue that heritage is more important than environment, as we see in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling”. Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling”. We are defined by our innate genetic habitus, we are almost predetermined.