You want speed, adaptability, resilience

TL;DR; Investing in Agile, Scrum, Kanban, and DevOps will not deliver real speed, adaptability, or resilience unless your teams have the agency to truly own their work and outcomes. Without empowering people to take responsibility, you risk superficial processes and disengaged teams. To achieve genuine agility, ensure your system supports team and individual ownership, not just frameworks.

Published on 11 May 2025

Written by Martin Hinshelwood

1 minute read

https://nkdagility.com/resources/5UaIfaLclWB

You want speed, adaptability, resilience.

You invest in Scrum, Agile, Kanban, DevOps.

But then you ignore the hard part:
agency.

Without agency, your teams can’t own outcomes.
Without agency, your Product Owners can’t own value.
Without agency, your Scrum Masters can’t own effectiveness.

Instead, you get cosmetic ceremonies, fake backlogs, and teams going through the motions.

Kanban, as an observability pattern for value delivery, won’t save you.
DevOps, as the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value, won’t save you.

None of these strategies work without the human system having the agency to act.

If you are serious about agility, you have to be serious about enabling people to own what they are accountable for.

Where in your system have you invested in agility but refused to invest in agency?

Also published on: LinkedIn

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