Agile is a product development method or framework that bundles different practices as well as a mindset of close customer contact, nimble and self-organized teams.
I will focus on some of the practices:
A sprint (from scrum) is a focused, time-boxed project where a group of people completes a piece of work. The most important aspect of it is the idea of clarifying the container: a backlog of things to address, and a time schedule. As such, its magic sauce is the frame-setting nature: time and scope are clear.
With the frame clearly set, the choreography on the inside – planning, stand-up meetings and reviews – are all weaving techniques that ensure a well-connected, shared context between the participants, mostly focused on the work and the clients’ needs.
Retrospectives are also coherence practices. They allow a group to zoom out from action and ask: how are we doing? What’s working? What’s out of alignment? They surface tensions and prompt pattern awareness.
Agile is about responsiveness. Staying in touch with the outside world – especially customers – is essential. Agile teams don’t just build according to a plan. They build, test, learn, adjust. And for that, someone has to listen. That’s where the Product Owner role comes in. This is a role that holds the customer’s needs and therefore stewards of coherence between the organizational inside and the contextual outside – the customers.
As such, customer contact is not a separate function – it’s woven into the loop. Feedback is not something collected at the end of a long project; it’s folded into the rhythm. The product owner, for example, acts as a membrane: selectively permeable, attuned to what enters and what stays out.
Agile is not only a list of doings, it’s also a way of orienting. That means that when Agile fails, it’s often because people go through the motion without the living patterns and orientation underneath and it becomes a performance, not a living practice.
Wiser organizations 