Mike Lyons explains that agility is primarily a mindset — a way of thinking that sits at the core of Agile work. He frames agility as layered: changing tools on the outside, then practices, then principles, then values, and at the center the Agile mindset; he argues practices (e.g., daily standups) can change when teams internalize the mindset. Lyons also references his own mindset shift after reading the Agile Manifesto and notes the difficulty and neurobiological aspects of changing mindsets.
Chapters
Agile really is a state of mind. We really like to focus in on agility as a way of thinking, a way of looking at how we view work. We call it the Agile mindset. You might wonder why we spend so much time talking about that. Well, let's talk about sort of the other pieces of what goes into the mindset. Sort of starting at the outer ring, if you will, of our, our thinking here is sort of the tooling and tools. They change pretty often. If you've been in the industry very long, you've probably tried any number of tools and they change and existing tools get better, you know, and so we don't really focus in on the training of tools. There's plenty of opportunity for us to do that, but we want to instead focus in on something a little more powerful, a little more tangible than tools and, you know, sort of working down that. We have this idea of practices and practices will change too. So, so for example, within Scrum, you have this idea of a daily standup. Okay. And by the way, it's daily. It's in the title, Daily standup. However, once, once teams are maturing and they begin to understand, well, what is the daily standup for? Ah, well, the mindset would say the daily standup is for the team, by the team, to know if the team's going to meet the team's commitments. It's for the team, in case you didn't get it, to know if they're going to meet their commitments. And so if the teams can figure out a way to do that without the practice of meeting daily, maybe they change that and begin to. Because they have a mindset. So you have tools, you have practices, and they have these sort of idea of principles. Now principles start to get closer to, okay, well, this is starting to be a little intangible, but pretty well set. Like it doesn't necessarily change all that often. It's something we can, we can buy into even though the tools and practices might change. And then there's, there's values. Now values don't change very frequently and maybe your organization has a set of core values that sort of drive the organization. But then at the, at the heart of it, we have, we have the mindset. Now this is intangible but extremely powerful when we begin to begin to change our mind, to begin to think about things differently. I shared a story with you of when I had one of my mindset changes when I read the Agile Manifesto. When I read the Agile Manifesto, I began to change my mind. And then there's all sorts of neuropathways, science discussions around how we think and how our brains are wired for learning. And there's all of that. And that's why we say it's pretty hard to master, because this is a mindset we're talking about. So all of that to say that sort of our focus is on bringing you this idea that agility is a state of mind.
