Today agility must deliver more than “just” flexibility, it must drive real, measurable value. This post explores this shift towards a businesslike approach centered on outcomes, Time-to-Value and, why not, efficiency.
Drawing insights from the 2024 Business Agility Report, we here highlights the challenges and opportunities in aligning empowerment with accountability, building people-centric leadership, and ensuring every step in the agile journey contributes to tangible results. Now, more than ever, “Value, Value, Value!” is the mantra guiding successful business agility.
I have to admit that in the past two years I have been assiduously thinking to the future of Agile. Today, I am convinced that we witnessed a shift of context that has been so powerful, and in some cases sudden, that, at least to me, it created a bit of disorientation and in certain cases embarrassment, but never, ever any kind of distrust.
In the early days of Agile, the maximum focus was, rightly, on mastering principles, practices, and new ways of working. What Aikido practitioners knows very well, is that in the first stages of learning that martial art, you need to learn the basics rigorously, without thinking too much on other stuff (see Shu-Ha-Ri concept).
This is what we did: Agility was revolutionary, a fresh approach to collaboration and adaptability and we needed to totally understand it and practice accordingly in order to gain experience and master it.
But, today…
“Value, Value, Value!” is the new mantra
As we face an era marked by geo-political instability, economic uncertainty, and rapid change, agility has to bring more concreteness and pragmatism. Starting from the foundational pillars of agile that drive how we think (principles) and work (ways of working), now it’s, more than ever important to focus on the capability of creating, delivering and measuring value.
Today, “Value, Value, Value!” is the new mantra. It’s mainly about delivering real, measurable impact. Agility has to answer a business imperative that requires focus, accountability, and a relentless drive toward efficiency and time-to-value.
We also spotted similar signals in two interesting reports 2024 Business Agility Report and Skills in the New World of Work” that somehow confirm we have to invest in these directions.
Aligning Empowerment with Accountability
The Individuals and interactions value of the Agile Manifesto, led us towards stressing so much about teams empowering in how they find solutions and how to implement it.
However, empowering teams without matching it with their full accountability in reaching the results, actually lacks impact.
Agile Teams today not only need to have freedom on the “How” but are also held responsible for delivering measurable value (stressing the word measurable is never enough…) .
Time-to-Value has become a crucial metric
As highlighted in the 2024 Business Agility Report, organizations that balance empowerment with clear accountability frameworks see the most meaningful results. Empowerment must come with a shared commitment to outcomes—only then it does translate into real business value.
Prioritizing Value and Time-to-Value
In today’s agile landscape, Time-to-Value has become a crucial metric, reflecting not just how fast teams deliver but how quickly users derive real benefits. The concept goes beyond simply releasing features (Output)—it’s about optimizing the entire journey from concept to actual user usage, ensuring that every step contributes to meaningful Outcomes.
Let’s see what Time-to-Value actually means from the perspective of those responsible for creating it:
- Discovery and Definition: Identify user needs and define high-impact features to deliver maximum value. The goal is to set a foundation where all efforts are aligned with delivering maximum value.
- Development and Iteration: Build in small increments, refining with each iteration to meet user expectations. This phase emphasizes quality, efficiency, and feedback, ensuring that each Potentially Shippable Increment is valuable to be released and aligns with user expectations.
- Deployment and Activation: Deployment alone doesn’t equate to value! Ensure smooth release and easy access so users can start engaging immediately. The word here is Activation: activate users in quick usage of the feature.
- Adoption and Usage: This is the point where the true value starts to emerge. Users begin actively engaging with the feature, integrating it into their routines or workflows. Teams need to understand how to facilitate and shorten the adoption phase, under the penalty of delaying real value creation.
- Realization of Value: Users experience tangible benefits, marking the true completion of value delivery.
All this has to do, to cite a few, with how:
- disciplined we are in defining and respecting Definition of Ready (DOR) and Definition of Done (DoD),
- how much we support Product Owners in clearly expressing Feature Benefit Hypothesis
- and equally clearly defining How to Measure the realization of that benefits,
- how good are we at helping our organization in setting a strategy
- and defining a effective and flexible goal setting approach (e.g. OKRs)
- and, last but not least, how good are we at finding win-win Agile Contracts base on risk & value sharing principles.
…just to cite a few…
The Long Road to People-Centric Leadership
The ever-green topic about Agile inefficiencies is that it requires a new style of leadership.
The 2024 Business Agility Report sheds light on a critical insight: People-Centric Leadership takes years to establish, with a minimum of three years to begin embedding and up to eight years to reach maturity.
Despite its low growth rate respect to the 2023 version of the report, this leadership style—rooted in trust and psychological safety—we know is essential for true agility.
Yet, many organizations underestimate the commitment required, overlooking the journey’s depth and duration. For agility to become deeply ingrained, and thus to deliver the expected value, leaders must prioritize this long-term investment, cultivating environments where empowered teams can thrive sustainably.
Final Thoughts
The journey of business agility is evolving, marked by a shift from “process-driven practices” to a focus on real, measurable impact.
As agile practitioners, we must recognize that agility itself is a commitment to growth over time. The strong shift we are experiencing pushes us to new levels of consciousness and requires to, maybe, unlearn (transform) some pieces of what we are doing today and acquire new ones.
Let’s embrace Businesslike Agility.
