Scaling or growing agile? Proposing a manifesto for agile organization development

Abstract

In the face of today’s world of uncertainty, many organizations aim for more flexible and less hierarchical forms of organizing. Relatedly, management scholars and consultants have increasingly taken stock of the agile concept, advocating a scaling of agile teams and their maverick practices to the organizational level. Considering four common challenges with organization-level agile in practice, we outline an alternative trajectory for agile in the context of organization design. This alternative trajectory builds on the notion of growing (rather than scaling) agile and is rooted in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development as the philosophical anchor of the agile movement. In this paper, we describe the journey of a Swedish software company along which we highlight the discrepancies in assumptions about uncertainty and people between manifesto agile and large-scale agile. Based on our case analysis, we propose a Manifesto for Agile Organization Development with four associated values, bringing the original Agile Manifesto and its mindset of trusting people to solve problems together locally to the organizational level. We further articulate five principles for agile organization development and illustrate through our case how bringing them to life can help address the common challenges of organization-level agile. Rather than a blueprint, our manifesto, and its associated values and principles are intended as an alternative basis for developing and discussing what manifesto agile means at an organizational level and how it can be turned into practice(s) in local contexts.