Want to understand agile and its challenges fast? Check out this comprehensive 15 minute video.

Dan Greening (Senex Rex) and Brent Barton (SolutionsIQ) explore the fundamental patterns of agility; how leadership inhibits and nurtures agility; why agile is hard to maintain; how to tell rapidly if a person, team or organization is agile; how to build agile manager teams to tackle tough strategic problems; and how to hire agile leaders.

Agile Leadership Patterns

Five agile leadership patterns tell us everything. Agile people, teams and organizations …

1. measure economic progress (i.e., velocity, NPS, clicks, happiness, progress metrics aligned with entity’s mission),
   
2. proactively experiment to improve (i.e., retrospective in Scrum, measure-learn in Lean Startup),
3. limit work in progress (i.e., ship every Sprint, follow one piece flow).

… and they do it fast enough to adapt to the chaotic economy where they operate.

The three top patterns are characteristic of agile entities, but if that’s all you have, your agility won’t last. Resilient agile entities also …

4. embrace collective responsibility (i.e., Sprint Commitment and Surrogate Product Owner in Scrum, Collective Code Ownership in XP).

If you operate in a non-agile setting, outside forces—other teams, business partners, managers or policies—often limit agility. Expansive agile entities also …

5. solve systemic problems (i.e., five whys, theory of constraints).

If you weren’t able to attend Jeff Sutherland and Dan Greening packed presentation on Agile Leadership Patterns at Agile 2015, here’s a rapid fire summary.

Many thanks to SolutionsIQ for producing this interview.