Agility is the degree that you can rapidly sense, adapt and succeed in changing situations and uncertainty. As technology and society advances ever more rapidly, our agility defines our success. And so, some of the best and most well-known companies, celebrity, politicians, and countries are extremely agile—they encounter problems and, unlike their slower-moving competitors, they very rapidly adapt and thrive.

You can be agile. You can achieve celebrity, or just establish a great reputation in your field. You can lead a company, civic organization or society to success. But unless you want to learn the hard way, it’s probably useful to learn how others did it.

This Agile Base Patterns category synthesizes and organizes fundamentals that are present in virtually all related frameworks. They have different names and operate in different fields—agile development, Scrum, Extreme Programming, Lean Startup, DevOps, Design Thinking, Lean Manufacturing, Getting Things Done, Pomodoro, Beyond Budgeting, Theory of Constraints. They are all practices that help you achieve higher agility, and they borrow from each other. You can use all of them simultaneously; they are largely complementary. For example, if you use Lean Startup to design products, you’ll get better results if you’re working with a development team that uses Scrum.

I have studied all these agile techniques, in depth. I have taught large companies, small startups, teams, and individuals how to use them. They became more successful and more productive as a result. One executive complained she had not seen any improvement, so I made a study of release frequency over a seven year period: during the time that we weren’t using agile methods, the average time between releases increased from 6 months (when it was a startup) to 24 months (years after it was acquired). The company was on the road to failure. Upon adopting agile methods the time between releases dropped below 3 months. Customer satisfaction and market share all improved dramatically, to be better than at any previous time. The company was saved, and agile saved it.

These Agile Base Patterns are a stand-alone pattern language. A pattern language organizes patterns to help you rapidly learn fundamentals first, then subtleties later. So, if you’d like to understand agility generally, read the Agility pattern, which is the first pattern in the Agility pattern language and the summary. The remaining patterns in this category (five as of this writing) form the second layer of the pattern language.

Every pattern in this blog starts with an leaf icon and a pattern name, like this:

Agile

The pattern name is either something well-known already, or something easy to remember.

The description starts with a Context and a Problem. If the context and the problem seem to match your context and problem, the pattern will likely help you. If the context and problem don’t match yours, maybe there’s another pattern that does.

To understand pattern languages generally, see How to Read and Write Pattern Languages.