A primary reason for the success of Agile methods, practices, and principles is because they are effective heuristics. But Agile is not a complete set of heuristics for all situations. We need to understand why and where Agile methods and practices work – and where they don’t – in order to adopt, tailor, use, and improve them.
Agile heuristics are especially important and useful for complex environments, where practitioners must work continuously to understand their context, and then respond quickly and flexibly to meet rapidly-changing needs.
The future we envision is one where practitioners understand not only how, but also why Agile methods and practices work across different contexts. Understanding Agile in context increases the chances for successful adoptions and highlight areas where new methods need to be developed or exapted from other disciplines. Treating Agile as a set of heuristics will also reduce recipe-based, dogmatic approaches that are fairly pervasive in the community at large today.
Cynefin is a sensemaking framework that helps people understand their context or situation in order to take appropriate action. The Cynefin framework can be used to select Agile heuristics appropriate for the environment (e.g. use Scrum here, and Kanban there) rather than defaulting to a single, recipe-based approach for all situations.
The Three-Circle Model combines three fundamental perspectives (Business, Usage, and Technology) in a way that permits teams to create balanced products, services, and solutions. The Three-Circle Model is an effective guide to identify and select heuristics, and is especially useful to see where Agile heuristics must be supplemented with other heuristics from other domains.
