Written by Elizabeth Congdon, Team and Leadership Coach
Elizabeth Congdon, is a Team & Leadership Coach rooted in Creative Consciousness' Coaching. She guides individuals, teams, and organizations to clarify and align their purpose, values, and goals. Her work cultivates cultures that ignite growth, unlocking full potential in high-performing individuals and teams who consistently achieve impactful results.
Too many businesses get stuck in the mechanics of Agile, chasing frameworks, tools, and ceremonies while missing the bigger picture: sustainable impact. True agility isn't about adopting a methodology; it's about creating a business that continuously adapts, delivers value, and stays ahead of disruption. This article explores seven critical principles for lasting agility and seven pitfalls that sabotage progress, drawing from years of experience and insights from the work of Jonathan Smart (Sooner Safer Happier) and Susan Abishara (Is This The End of Agility?).
The 7 keys to success
1. Define and align with a clear purpose
Align teams with a clear, shared purpose. Purpose provides the "why" that fuels strategic decision-making, prioritization, and engagement, ensuring that work directly contributes to meaningful business outcomes.
2. Focus on business outcomes
Agility must serve the overarching business vision and goals. Every effort should contribute directly to solving customer problems and delivering measurable value. Outcomes are about changing behaviors and achieving tangible results, let clarity of outcome guide the way.
3. Customer-centric strategy and practices
Combine strategic alignment with deep customer understanding. Your business strategy sets the direction for customer-centricity, with the customer at the heart of every action, employee engagement, funding model, and beyond. Operationalizing the strategy through practices like Design Thinking is powerful in getting closer to the customer and ensuring that solutions address their actual needs. Remember, employee happiness influences customer happiness.
4. Transparency across all levels
Cultivate shared accountability at all levels through open communication and visibility across teams, leadership, and stakeholders. Transparency builds trust and alignment. From the "why" behind strategy to the "why" behind processes, policies, and decisions, transparency is key to reducing ambiguity and enabling informed decision-making.
5. Accelerate learning with rapid feedback
Feedback loops are not just about speed; they enable learning, adaptation, and alignment with customer needs while reducing the cost of change and risk. Think big, deliver small, and seek feedback frequently.
6. Cultural transformation: Build an intentional culture
Create a culture that aligns with your business and context and cultivates continuous improvement, learning, and co-creation. Cultural transformation is the foundation of sustained agility, ensuring change is embraced and embedded.
7. Sustainable pace for lasting impact
Lasting change happens when people have the space to unlearn old habits and adopt new ways of thinking. Rushing leads to fragility, while a steady, intentional approach builds resilience and long-term value.
The 7 pitfalls to avoid
1. Trying to do everything, delivering no value
Pursuing too many priorities creates chaos and diminishes the impact of delivery. Without ruthless enterprise-wide prioritization, agile efforts become chaotic and ineffective. As Susan Abishara highlights in Is This The End of Agility?, "Develop happier people, have people working on the right things, not everything."
2. Tool-centric transformations
Investing in tools without addressing how we think about work, value, governance, and processes leads to superficial agility. Tools are enablers, not solutions.
3. Framework fetish
Over-relying on a specific framework stifles adaptability and undermines the spirit of agility. It's not about Agile, Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, DAD, LeSS, or any particular method, it's about outcomes.
4. Neglecting the customer
Losing sight of customer problems to chase internal efficiency metrics disconnects the business from its value proposition. Verify assumptions with the customer and test solutions in the market as early and often as possible.
5. Lack of leadership engagement
Without committed leadership, teams struggle to navigate ambiguity and align goals and priorities. Leaders are responsible for eliminating wasteful policies and procedures to align metrics with outcomes. Leadership and metrics shape company culture and drive systemic behavior.
6. Optimising teams while neglecting systems
Focusing only on teams or specific business areas, like IT, neglects the systemic constraints and dependencies that shape outcomes. True transformation requires an end-to-end perspective, aligning the entire organization to deliver better customer outcomes. Without this, improvements remain localized, optimizing parts rather than the whole. As Jonathan Smart states in Sooner Safer Happier, "Everything is in scope."
7. Vanity metrics
Metrics like velocity and Agile team maturity assessments misdirect effort. These metrics make it about Agile rather than measuring whether you are meeting customer needs sooner, improving delivery predictability, increasing the happiness of your people, or responding to change effectively.
Making agility work for your business
Agile is neither the destination nor the strategy, it's a vehicle. The real journey is about creating a business that adapts, delivers value, and stays ahead of change. Avoiding common pitfalls like overload, tool obsession, and neglecting leadership ensures that transformation isn't just a buzzword but a genuine shift toward long-term success. Remember, the goal is not to do more but to do what matters most and do it well.
Let's talk if you want to move beyond frameworks and create lasting agility that drives business outcomes. I help organizations align strategy, leadership, and teams to unlock real agility. Contact me to discuss how we can make agility work for your business.
Ready to transform your organization with purpose and clarity? Reach out now to start your journey with Elizabeth Congdon | LinkedIn | Website
Elizabeth Congdon, Team and Leadership Coach
Elizabeth Congdon is a team and leadership coach who brings a unique blend of experiences to her practice. She empowers people to embrace innovative thinking and adaptability. With a foundation in creative consciousness coaching and a background in leading business transformation, digital transformation, and agile ways of working projects for global companies, she excels at guiding individuals, teams, and organizations toward clarity and alignment in their purpose, values, and goals. Elizabeth fosters inclusive cultures that promote courage, confidence, and creative thinking. Her holistic coaching approach ignites team engagement and collaboration, resulting in high-performing teams and individuals.
