I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak at Agile in the City Bristol 2019 with my session entitled Futurespecting Agile. We had a room full of people who spent an hour thinking and talking about their vision for Agile in 10 years’ time and how we could make this happen. As the teams shared the results of their conversations, I found it fascinating to see a small number of repeated ideas emerging. As a group, we captured these into seven different themes:

1)     Agile exists outside of IT and IT industries

2)     Agile is in the mainstream, superseding roles and certifications

3)     We leverage the tools that we have available to get the maximum collaboration without having to be physically together.

4)     We focus on shared learning and development of soft-skills

5)     We leverage the availability of people and maximise the processes that we use in order to achieve the greatest effectiveness

6)     We use our technology and tools for what they do best and automate all common processes

7)     Feedback and experimentation is a corner-stone of our practice

As we went through the exercise, I invited the group to think big, think blue-sky, think outside of the box and find those crazy ideas that could really move us forward. I want to share two of the ideas that struck me the most.

We had a big theme around teaching Agile and using it in schools. One suggestion was “GCSE Agile”! I love this idea. As we know, Agile is about mindsets and behaviours, which apply anywhere. Imagine our children learning this in depth so that, by the time they leave school, they already have this in-built as they enter the world of work. Then Agile truly does become the norm, not something new that they have to learn on the job.

The other idea that I want to highlight is “A Star Trek Holodeck for team remote working”! It’s hard to avoid having remote team members and distributed teams. Imagine that, just like stepping over to someone’s desk, you could meet them in a virtual environment to pair programme, peer review or whiteboard an idea. No video, no audio, just a virtual environment in which to collaborate. Could this be how we work in 10 years’ time? I would love to think so!

So thank you to all the people who joined the session, had amazing and innovative conversations and came up with these focus areas for the Agile of the Future. See you there in 10 years’ time!