Agile Planning = a model for strategic thinking?

I had a bit of an epiphany this weekend.

I picked up a textbook on my dining room table that my husband Andy was reading for a software development and project management course he's taking. The book was called Agile Estimating and Planning, by Mike Cohn and Prentice Hall. I start leafing through it, and at first I was thinking, this might as well be in Greek, then I started to "get" some of it and it suddenly struck me. If you take all the software development jargon out of it, and extract the basic principles, I could have been reading about a methodology for how to foster strategic thinking in an association context. And it is stupendous!

Check this out.

The wikipedia entry is here. It's a little heavy going but if you skip down to the principles and comparison to other methods you'll see what caught my eye. This is the Agile Manifesto, written by a group of 17 software developers in 2001:

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Also check out the Principles behind the Agile Manifesto (my bold):

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software.

Welcome changing requirements, even late in
development. Agile processes harness change for
the customer's competitive advantage.

Deliver working software frequently, from a
couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a
preference to the shorter timescale.

Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.

Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.

The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a development
team is face-to-face conversation.

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Agile processes promote sustainable development.
The sponsors, developers, and users should be able
to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.

Continuous attention to technical excellence
and good design enhances agility.

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done--is essential.

The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams.

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly.

Agile planning is based on the idea that you can plan in shorter iterations which are continuously adjusted. I would say it's like a cyclical spiral, always moving, as opposed to the linear straight arrow plan with a set start date and finish date. It is highly collaborative between team members, it relies on trust between team members, and it is extremely nimble and responsive. As per wikipedia,

Although agile methods differ in their practices, they share a number of common characteristics, including iterative development, and a focus on interaction, communication, and the reduction of resource-intensive intermediate artifacts. ... From an organizational perspective, the suitability can be assessed by examining three key dimensions of an organization: culture, people, and communication. In relation to these areas a number of key success factors have been identified (Cohen et al., 2004):

• The culture of the organization must be supportive of negotiation
• People must be trusted
• Fewer staff, with higher levels of competency
• Organizations must live with the decisions developers make
• Organizations need to have an environment that facilitates rapid communication between team member

Now, if you google "agile planning" or "agile software development" you will get tons of really complicated project management methodologies. That's not what I am interested in. What is important here are the principles behind agile planning, which seem to me to be entirely in sync with what some of us have been talking about for a long time in the association world. Namely, how to foster middle-level strategic thinking. How to incorporate decision-making through collaboration and communication throughout an organization (task forces rather than departments or committees). How to be nimble, continuously proactive and reactive. How to incorporate the possibility of failure through continuous beta-testing (so there will be no such thing as failure, only lessons learned and goals adjusted). How to really engage our members so they have a participatory role in the development of the association.

Jeff and Jamie talk about these ideas in their 2005 article, Building Strategic Capacity by Design, which I was reading for my CEO Dialogues course. But I was thinking to myself, we all talk about this stuff on a theoretical level, but I think what people really want to know now is "How can we IMPLEMENT this within my organization? How can we get started?" The article talks about developing "design principles", "processes that facilitate strategic conversations". But here I am, Joe Blow association executive trying to get my head round it and wanting to start changing my association's culture - and I'm thinking, I get the theory, but I want some concrete examples of how to get there!

I know they are not easy to come up with because everyone's organizational culture and history is so different. However, I think what may be missing now, what is keeping us in the association world from the widespread adoption of the technologies behind the cultural shift we are experiencing but have little idea how to deal with, is to have some kind of basic methodology for strategic thinking, some kind of "control", not necessarily a benchmark but something to start with, that an association can compare their own processes against and modify to suit their own organizational culture.

So, I have a lot more thinking to do about this, but maybe the ideas behind agile planning could be developed into some usable model or template for how to get started in moving towards strategic thinking, responsiveness, innovation and creativity - over linear strategic planning, slow reactivity and risk aversion, rigidity of thinking and top-level-dominated leadership.

What do you think?