Creating Agile Tribes: Herding CATs for Fun and Customer Delight

• All Resources
• Blog
• Experience Reports
• Webcasts
• Videos
• Books
• Event Sessions
• Research Papers

When you create Agile teams you typically tell people about a methodology. You probably explained their roles within the decision framework to guide their responsibilities and actions. And you told them that they collaborate and coordinate their decisions versus being told what to do.

But where do we help teams bond? How do you support their sense of belonging and value and respect for one another? We believe you will fail in your Agile adoption if you are not explicit in creating and sustaining these attributes. What you are missing is a sense of “tribes.” But what is a tribe? Who creates it? What holds it together? Our answers may startle you.

For us, Agile success relies on each team’s sense of their individual identity coupled with the tribe’s sense of unity. We’re convinced that the notion of creating and sustaining tribes is pivotal to scaling Agile. And yet this notion seems conspicuously absent in how experts talk about success in scaling Agile? In this talk, Em and Jean bring the good, the bad and ugly from their research, personal insights, and stories about tribes.