Humanizing Agile

“Can we get serious now?” quipped Captain Charles Sully Sullenberger, the iconic character played by Tom Hanks in the movie adaptation of the Airbus A320 Hudson Water landing incident. He goes on to articulate the crux of his argument in the safety hearing: “You are taking humanity out of the cockpit while looking for human errors.”

I have a feeling - more from experience - that many of the Agile implementations that are done in organizations suffer from this very same issue: humanity is taken out of Agile. This is a sad irony as Agile by design is meant to amplify people practices. There are several manifestations of this in Agile. Task sign-up, self-organizing teams, servant leadership, a daily Scrum meeting, team retrospective, and various principles are all examples of the human side of Agile.