So I was reading this blog by Bob Marshall and at first I got angry, and then I realized I have being doing too much of angry, as I read I realized that not only he was not wrong, but also he was dead on right.

He did express exactly what I want.

I do not want the word back, I want what it meant to be, regardless of the name given. Going about making noise does not solve anything, if there is not a direction and a metaphor to work by.

So, really taking “agile” back must be done in “agile” way, lets do agile in anger(1) instead of doing it with anger, who says this is limited only to writing software?

Starting by feedback, what went right? What went wrong? How can we improve it?

And the first thing I think went wrong are the names, extreme programming scared people, most never went on to understand or learn anything related.

Agile is misleading and an attractive word for corporate drones in love with titles. It is too easily interpreted as fast, it also has an inherent aggressiveness, in the sense of hormone pumped up sport player “going for the kill” in a game, that appeal for those kinds of alpha male management types that love so much to be in control of everything.

My suggestion is to use Organic Development, organisms adapt and react to changes of context, organisms fail fast, organisms learn and improve through feed back loop, evolving and doing better for the context over the time.

I think Organic Development offer quite an extense source of metaphors to be used and to explain what we call agile.

(1) I just learned this expression, found it cool.