GLUTEN-FREE AGILE

“You can’t be pro pizza and anti-gluten.” Jimmy Kimmel

In a recent skit on the “Jimmy Kimmel Live” show, random people in LA who were on gluten-free diets were asked to define what gluten actually was. It became tragically comic when nearly all the people quizzed had no idea. We are too willing to make radical changes to our bodies without really knowing why…  Are organizations doing the same thing with Agile?  Don’t get me wrong… I have a family member with celiac disease that has painstakingly removed gluten from her diet. You can’t walk down a grocery aisle these days without seeing the word “gluten free” proudly printed across labels of all sorts on shelves.  Gluten-Free has become mainstream and accepted into society as a norm.  I recall going out to lunch recently with friends and one person was on a gluten free diet. “Lunch would be great,” he said, but he couldn’t eat white grains, sugar, meat, dairy or salt. “Rice and fish are okay,”  We ended up going to a local favorite Thai restaurant.  He had celiac disease and understood the consequences if he ate gluten.

Ripping the label off   Like gluten free, everyone tosses around the word “Agile”so readily from the boardroom to the server room. A recent Google search returned about 19,000,000 results from the word Agile. Tensions abound when the values in the manifesto are incongruent to conventional ways of working. This has lead to interesting discourse. Big A vs little ‘a’ Agile, Agile is Dead, Flaccid Scrum, Taking Agile Back, Consumer Agile just to name a few…   Has the “A” word gone viral?  Some folks have ceased using a label altogether, resulting in new and effective patterns of work context. What might happen if we ripped the label off and began to focus on effective ways of working?  Does a label obligate us to exploring new ways of working?