diana larsen and james shore

THE AGILE FLUENCY MODEL
A Brief Guide to Success with Agilediana larsen and james shore

THE AGILE FLUENCY MODEL
A Brief Guide to Success with AgileCopyright 2012, 2019 James Shore and Diana Larsen.
Agile Fluency is a trademark of James Shore and Diana Larsen.
You may reproduce this eBook so long as this notice is preserved.

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Contents
A Note from the Authors1

Introducing the Model

1Choose Your Zone

3

Achieving Fluency

4Losing Fluency

5

Organizational Fluency

6

Focusing Teams Produce Business Value8

Delivering Teams Ship on the Market Cadence

13

Optimizing Teams Lead Their Market

18Strengthening Teams Make Their Organizations Stronger

24

Applying the Agile Fluency Model

26Conclusion

28

Acknowledgements

31

About the Authors32vi

A Note from the Authors
We’ve been leading and helping teams transition to agile development since thelate 90’s. In that time, we’ve seen the Agile movement grow from a programmer-centric passion of enthusiasts and innovators to a behemoth that’s takenover the software world.
Despite the success—or maybe because of it—agile approaches
don’t always achieve what people expect. Agile luminaries postarticles such as Martin Fowler’s Flaccid Scrum (2009). Complaints
arise that consultancies profiteer by forcing rigid, un-agile processes
down people’s throats. Organizational leaders worry that they’re notgetting the benefits that they should.

If you’d like to watch a video
about this material, check out
this 10-minute overview.

In our years of helping agile teams, we’ve learned a lot about what it takes tosucceed with agile and why so many organizations don’t see the results they
expect. In 2012, we formalized this learning as the Agile Fluency™ [1] Model andpublished it here. In the intervening six years, applying the model has taught useven more. Now we’ve updated this article to include our latest discoveries.
Use this article to understand which benefits to expect from your agile teams;
which investments must be made to achieve those benefits; and where to lookwhen your teams don’t deliver the benefits you need. It may involve a mirror.

Introducing the Model
We’ve observed that agile teams pass through four distinct zones as they learn.
Each zone brings specific benefits:
1 Focusing teams produce business value.
2 Delivering teams deliver on the market cadence.
3 Optimizing teams lead their market.
4 Strengthening teams make their organizations stronger.

1 Agile Fluency is a trademark of James Shore and Diana Larsen. (We’ve had problems with other peopleusing the term “Agile Fluency” while misrepresenting our model, so we felt we needed to trademark theterm to prevent that from happening.)

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Each zone depends on a set of agile proficiencies. A proficiency is an observablebehavior—such as “The team works with a business representative who provides
the team with the business’s perspective and expectations”—that leads to thezone’s benefits.
In the Agile Fluency Model, we’re most interested in fluent
proficiency: a habit of exhibiting the proficiency at all times, evenwhen under pressure.

For an executive summary, jump
to the Conclusion on page 28.

Agile development is a team sport, so fluency is a trait of the team, not individual
team members. In practice, some proficiencies will be exhibited by all teammembers and some will be the specialty of a few individuals. Either way, a team’s
fluency comes from the ability of team members to self-organize so that individual
skills are applied to the right problems at the right times. Anyone can follow a
set of techniques when given time to focus in a classroom; true fluency is skillful,routine ease that persists when your mind is distracted with other things.
A team is fluent in a zone when it’s fluent in all of the zone’s proficiencies,
including predecessor zones. Although teams develop proficiencies in any order,
even from multiple zones simultaneously, we’ve observed that teams tend to gainzone fluency in a predictable order.

You may download and use this diagram yourself so long as you preserve the copyright notice.
Download the horizontal version (PNG, PDF); a vertical version (PNG, PDF); or a detailed version (PNG, PDF).

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Choose Your Zone
Each fluency zone brings new benefits, so it may seem that the model shouldbe treated as a maturity model, in which the goal is to reach maximum maturity.
That would be a mistake. Unlike maturity models, where more mature is always
better, the fluency model describes a collection of choices. Each zone represents
a fully-mature choice. Each one brings value.
Think of fluency as a ride on a bus. When you get on a bus, you buy a ticket forthe zone that you want to reach. A zone that’s further away isn’t inherently morevaluable; it just costs more and takes longer to get to. Sometimes you’ll buy a bus
ticket for the suburbs, because you want to go to a big box store. Sometimes
you’ll buy a ticket for downtown, because you want to see a play. Neither isinherently better—it all depends on what you need that day.
Similarly, while each zone has value, each zone also brings challenges. Investing in
more than you need could incur organizational backlash, and could even poison
people’s perception of agile ideas in general.
The appropriate zone for your teams depends on your organization. Deliveringor Optimizing are often the best targets, but Focusing and Strengthening canalso be good choices.
•

The Focusing zone represents agile fundamentals, and fluent teams provide
noticeable benefits to transparency and teamwork. Although Focusing
fluency doesn’t include sustainable technology practices, it’s a great way todemonstrate success and create buy-in for further investment. It’s also agood fit for teams, such as some digital agencies, that don’t maintain theirsoftware long-term.

•

For teams that need to modify and enhance their software for more than a
few months, Delivering fluency is often a better choice. This zone represents
agile sustainability. Delivering teams have low defects, high productivity, andare responsive to business requests. Fluency here is a valuable leap forward
for most teams.

3•

Organizations that wish to set the pace of change in their market, or who see
the threat of market disruption on the horizon, will benefit from choosing
the Optimizing zone. Optimizing represents the promise of agile: innovative
business agility. Although it has dramatic payoffs, it also requires disruptivechanges to organizational structure. Making those changes is often easiest insmall, nimble organizations.

•

Leaders who want to innovate management theory and practice, particularly
in small- to mid-size organizations, may find the Strengthening zone to be
the best fit for their teams. This zone is a possible future of agile. Cutting-edge
agile practice appears to be moving in that direction. However, be cautionedthat this zone requires researching cutting-edge management theory andinventing new ways of working.

Even within a single organization, different fluency zones can be appropriate fordifferent teams. Later in this article, we describe the investments and benefits
involved for each zone. As you read through the zones, remember that every zone
has its own costs and trade-offs. Think carefully about the trade-offs that are rightfor you rather than simply assuming more is better.

Achieving Fluency
Fluency is more a matter of habits than skills. Although training can teach theunderlying techniques, the skillful ease at the heart of fluent proficiency requires
deliberate, thoughtful, day-in-day-out practice over months. It comes from adeliberate investment in learning through practice.
The proficiencies involved in later zones tend to require more time than the
proficiencies for earlier zones. The sooner a team starts working on a zone’s
proficiencies, the sooner the team will become fluent in them. Agile proficiencies
are also mutually supportive. Accordingly, it’s best to choose the zone of fluency
you want to reach and start practicing all the proficiencies needed for that zone—
and all prior zones—simultaneously.

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(Of course, you can always change your mind. There’s no harm in starting with
one zone and targeting a different zone later. It just takes longer.)
As a team practices its proficiencies, fluency will develop in fits and starts.
Rather than an orderly progression of proficiency from one zone to thenext, proficiencies will develop in parallel across all zones. You’re likely to see
encouraging signs quickly, but the mastery and reliability of true fluency can be
frustratingly slow. Proficiencies plateau, jump forward and back, and progress at
different rates.
One of the biggest factors affecting team fluency is organizational support. To
continue the bus metaphor, the team has to ride the bus to their fluency zone. No
one can do it for them. But the organization has to buy the bus ticket. An organization that expects fluency without providing appropriate support is bound to bedisappointed. Even worse, insufficient support can cause turnover and create acynical corporate culture that hinders improvements. Before embarking on yourfluency journey, be sure your organization is prepared to offer the support thejourney needs.
One of the biggest investments the organization will make is time. True fluency
takes longer than anyone expects or wants. In our experience coaching teams, ittakes a team two to six months to become fluent in the Focusing zone. Reaching
the Delivering zone takes another 3–24 months, depending on the amountof technical debt in the code. Optimizing fluency can take another 1–5 years,
depending on organizational trust and willingness to change reporting structures.

Losing Fluency
It’s rare for stable teams to lose fluency on their own. In our experience, it’sexternal disruption that causes fluency loss.
The most common cause of fluency loss is when new management decides thatagile approaches don’t fit their vision. Without organizational support and theability to continue practicing what they’ve learned, team fluency erodes quickly.

5This is often accompanied by loss of expertise as dissatisfied team members seek
new positions.
Turnover is a related cause of fluency loss. A team that gains or loses too manymembers may have trouble sustaining what it’s learned. This is a particular
problem for organizations that assemble new teams for every project.
Rapid growth and imposed processes can also lead to loss of fluency. Successful
startups often struggle with this. When they’re small, startups often instinctively
operate in the Optimizing or even Strengthening zones. (They’re not necessarily
fluent in every proficiency, but their instincts push them towards those zones.)Once a startup starts growing rapidly, they often introduce bureaucracy andprocesses that accidentally damage the ad-hoc processes and culture thatenabled fluency.
Similarly, companies that have had success using agile ideas in individual teams
sometimes impose a scaling framework on their teams. Most of these frameworks
are only designed to support Focusing fluency, and some are designed more formanagement appeal than agile excellence. This makes developing and sustaining
fluency at later zones difficult.
That’s not to say ad-hoc growth is the correct answer, either. The relationshipbetween growth, scaling, and fluency is a complex topic deserving its own article.
For now, we’ll just say that, to have fluency at scale, you must have fluency in eachindividual team. When you evaluate scaling options, consider how your choices
support and hinder the proficiencies of the zones you want.

Organizational Fluency
In an agile organization, the work of the organization is done by teams of collaborative people who have a shared purpose and interdependent work. As a result,fluency derives from teams. An individual or organization may contribute to ateam’s fluency, but they can’t be fluent on their own.

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Although an organization itself can’t be fluent, it does make sense to talk about
the fluency that an organization enables. Team fluency depends on more thanjust the skills of team members. It also depends on management structures,
relationships, organizational culture, and more. Don’t make the mistake of
blaming individuals for a team’s lack of fluency, or assuming that one highly-skilledindividual will guarantee fluency. The organizational context often matters more.
When a team hits a roadblock in their fluency development, they’ll typicallystruggle with a few specific proficiencies. Sometimes the problem is a lack ofknowledge or skills, and training and mentoring is all the team needs.
More often, the team’s development is actually blocked by organizational
constraints. You can check for organizational constraints by conducting afluency diagnostic across several teams. (The Agile Fluency Project offers
diagnostic options at agilefluency.org.) If multiple teams are having trouble withthe same proficiencies, there’s a systemic issue that requires organization-level
investment and change.
In the sections that follow, we describe the proficiencies and organizational
investments needed for each zone. As you read them, think about which zones
your organization is prepared to enable, and which ones it’s currently designed
to hinder.

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Focusing Teams Produce Business Value
Summary 	���������������Agile fundamentals
Benefit 	�������������������Greater visibility into teams’ work; ability to redirect.
Investment 	�����������Team development and work process design.
Learn From	�������������Scrum, Kanban, non-technical XP
Time 	�����������������������2–6 months

Fluent Focusing teams work as a cohesive team with shared goals. They think andplan in terms of the benefits their sponsors, customers, and users will see fromtheir software. This is in contrast to teams who are just starting their agile journey,
who tend to think in terms of technical considerations, such as software layers,
and who often work as individual contributors with individually-assigned tasks.

Focusing: The team thinks and plans in terms of the benefits
their sponsors, customers, and users will see from their software.

Scrum, Kanban, and the non-technical parts of Extreme Programming are
examples of agile methods that teams use to reach Focusing fluency. User stories
are one of the most common techniques teams adopt. Other techniques include
backlogs, retrospectives, timeboxes (such as Sprints), and team task boards.
Focusing teams also give attention to interaction concepts such as psychologicalsafety, team chartering, group learning, and peer feedback.
Teams fluent in this zone show what they’re working on, and how it’s progressing
from a business value perspective, at least once per month. This is the core metricfor Focusing teams: it’s not the only benefit you should expect from a fluent
team, but it’s an easy, quick way to check if a team might be fluent. If you don’t

8have visibility into the team’s business priorities, or if those priorities don’t reflect
what the team’s actually working on, then the team isn’t yet fluent.

Expected Benefits
Transparency
Core Metric

At least once per month, the team shows what it’s
working on and how it’s progressing from a businessvalue perspective.

Reduce Risk

Management knows when the team is building thewrong thing, or isn’t making progress, and has theability to positively intervene.

Achievement
Increase Productivity

The team regularly reflects upon, tunes, and adjusts
its work habits to provide more value.

Increase ROI

The team focuses their work on the priority thatthey are told is most important to the business.

Increase ROI

The team makes incremental progress on businesspriorities every month.

Alignment
Increase Productivity

Collaborative communication reduces misunderstandings and hand-off delays among
team members.

Focusing benefits derive from effective communication, collaborative teamwork,and continuous team improvement. Fluent proficiency in these categories isn’t atechnical challenge, but the shift to team culture can be difficult for some people.

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Team members must learn to plan in terms of business outcomes rather thantechnology. They need to learn to take responsibility for the whole team’s success,not just their individual contributions. Managers must learn to support teamwork
over individual rewards and task planning.

Zone Proficiencies
Respond to Business Needs
The team works with a business representative who provides the team withthe business’s perspective and expectations.
Business stakeholders can count on the team working on their business representative’s view of the next-most valuable thing.
The team plans its work, and shows progress, in chunks that their business
representative understands and values.
The team’s business representative sees and can change the team’s direction
at least monthly.
Management enables the team to work at a pace that allows them to respondto business needs indefinitely.

Work Effectively as a TeamThe team generates their own day-to-day tasks and plan (based on theirbusiness representative’s needs).
Team members consider their plan to be the team’s work, notindividuals’ work.
Team members share accountability for getting their plan done.
Management considers the plan to be the team’s work rather than assigningaccountability to individuals.

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Pursue Team Greatness
The team embraces, and continuously improves, a joint approach totheir work.
The team is aware of how team member relationships affect their ability tosucceed and proactively attempts to improve them.
The team is aware of how their work environment affects their ability to dowork and proactively attempts to improve it.
Investment/Value Tradeoff: It takes two to six months of practice for a groupof independent individual contributors to make the shift to a collaborative,
team-based work style. Their fluency depends not only on their efforts, but theinvestments of their organization. As we’ve said before, the team may be driving
their fluency bus, but their organization needs to buy the bus ticket.
For many managers and organizations, the most challenging investments are
non-monetary. Enabling a team to work effectively as a team can require changing
management behavior, dedicating team members full-time to their team,and redesigning physical workspaces. In particular, managers must shift frommanaging the contributions of individuals to managing the work system—guiding
team processes, work habits, skills, and context such that the team makes correct
decisions without explicit management involvement.
We see many organizations that choose not to make these investments, but still
expect fluency from their teams. In these instances, team proficiencies develop
slowly and full fluency is rarely achieved. If your organization can’t make therequisite investments, agile approaches will disappoint.

Common Organizational Investments•

Select team members with appropriate skills, background, and willingness towork together. Allocate them 100% to their team.

11•Create a productivity-focused shared workspace, strongly preferring a physicalteam room. If a physical team room is infeasible, provide a richly interactive
virtual workspace instead, and accept that this will be less effective.

•

Ensure that someone with expertise on business priorities and customer value
is available to act as the team’s business representative.

•

Remove impediments to effective teamwork such as competitive ranking,individual rewards, and distributed teams.

•

Coach and train team members in Focusing proficiencies.

•

Train managers to create an environment that supports teamwork and how tomanage the work system rather than individual contributions.

In exchange for making these investments, you’ll have greater visibility into what
your teams work on and you’ll be able to direct them towards the 20% of theirwork that provides 80% of the value.

12Delivering Teams Shipon the Market Cadence
Summary 	���������������Agile sustainability
Benefit 	�������������������Low defects and high productivity.
Investment	�������������Lowered productivity during technical skill development.
Learn From	�������������Extreme Programming, DevOps movement
Time	�������������������������+3–24 months

Fluent Delivering teams not only focus on business value, they realize that valueby shipping as often as their market will accept it. This is called “shipping on themarket’s cadence.” Delivering teams are distinguished from Focusing teams not
only by their ability to ship, but their ability to ship at will.

Delivering: The team can release their latest work, at minimalrisk and cost, whenever the business desires.

Extreme Programming (XP) pioneered many of the techniques used by
Delivering teams and it remains a major influence today. Nearly all fluent
teams use its major innovations, such as continuous integration, test-driven
development, and “merciless” refactoring.
In recent years, the DevOps movement has extended XP’s ideas to modern
cloud-based environments. The movement’s Continuous Delivery andContinuous Deployment techniques are used by most Delivering teams. Other
useful techniques include evolutionary design, collective ownership, and pair
programming or mobbing.

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Teams fluent at Delivering create low-defect software that can be shipped asoften as your organization desires. If a team can’t release at will, they aren’t
yet fluent.

Expected Benefits
Transparency
Core Metric

The team can release their latest work, at minimalrisk and cost, whenever the business desires.

Reduce Risk

Systemic flaws in your production lifecycle arerevealed early.

Increase Satisfaction

The team provides useful release forecasts for
managers and customers as needed.

Achievement
Increase Productivity

The team has low defect rates, so less time iswasted fixing bugs and more time is invested in
making improvements.

Increase Productivity

The team’s codebase has low technical debt, whichmakes changes cheaper and faster.

Increase ROI

The team ships on the market cadence, capturing
value as often as the market will bear.

Alignment
Increase Productivity

Low defect rates and technical debt are beneficial
to job satisfaction and morale, improving retention
and productivity.

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Delivering is the most technically-intensive fluency zone. There are a lot ofskills to learn. Some, such as test-driven development, are of the “moments tolearn, lifetime to master” variety. Team members will benefit from studying andpracticing techniques described by Extreme Programming, DevOps, and agile
software quality gurus. Managers will need to ensure that the team is staffedwith people who collectively have all the expertise needed, and they’ll need towork with stakeholders to establish an expectation that thoughtful work is valued
over expediency.

Zone Proficiencies
Respond to Business Needs
The team’s product-related code is production-grade and all its latest work isdelivered to a production-equivalent environment at least daily.
The team’s business representative may release (or otherwise enable) theteam’s latest work at will.
The team provides useful release forecast ranges to their business representative upon request.
The team coordinates with their business stakeholders to develop theircode and other artifacts in a way that allows them to be maintained,
inexpensively, indefinitely.

Work Effectively as a Team
Programmers consider code and similar artifacts to belong to the team, notindividuals, and they share responsibility for changing and improving it.
All day-to-day skills needed to design, develop, ship, monitor, maintain, etc.,
the team’s work product are immediately accessible to the team.

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Pursue Technical Excellence
When working with code and similar artifacts, team members leave its
technical quality at least slightly better than they found it.
Production releases are automated and take no more than ten minutes ofmanual effort.
The team produces production-grade code without requiring a manual
testing phase.
All team members are aware of how their professional and technical skills
affect their ability to accomplish the team’s goals and decrease their maintenance costs. They proactively seek to improve those skills.
Investment/Value Tradeoff: Developing team members’ skills to the point offluency takes time and significant effort. Delivering fluency typically appears 3–24
months after Focusing fluency, depending on the amount of coaching the teamreceives and the amount of technical debt in their codebase. Large systems withvery high amounts of technical debt could take even longer.
Training courses can introduce the concepts needed for Delivering fluency,
but students often have difficulty translating course examples back to theirreal-world problems. In many cases, fluency also requires engaging skilled practitioner-coaches to work with the team on their real-world projects. In addition,
productivity will often appear to decrease as the team learns new skills and pays
off technical debt in existing code.

Common Organizational Investments•

Provide time for lowered productivity while team members learn new skills.

•

Integrate non-programming technical disciplines, such as QA and ops, into
the team.

•

Provide training in agile technical practices.

16•Engage skilled practitioner-coaches to mentor the team on theirreal-world work.

Despite the costs, the benefits of Delivering fluency are substantial. Fluent teams
produce very low-defect software and keep technical debt to a minimum, whichmeans they have more time for delivering features. It takes time for pre-existing technical debt to be paid off and benefits to appear, but once they do,
you’ll see faster development times, higher quality software, and dramatically
improved responsiveness.

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Optimizing Teams Lead Their Market
Summary 	���������������Agile’s promise
Benefit 	�������������������Higher-value deliveries and better product decisions.
Investment	�������������Social capital expended on moving business decisions andexpertise into team.
Learn From	�������������Lean Software Development, Lean Startup, Beyond
BudgetingTime	�������������������������+1–5 years

Fluent Optimizing teams understand what their market wants, what yourbusiness needs, and how to meet those needs. Or, as in a startup environment,
they know what they need to learn and how to go about learning it. In contrast
to Delivering teams, Optimizing teams not only have the ability to deliver tomarket, they also know what to deliver to market.

Optimizing: The team understands what their market wants,
what your business needs, and how to meet those needs.

Most agile methods are designed to help teams reach Focusing or Delivering
fluency. To gain fluency in the Optimizing zone, start with a Deliveringfoundation (such as Scrum + XP + DevOps, Kanban + XP + DevOps, or just plain
XP + DevOps) and layer product-centric techniques on top of that foundation.
Lean Startup and Lean Software Development—which, despite the similar names,
are different approaches—are both good places to start. Managers will benefit
from familiarizing themselves with Beyond Budgeting. From there, be prepared
to seek out and experiment with product-focused agile techniques. Useful topics

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include customer discovery, continuous product discovery, design thinking, story
mapping, and adaptive planning.
Fluent Optimizing teams understand their market. They know why they’rebuilding something, not just what they’re building. At a minimum, conversations
with a fluent Optimizing team will demonstrate a clear-headed view of where
their products stand in the market. The team will define its own metrics (or otherindicators of progress), they’ll be able to defend those choices, and they’ll haveplans to improve their market position.
If a team doesn’t have this sort of understanding of their products and market,
or if they produce less value than their opportunity costs, they aren’t yet fluent
at Optimizing. As a corollary, fluent Optimizing teams will coordinate withleadership to cancel or pivot low-value products and initiatives.

Expected Benefits
Transparency
Core Metric

The team describes where their products stand intheir market and how they’ll improve their position.

Reduce Risk

The team coordinates with leadership to cancel orpivot low-value projects early.

Achievement
Increase ROI

The team delivers products that meet businessobjectives and market needs.

Increase ROI

The team learns from market feedback to
anticipate customer needs and create new
business opportunities.

Increase ROI

The team includes broad-based expertise that
promotes optimal cost/value decisions.

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Alignment
Increase Productivity

The team’s broad-based expertise eliminates
handoffs and speeds decision-making.

Increase Productivity

Mutual trust between the team and its organization
leads to rapid, effective negotiation.

One of the biggest challenges in enabling Optimizing fluency is giving the teamtrue control over its product direction. The distinction between an Optimizing
team and a Delivering team is that, within the constraints of its charter, theOptimizing team makes its own decisions about what to fund and where to focus
their efforts. Managers need to delegate this power to teams, which is often adifficult change for organizations.

The distinction between an Optimizing team and a Delivering
team is that the Optimizing team makes its own decisions about
what to fund and where to focus their efforts.

Of course, to own those decisions, teams need to have the insight to make theright decisions… or at least know which experiments will help them discover theright decisions. Gaining that expertise usually involves incorporating non-developers as full-time team members. Common examples include productmanagers, business analysts, and subject matter experts, but can also include staff
from marketing, sales, or customer support.
These sorts of structural changes require high-level permission from the organization. It can be difficult to obtain. Although you may be tempted to hire new
employees to fill the gaps, it’s usually more effective to include employees whoalready understand your business’s unique priorities and constraints.
Developers and QA personnel, particularly those with company seniority, can bea surprisingly useful source of product expertise. As you’re looking for people to20

bring business expertise to your team, don’t overlook the possibility of training
senior technical people in needed business skills. Sales calls and customer visits
are a great way to provide new perspectives.

Zone Proficiencies
Respond to Business Needs
The team describes its plans and progress in terms of business metricoutcomes jointly identified with management.
The team collaborates with internal and external stakeholders, as appropriate, to determine when and if release forecasts have the best returnon investment.

Work as a Trusted Autonomous TeamThe team coordinates with management to understand and refine their role inachieving business strategy.
The team jointly takes responsibility, and accepts accountability, for achieving
the business outcomes they identified with management.
Management gives the team the resources and authority they need to autonomously achieve their business outcomes.
Management ensures all day-to-day skills the team needs to understandtheir market and achieve their business outcomes are embodied in full-timeteam members.

Pursue Product Greatness
The team engages with their customers and markets to understand productneeds and opportunities.

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The team creates hypotheses about business opportunities and conducts
experiments to test them.
The team plans and develops their work in a way that allows them tocompletely change plans, without waste, given less than a month’s notice.
Investment/Value Tradeoff: Giving teams decision-making power andcorresponding expertise challenges existing organizational structures. It can takeseveral years—not because of the skills required, but because managers andorganizational leaders must learn to trust their teams’ use of agile ideas before
making changes that affect their power, control, and familiar ways of working.
Investing in these changes requires an understanding of positive politicalskills and a deep conviction in the value of the payoff. Advocates will need tospend their social capital to make it happen. Managers may need coaching in
supporting high-performance agile environments, where their job changes
from tactical decision-making to defining team direction and orchestrating
cross-organization alignment.

Common Organizational Investments•

Dedicate teams 100% to particular products or markets.

•

Incorporate business and subject matter experts as full-time team members.
Don’t assume one person will be enough.

•Give teams responsibility for their budget, plans, and results; judge them on
results, not adherence to plans.

•

Enable and expect managers to work collaboratively across the organization
to remove obstacles to team performance.

•

Provide coaching to managers about how high-performance, self-organizing
agile teams change the nature of management work.

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Optimizing fluency reduces communication overhead, eliminates bureaucratic handoffs, and enables rapid response to changing business conditions. Its
investments disrupt the status quo, so they aren’t appropriate for every organization. But for those organizations that wish to drive the pace of change in theirmarket, an investment in Optimizing fluency is worth consideration.

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Strengthening Teams Make
Their Organizations Stronger
Summary 	���������������Agile’s future
Benefit 	�������������������Cross-team learning and better organizational decisions.
Investment	�������������Time and risk in developing new approaches to managing
the organization.
Learn From	�������������Organization design and complexity theories
Time 	�����������������������unknown

Where Optimizing teams have the ability to understand and fulfill the needs oftheir market, Strengthening teams also play a larger role in their organization.

Strengthening: The team understands its role in the larger
organizational system and actively works to make that system
more successful.

Strengthening teams contribute to their organization in three ways. First, they
understand how they are part of a larger system. They understand how their
purpose aligns with other teams’ to achieve a greater strategy. They actively work
to make that strategy more successful.
Second, they intentionally spread expertise in the organization. They look foropportunities to contribute their skills to other teams, and they seek opportunities to learn from other teams.
Third, the organization distributes directional decisions amongst teams. Leadersdesign deliberate structures for distilling teams’ collective insights and channelingthem into organizational improvements.

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We see glimmers of Strengthening approaches in organizations around theworld. Companies like Valve Software, Semco, Zappos, and AppFolio are experimenting in this space. We also see cutting-edge techniques such as team
self-selection and Open Space strategy meetings gaining traction in leading agile
teams. That said, this zone is speculative. We think it may be the future of agile,
but we don’t know exactly what it will look like.
Although we aren’t entirely certain of the shape this zone will take, we’veseen enough examples to draw conclusions about the benefits fluent teams
could provide.

Expected Benefits
Transparency
Core Metric

The team describes its work in the context of thebusiness’s other initiatives, allowing products to bebalanced against each other.

Reduce Risk

The team raises, and helps address, cross-organization bottlenecks and issues early.

Achievement
Increase ROI

The team participates in multi-team activities that
optimize the organizational value stream.

Increase Productivity

The team recognizes when they can contribute toanother team’s work, and when that work is morevital, redirects their effort to help them.

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Alignment
Increase Productivity

The team cross-pollinates perspectives, context,
learning, and innovations with other teams andother parts of the organization.

This zone is most appropriate for organizations whose leaders want to be on
the cutting edge of management theory and practice. It requires working at theleading edge of organizational theory and inventing new ways of applying it toagile teams.
If this zone is for you, research complexity theories, such as Cynefin and Human
Systems Dynamics, and new ideas in organization design, including alternative
governance structures such as Open Space Agility, Sociocracy, and Holocracy.
Even if you don’t desire fluency in this zone, some of the techniques being
developed in this space are well worth considering. Just as a fluent Delivering
team will have some proficiency in Optimizing techniques, you can benefit from
Strengthening techniques. Two we’ve directly experienced are team self-selection
and strategic Open Space sessions. Both are well worth piloting.
For most organizations, Strengthening fluency is probably best left as an idea towatch from afar, at least until Optimizing fluency is within reach. However, forsmaller organizations that already emphasize Lean principles and systems thinking,
who are predisposed to distribute decision-making to teams, and who value
visionary approaches and innovative processes, the Strengthening zone offers abold challenge and an intriguing puzzle.

Applying the Agile Fluency Model
As George Box said, “All models are wrong, but some models are useful.” The Agile
Fluency Model is a simplified view of the real world. Despite its simplifications,
we’ve found that it accurately reflects most organizations’ needs. Even when it26

isn’t a perfect match, the benefits, proficiencies, and investments we’ve described
are useful conversation topics.
You can apply the model in three ways: First, use it to see what kind of agile
investments your organization needs to make. Insufficient investment not only
leads to slow progress, it creates lasting cynicism and resentment. We’ve seen thisfailure case too many times. Use the model to make sure your expectations andinvestments are aligned.

Insufficient investment not only leads to slow progress, it creates
lasting cynicism and resentment.

Second, if you aren’t seeing the fluency you expect, the model can help reveal
what’s wrong. Conduct a diagnostic to discover which proficiencies teams arehaving difficulty with, then provide training and support. (The Agile Fluency
Project offers diagnostic options at agilefluency.org.) If multiple teams are having
trouble with the same proficiencies, the problem is probably systemic, so look
into organizational changes.
Finally, the model is a useful way to align conversations about agile approaches.
Discussions about agile ideas can easily get bogged down with arguments about
specific methods, tools, and practices. Instead, use the model to foster discussionof what people want to achieve and how they’re going to make it possible.
The Agile Fluency Model diagram is available for you to adapt for your presentations. You can also share this article to create conversations about teamproficiencies and organizational needs. For derivative works, such as republishing
the lists of proficiencies, contact us for permission.
If you need help applying the model or diagnosing fluency challenges, the Agile
Fluency Project has contacts and additional resources. Visit agilefluency.org
for more.

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Conclusion
In our work with agile teams and organizations, we’ve seen that teams follow atypical progression in their understanding of agile approaches and the benefits
their organization receives. We’ve grouped this progression into four zones offluency. Each zone is characterized by unique benefits and distinct challenges
to adoption.
•

The first zone, Focusing, requires a team to learn to work together to focus
on creating business value rather than merely finishing technical tasks. In
return, the organization gains greater insight into the team’s work and has
more opportunities to influence that work in positive directions. This zonereflects agile fundamentals.

•

The second zone, Delivering, requires a team to invest in learning a wide arrayof software development skills. This zone reflects agile sustainability. The skills
don’t come easily, but with time and adequate organizational support, theteam gains the ability to create and ship low-defect software as frequently as
the market will accept it, which gives the organization new opportunities forachieving return on their software development investment.

•

The third zone, Optimizing, represents the promise of agile: a team thatdances and turns in response to changing market conditions, and collectively
takes responsibility for building the best product your investment can buy.
Achieving fluency in this zone means business experts must join the team as
full-time contributors, and while this change to organizational structure canbe challenging, it pays off in the team’s improved ability to serve your business.

•

The fourth zone, Strengthening, represents agile’s future. Strengthening
teams collaborate with other teams to improve their whole organization. Reaching this zone requires innovative thinking and a willingness
to experiment.

All of these zones provide benefits, and every one is the right zone for someteams. Use the model to inspire conversations about which zones yourorganization wishes to support. Once you’ve chosen your zones, consider

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the investments needed to reach fluency and commit fully to making
those investments.
Teams need time to develop their proficiencies. They’ll develop in fits andstarts, moving forward and backwards, and reaching plateaus. Practice as many
proficiencies as you can from the beginning. The fluency zones represent natural
plateaus where you’ll see distinct benefits and challenges to overcome.
Be aware that organizational context can prevent fluency. Keep an eye out forsystemic issues impacting multiple teams in the same way. This is usually a signthat an organizational change needs to be made.
We’ve seen teams go through these fluency zones time and time again. By
sharing our experiences with you, we hope that you’ll gain greater insights into
the possibilities of agile approaches, and greater understanding of the challenges
they pose. May you and your teams achieve ever greater fluency, and evergreater success.

29This book is published by the Agile Fluency Project LLC.
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Learn more and register.
Increase your influence as a trusted advisor.
Become a licensed facilitator.
The Agile Fluency Project also sponsors other workshops and events.
Learn more and register.

30

Acknowledgements
We want to acknowledge the contributions of so many people. The list to
thank includes: reviewers who read our drafts; groups who listened to ourpresentations; colleagues who challenged our thinking; teams who shared theirexperiences; and clients who recognized the applicability and utility of our ideas.
All offered support and encouragement as we developed the model and then thearticle. They are many. Mentioning them individually would need another ebook
on its own. You know who you are.
We feel particularly indebted to Martin Fowler. He showed his confidence in ourwork by publishing the original article. He helped to spread the word in many
ways. After a few years, he prevailed on us to record what we had learned. This
became a revised, updated version published in 2018. He nudged us in just theright way.
We also owe endless gratitude to Adam Light. Adam helped us turn an article
and a pile of printouts into a new startup business. He stuck with us long after it
stopped making sense.
We appreciate the Agile coaches and consultants everywhere who inspired
us. They have used our work to pave the path of the Agile Fluency Suite,then helped businesses and teams along the journey toward agile softwaredevelopment done well. This ebook edition is dedicated to them andtheir future peers.
Thank you,
Diana and James

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About the Authors
The Agile Fluency Project helps coaches, consultants, and change agents put theinsights of the Agile Fluency™ Model into practice. We envision a world where
Agile is done well in every organization, where all teams practice effectively tosustain continuous improvement, and where each team performs at a level offluent proficiency that is fit to purpose.

Our Story
James Shore and Diana Larsen fashioned the Agile Fluency Model from theirpersonal observations and deep practical experience. They described the modelin collaboration with other thought leaders in the agile community. As an earlysupporter of the Model, Martin Fowler published their seminal article in 2012.
Following a series of collaborations using the Agile Fluency Model to serve
consulting clients, James and Diana co-founded the Agile Fluency Project with
Adam Light in 2014.

James Shore
James Shore teaches, writes, and consults on
Agile development processes. He led his first Agile
team in 1999 and was an early adopter of Extreme
Programming in 2000. Today, he focuses on helping
people understand how the technical, business,and social aspects of Agile fit together to create
successful software.
James is a recipient of the Agile Alliance’s Gordon Pask Award for Contributions
to Agile Practice and co-author of The Art of Agile Development. InfoQ has
named him as one of the “most influential people in Agile.” He writes about
software development on his “Art of Agile” blog and hosts the screencast series“Let’s Code: Test-Driven JavaScript.”32

Diana Larsen
Diana Larsen is the author of Agile Retrospectives:
Making Good Teams Great, Liftoff: Start andSustain Successful Agile Teams, and Five Rules for
Accelerated Learning. For more than 20 years she
has worked with leaders to design work systems,
improve project performance, and support
leadership and enterprise agility.
An active speaker and contributor to her professional community, Diana hascontributed in leadership roles to the Agile Alliance, the Organization Design
Forum, and the Agile Open Initiative.

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