Rediscovering the First Line of the Agile Manifesto: Humility, Experimentation, and Empiricism
The first line of the Agile ManifestoââWe are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do itââcaptures the humility and curiosity of its authors, yet it is often overlooked. Agile was born as a mindset of exploration, not a recipe of fixed practices. Today, many organizations confuse âgood practicesâ with âbest practices,â clinging to frameworks like Scrum, SAFe, or the âSpotify modelâ instead of running experiments to discover better ways of working. Complex problems such as delivering customer value or organizing teams require empiricism: forming hypotheses, running experiments, reflecting, and deciding what to do next. Two real-world stories illustrate thisâone where a team paused Scrum to test Kanban and rediscovered the power of Sprint Goals, and another where a pharmaceutical department experimented with temporary small teams and learned that size and structure matter. Organizations thrive when they embrace curiosity, empiricism, and continuous experimentation.