The Only Three Things You Must Do To Improve Agility - Mike Cohn

Oct 22, 2025

Discover the three pivotal steps to enhance agility within teams. Start by aligning practices with agile principles and fostering collaboration among cross-functional teams. Persuade management to value team input on deadlines to promote true agility. Explore impactful changes like shortening sprints and introducing innovative techniques like story mapping. Embrace small improvements that can lead to significant results, transforming the impossible into possible gains. Get ready to unlock the potential of your team!

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ADVICE

Prioritize Fixing What Blocks Agility

Start by fixing practices that violate agile principles to enable real agility.
Change team structure, mindset on iteration, and management deadline behaviors first.

ANECDOTE

Transparency Prevents Requests For The Impossible

Lee Henson shares a candid reaction about leaders needing to "see the light" regarding agile practices.
He emphasizes transparency with leadership to avoid creating a precedent of demanding the impossible.

ADVICE

Choose Small Wins That Unlock Bigger Gains

After removing blockers, pursue improvements that are now possible like shorter iterations and reduced handoffs.
Make small chosen changes rather than trying to improve everything at once.

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The Only Three Things You Must Do To Improve Agility - Mike Cohn

Distilled to its essence, it’s quite simple to be a Scrum Master, agile coach, or anyone seeking to improve team or organizational agility. There are only three things you need to do and Saint Francis laid them out succinctly over 800 years ago:

To improve agility, we have to start with what’s necessary. Change practices that go against agile principles. If programmers and testers aren’t part of a single multidisciplinary team, that needs to change.
If the team doesn’t see the benefits of iterative and incremental work, you need to talk to them about that.
Similarly, if management is imposing deadlines without regard to the team’s opinion, you’ll need to help them see the light.

Having made changes necessary to enable agility, look next at what’s possible. There will be many more options to choose from now, such as:

Shortening iterations
Improving teamwork
Reducing handoffs by overlapping work
Introducing new practices such as story mapping or job stories

“Start by doing what’s necessary, then what’s possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”
Doing What’s NecessaryThen Do What’s Possible
Don’t try to improve too many things at once and choose wisely. Initially there will be opportunities for small changes to create outsize improvements.
Finally, Do the Impossible
At this point, it’s time to do the impossible . . . except that now very little is impossible.
Having iteratively and incrementally improved, most teams feel powerful enough to take on challenges and changes that would have seemed impossible before.
What still seem impossible are changes outside the team. Managers may still impose deadlines. Stakeholders may foist too-frequent changes because they’ve heard agile teams “embrace change.”
Fixing these outside-the-team behaviors isn’t impossible, but it is harder and often takes time. Fortunately a team that has done the necessary and then the possible will be ready to do the impossible.

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