So why did integral agile come to be? 

Agile for me has always been about enabling what lean manufacturing people call ‘single-piece flow of ideas’, sourced by actual users and customers, filtered through a purpose-aligned organization that prioritizes based on shared goals, then executed by talented software engineers working together with the knowledge that no one individual understands enough to get the job done. 

It takes transparency and teamwork to achieve a truly great result. Agile has been about creating that culture and also about pulling in the leadership that's needed to guide the enterprise towards its goals; removing the barriers that prevent the people who best understand the work from creating breakout success.

The early successes of Agile at the team level created a desire to bring these results to a higher scale.  The easiest, most visible thing available to scale was the process.

Process-minded people felt: If only we can make the process that works for teams consistent and standardized, incorporating enterprise needs, then we would get the same results organization-wide. This all looked on paper, so certifications and frameworks and career paths were created to facilitate the widespread adoption of the new way of working with the promise of producing greater results at scale.

Unfortunately, this has not happened, as just about any Agile coach who's been on the ground in a large organization can attest to. This is because it is not just about the Agile process and practices. These are great, really revolutionary, but they require something more to animate the results, and those who've taken the classes and paid the dues to maintain certification largely have no clear idea how to bring about the magic, because this is not something that can be taught, it is something that is learned through experience. Just as great leaders are rare, so are Agile coaches, because effective coaching and effective leadership have a lot in common.

In 2018, a group of such coaches got together in New York City (it wasn’t as glamorous as Snowbird, Utah, sorry Martin Fowler ) and reflected on the state of the industry and what could be done to bring greater visibility to the art of achieving true agility at scale. We universally agreed that the last thing we needed was another Agile Framework! Rather, we saw that while there is wisdom in each of the popular Agile Frameworks (Scaled Scrum, Disciplined Agile, SAFe, LeSS and others), and indeed a large degree of overlapping principles, there is no documented, systematic, effective method for using these process frameworks to transform regular organizations into the kind of Agile powerhouses envisioned by the leadership of organizations committed to Agile transformation.

Instead, achieving this large-scale result is left to a handful of loosely organized, often competing, Agile coaches who have come up the hard way and accumulated the expertise, leadership skills, and techniques needed to convince people at various levels that it is safe to let go of the things that have gotten them to where they are, in order to try things that will help them discover a new level of cooperation, give and take, vulnerability and trust that they have never before experienced but which comprise the culture that is the backbone of every successful Agile team and organization.

The few courageous coaches are widely scattered, do not have a platform or an approach to organize on, and largely have to work around the other coaches produced by the certification mills that are hired, with good intentions, by the industry managers who have no other basis on which to evaluate their effectiveness.

The 8 people gathered in this rented room in New York City decided to change that. Rather than creating a new Framework to compete with the others, we decided to capture an Approach to applying any or all of the existing frameworks to drive organizational transformation, because that is where the magic happens. The Integral Agile Approach would soon grow to become a platform capable of attracting and focusing the energies of those isolated Agile Coaches who can deliver outsized results, who are frustrated with the status quo. A platform that can make them visible and coordinate their efforts; placing them exclusively in the service of clients who truly want the benefits, who've seen the Agile movie play out at the team level, who want those benefits at scale, and, most importantly, who are willing to reshape their organization in order to achieve them.

They want world class, stellar organizations composed of energetic people responding to change guided by leadership working together. Not all enterprises want that. At least not all leaders understand that they want that.

Agile has become a buzzword; a box to check, something that may deliver value, unspecified. It's not well understood how it does that. We understand how Agile can create impact at scale. And we have hammered together an approach, built by the people who've been able to do this over and over again, in enterprise after enterprise to guide and focus the kind of coaches who can make a difference and to give them greater reach.

In mid 2015, I worked with a team of about 20 coaches at a Fortune 100 company. It was my first time being part of an Agile Transformation team this size. The team was led by Faye [an amazing coach] who both empowered and enabled us to deliver some truly transformational results - things the enterprise had never seen before. 

However, not all of the coaches were able to generate those transformational results. Some of the coaches were what I called “theory” coaches. These would preach the theory of Agile to teams or leaders and then blame them when they could not apply that theory in a meaningful way. Next were the “results” coaches, these coaches knew exactly what to do to get the desired result. They often positioned themselves as the smartest person in the room and rather than guide the teams, they would …. Then there were the “people” coaches. These focused on communication, transparency and morale. The people they worked with were generally happier, but these coaches were not good at delivering impactful business results. 

“Whole picture” coaches were the few who understood that people, results, frameworks, tools and theory all need to be addressed in order to be successful. We naturally gravitated towards each other as we shared the tips, hacks, and tricks we used to get the results we needed. In doing so we discovered a lot of similarities in our approaches. We were each systemic thinkers who partnered with and embedded ourselves into teams and together we were making a difference.

Eventually the corporation did what corporations do and they changed direction and brought in new management with no ground level understanding of what was and was not working. [Faye] [The team leader] took a position elsewhere and the company eventually found a replacement.

I shared this with my business partner, David Hersey, and two other senior coaches, Ben Williams, and Jason Wrube. Our experiences were unsurprisingly similar, and we had a frank discussion about the current state of the industry. 

We agreed that Agile works very well at the team level, but something was getting lost when scaling those results to multiple teams and even further to entire organizations. 

We looked at our shared experience over the years with existing scaling frameworks such as SAFe (too heavy), LeSS (too light), and agreed there was something missing. 

While existing solutions had some good ideas, the techniques and hacks and tools that we needed in order to get truly transformative results in the field were not spoken about by ANY of them.

The industry had not yet figured out what does and does not make Agile successful at scale.

Too much weight was given to meaningless certificates and to processes.

A certification represents 2-4 days spent in a room, sometimes with a regurgitation test to take after. When folks with a 2 year degree have trouble finding a job, why does the industry place so much value on material learned in a few days?

The goal of becoming Agile should NOT be becoming Agile!

We needed a way to differentiate ourselves in a market where everyone claims to get better and different results

Clients who hire a coach have no idea what they’re getting and often do not realize a coach is ineffective for 6-12 months

Leaders and teams who experience an ineffectual coach believe that Agile does not work, not that the coach did not know how to properly use Agile

They cost 250,000+ per year! Clients are not getting what they’re paying for.

When I was in college I was introduced to Integral Theory by my mother. The creator of Integral Theory, Ken Wilber, refers to it as a “theory of everything” explaining that:

“This map uses all the known systems and models of human growth—from the ancient shamans and sages to today’s breakthroughs in cognitive science—and distills their major components into 5 simple factors, factors that are the essential elements or keys to unlocking and facilitating human evolution.”

Wilber suggests that taking an Integral perspective, no matter the subject matter or industry, will lead to “more complete” and superior results. 

I recognized that the quality that differentiated the coaches I collaborated with was what Wilber describes as the “Integral” manner in which they approach Agile Transformation.

They considered the WHOLE system, and the ripple effects of every action

They understood that people were at least as as important as process, and that we’ve achieved anything if we are not delivering business results

They could see that even though Agile spoke about things like relationships and culture, Agile implementations tended to be framework driven -- without taking human complexities into account

January 2019, nine of us met. We wanted to create something to tie us together; we needed a brand. I spent the first morning showing them how much the basic elements of Integral Theory complimented the unique perspectives we brought to the field, with the idea of using Integral Theory, not only as a brand, but as a set of tools we could build on. We spent the remaining two days working on the creation of an approach to scaling agile that was based on Integral Theory. We were clear that:

We did not want to create yet another framework so we called this “The Integral Agile Approach” to reflect the fact that it could stand on its own or be used alongside any framework (for example; an Integral approach to using SAFe).

Money was a secondary concern, our mission was to make the world a better place to work, and if we were successful in this then we were confident the venture would be sustainable

Though we were adding Integral elements to existing practices, we wanted to focus our energies on areas that were not being addressed currently by Agile

We committed to only grow as quickly as it was possible to grow while maintaining the same level of quality, and to never compromise our results, or bring anyone in who did not share our vision, just to make money

We worked to build this for several months but life did what life often does and our  momentum slowed down to a crawl. 

Would this dream ever become a reality? Could I allow this to fizzle out, or was this something I HAD to bring this into the world?

As I pondered these questions I attended a five day workshop by David Deida. The more I explored these issues, the more it felt like I would not be able to sleep at night if I did not try everything in my power to make this happen. 

On the fourth day we did an exercise designed to help us find our deepest purpose. After describing my situation, some guy asked me the name of my company.

I told him, “Integral Agile.”

“What? You’re joking,” he said.

“... No, we use Integral Theory to get better Agile results. Why?”

“The name of my company is Integralis! We don’t use Agile, but we use Integral Theory to progress our clients into their next stage of development and growth.”

“Holy shit, we have GOT to talk!”

After the workshop, we ended up on the four hour drive to the airport together. We explored ways that we could help each other. We soon got our teams together and on that call it was clear that our vision of what we wanted to bring to the world was completely aligned. We made plans for key Integralis folks to come from Argentina to New York for a few days in March.

March of 2020… COVID happened instead.

But all was not lost. In fact, (virtually) the addition of the folks at Integralis brought exactly the energy we needed to complete an MVP of the Integral Agile Approach, which we were able to bring to our first client later in 2020. 

I took a break from consulting for all of 2021 to take what we created from an MVP into a full offering. Today we are actively using our Approach to solve real world problems in organizations across different industries.

Agile for me has always been about enabling what lean manufacturing people call single-piece flow of ideas sourced by actual users and customers filtered through a purpose-aligned organization that prioritizes based on shared goals, then executed by talented software engineers working together with the knowledge that no one individual understands enough to get the job done.

It takes transparency and teamwork to achieve a truly great result, and Agile has been about creating that culture and also pulling in the leadership that's needed to guide the enterprise towards its goals and remove the barriers that prevent the people who best understand the work from creating breakout success.

Unfortunately, the early successes of Agile at the team level created a desire to bring these results to higher scale. And the easiest, most visible thing available to scale was the process. And process people felt that if only we can make the process that works for teams consistent and standardized, incorporate enterprise needs, then we would get the same results organization-wide. It looked on paper, so certifications and frameworks and career paths were created were created to facilitate the widespread adoption of the new way of working with the promise of producing greater results at scale.

Unfortunately, this has not happened, as just about any Agile coach who's been on the ground in a large organization can attest to. This is because it is not just about the Agile process and practices. These are great, really revolutionary, but they require something more to animate the results, and those who've taken the classes and paid the dues to maintain certification largely have really no idea how to bring about the magic, because it is not something that is taught, it is something that is learned through experience. Just as great leaders are rare, so are Agile coaches, because effective coaching and effective leadership have a lot in common.

In 2018, a group of such coaches got together in New York City (it wasn’t as glamorous as Snowbird, Utah, sorry Martin Fowler ) and reflected on the state of the industry, and what could be done to bring greater visibility to the art of achieving true agility at scale. We universally agreed that the last thing we need is another Agile Framework! Rather, we saw that while there is wisdom in each of the popular Agile Frameworks (Scaled Scrum, Disciplined Agile, SAFe, LeSS and others), and indeed a large degree of overlapping principles, there is no documented, systematic, effective method for using these process frameworks to transform regular organizations into the kind of Agile powerhouses envisioned in my opening paragraph.

Instead, achieving this large-scale result is left to a handful of loosely organized, often competing, Agile coaches who have come up the hard way and accumulated the expertise, leadership skills, and techniques to convince people at various levels that it is safe to let go of the things that have gotten them to where they are, in order to try things that will help them discover a new level of cooperation, give and take, vulnerability and trust that they have never before experienced but which comprise the culture that is the backbone of every successful Agile team and organization.

These people are widely scattered, do not have a platform or an approach to organize on, and largely have to work around the coaches produced by the certification mills that are hired, with good intentions, by the industry managers who have no other basis on which to evaluate their effectiveness.

The 8 people gathered in this rented room in New York City decided to change that. Rather than creating a new Framework to compete with the others, we decided to capture an Approach to applying any or all of the existing frameworks to drive organizational transformation, because that is where the magic happens. The Integral Agile Approach would soon grow to become a platform capable of attracting and focusing the energies of those isolated Agile Coaches who can deliver outsized results, who are frustrated with the status quo. A platform that can make them visible, and coordinate their efforts, placing them exclusively in the service of clients who truly want the benefits, who've seen the Agile movie play out at the team level and want those benefits at scale, and most importantly, are willing to reshape their organization to achieve them.

They want world class, stellar organizations composed of energetic people responding to change guided by leadership working together. Not all enterprises want that. At least not all leaders understand that they want that. Agile has become a buzzword; a box to check, something that may deliver value unspecified. It's not well understood how it does that. We understand how it does that. And we have hammered together an approach built by the people who've been able to do this over and over again, in enterprise after enterprise to guide and focus the kind of coaches who can make a difference and to give them greater reach.

Agile for me has always been about enabling what lean manufacturing people call single-piece flow of ideas sourced by actual users and customers filtered through a purpose-aligned organization that prioritizes based on shared goals, then executed by talented software engineers working together with the knowledge that no one individual understands enough to get the job done.

It takes transparency and teamwork to achieve a truly great result, and Agile has been about creating that culture and also pulling in the leadership that's needed to guide the enterprise towards its goals and remove the barriers that prevent the people who best understand the work from creating breakout success.

Unfortunately, the early successes of Agile at the team level created a desire to bring these results to higher scale. And the easiest, most visible thing available to scale was the process. And process people felt that if only we can make the process that works for teams consistent and standardized, incorporate enterprise needs, then we would get the same results organization-wide. It looked on paper, so certifications and frameworks and career paths were created were created to facilitate the widespread adoption of the new way of working with the promise of producing greater results at scale.

Unfortunately, this has not happened, as just about any Agile coach who's been on the ground in a large organization can attest to. This is because it is not just about the Agile process and practices. These are great, really revolutionary, but they require something more to animate the results, and those who've taken the classes and paid the dues to maintain certification largely have really no idea how to bring about the magic, because it is not something that is taught, it is something that is learned through experience. Just as great leaders are rare, so are Agile coaches, because effective coaching and effective leadership have a lot in common.

In 2018, a group of such coaches got together in New York City (it wasn’t as glamorous as Snowbird, Utah, sorry Martin Fowler ) and reflected on the state of the industry, and what could be done to bring greater visibility to the art of achieving true agility at scale. We universally agreed that the last thing we need is another Agile Framework! Rather, we saw that while there is wisdom in each of the popular Agile Frameworks (Scaled Scrum, Disciplined Agile, SAFe, LeSS and others), and indeed a large degree of overlapping principles, there is no documented, systematic, effective method for using these process frameworks to transform regular organizations into the kind of Agile powerhouses envisioned in my opening paragraph.

Instead, achieving this large-scale result is left to a handful of loosely organized, often competing, Agile coaches who have come up the hard way and accumulated the expertise, leadership skills, and techniques to convince people at various levels that it is safe to let go of the things that have gotten them to where they are, in order to try things that will help them discover a new level of cooperation, give and take, vulnerability and trust that they have never before experienced but which comprise the culture that is the backbone of every successful Agile team and organization.

These people are widely scattered, do not have a platform or an approach to organize on, and largely have to work around the coaches produced by the certification mills that are hired, with good intentions, by the industry managers who have no other basis on which to evaluate their effectiveness.

The 8 people gathered in this rented room in New York City decided to change that. Rather than creating a new Framework to compete with the others, we decided to capture an Approach to applying any or all of the existing frameworks to drive organizational transformation, because that is where the magic happens. The Integral Agile Approach would soon grow to become a platform capable of attracting and focusing the energies of those isolated Agile Coaches who can deliver outsized results, who are frustrated with the status quo. A platform that can make them visible, and coordinate their efforts, placing them exclusively in the service of clients who truly want the benefits, who've seen the Agile movie play out at the team level and want those benefits at scale, and most importantly, are willing to reshape their organization to achieve them.

They want world class, stellar organizations composed of energetic people responding to change guided by leadership working together. Not all enterprises want that. At least not all leaders understand that they want that. Agile has become a buzzword; a box to check, something that may deliver value unspecified. It's not well understood how it does that. We understand how it does that. And we have hammered together an approach built by the people who've been able to do this over and over again, in enterprise after enterprise to guide and focus the kind of coaches who can make a difference and to give them greater reach.

I first worked with David a number of years back. Although we didn’t work directly on a daily basis there was a mutual respect for each other’s talents when our paths did cross. After a while, he suggested that I meet a couple of associates of his who had a similar outlook on our profession. One of those associates, Leor became a lynch pin to our efforts over the past X years.

It was however not for several years before I was ‘fully in’. It’s not to say that I needed to be convinced, it was just that there didn’t seem to be anything to be into.

It actually fully crystallized when I started to see the energy that we had as a team and the fact that a group of people was forming and talking about a set of righteous behaviors and vision that aligned with my outlook.

Since that point, people have come and gone. Some people briefly enter our world and depart for their own reasons, others wait on the sidelines eagerly anticipating the crystallization of our efforts to something that they can be ‘fully into’.

It's in the past few years with the introduction of Integralis and the sustained efforts from a few core people that have gotten us to this point. What point is that? I am not sure where the future will take us but it feels like we are on the precipice of something great. It’s going to be one hell of a ride.

Agile for me has always been about enabling what lean manufacturing people call single-piece flow of ideas sourced by actual users and customers filtered through a purpose-aligned organization that prioritizes based on shared goals, then executed by talented software engineers working together with the knowledge that no one individual understands enough to get the job done.

It takes transparency and teamwork to achieve a truly great result, and Agile has been about creating that culture and also pulling in the leadership that's needed to guide the enterprise towards its goals and remove the barriers that prevent the people who best understand the work from creating breakout success.

Unfortunately, the early successes of Agile at the team level created a desire to bring these results to higher scale. And the easiest, most visible thing available to scale was the process. And process people felt that if only we can make the process that works for teams consistent and standardized, incorporate enterprise needs, then we would get the same results organization-wide. It looked on paper, so certifications and frameworks and career paths were created were created to facilitate the widespread adoption of the new way of working with the promise of producing greater results at scale.

Unfortunately, this has not happened, as just about any Agile coach who's been on the ground in a large organization can attest to. This is because it is not just about the Agile process and practices. These are great, really revolutionary, but they require something more to animate the results, and those who've taken the classes and paid the dues to maintain certification largely have really no idea how to bring about the magic, because it is not something that is taught, it is something that is learned through experience. Just as great leaders are rare, so are Agile coaches, because effective coaching and effective leadership have a lot in common.

In 2018, a group of such coaches got together in New York City (it wasn’t as glamorous as Snowbird, Utah, sorry Martin Fowler ) and reflected on the state of the industry, and what could be done to bring greater visibility to the art of achieving true agility at scale. We universally agreed that the last thing we need is another Agile Framework! Rather, we saw that while there is wisdom in each of the popular Agile Frameworks (Scaled Scrum, Disciplined Agile, SAFe, LeSS and others), and indeed a large degree of overlapping principles, there is no documented, systematic, effective method for using these process frameworks to transform regular organizations into the kind of Agile powerhouses envisioned in my opening paragraph.

Instead, achieving this large-scale result is left to a handful of loosely organized, often competing, Agile coaches who have come up the hard way and accumulated the expertise, leadership skills, and techniques to convince people at various levels that it is safe to let go of the things that have gotten them to where they are, in order to try things that will help them discover a new level of cooperation, give and take, vulnerability and trust that they have never before experienced but which comprise the culture that is the backbone of every successful Agile team and organization.

These people are widely scattered, do not have a platform or an approach to organize on, and largely have to work around the coaches produced by the certification mills that are hired, with good intentions, by the industry managers who have no other basis on which to evaluate their effectiveness.

The 8 people gathered in this rented room in New York City decided to change that. Rather than creating a new Framework to compete with the others, we decided to capture an Approach to applying any or all of the existing frameworks to drive organizational transformation, because that is where the magic happens. The Integral Agile Approach would soon grow to become a platform capable of attracting and focusing the energies of those isolated Agile Coaches who can deliver outsized results, who are frustrated with the status quo. A platform that can make them visible, and coordinate their efforts, placing them exclusively in the service of clients who truly want the benefits, who've seen the Agile movie play out at the team level and want those benefits at scale, and most importantly, are willing to reshape their organization to achieve them.

They want world class, stellar organizations composed of energetic people responding to change guided by leadership working together. Not all enterprises want that. At least not all leaders understand that they want that. Agile has become a buzzword; a box to check, something that may deliver value unspecified. It's not well understood how it does that. We understand how it does that. And we have hammered together an approach built by the people who've been able to do this over and over again, in enterprise after enterprise to guide and focus the kind of coaches who can make a difference and to give them greater reach.

It was 2018. I was tired, jaded, and far too early in my professional life to be as demoralized as I was.

I had studied journalism in College and had grandiose plans to make a difference in the world. I had hopes to cover people and their stories that wouldn’t otherwise have a voice or a platform, but since leaving school life took me on a winding road with a multitude of lessons along the way- one of which would be the realization that a career in journalism didn’t necessarily change any lives— and neither did any of the other professions I had chased over the years– television show production, public relations, and even a short stint in the medical administration field, to name a few.

While those experiences have been invaluable and are still contributing factors to my successes and wins today, those industries and their environments were incredibly toxic. Coworkers I had in each of these industries worked off of fear-based motivation, never knowing if leaving work early for a sick kid or running to a doctor appointment midday would be the cause for a write-up, or worse, a case against you later for a pink slip (fired), or as one employer put it “dismissal from employment due to irreconcilable differences.” I was even once told by my manager that I had to be “meaner” to my direct reports, and said that my managing style was “too soft.” I learned very quickly we had very different ideas of managing… irreconcilably.

It was around this time I started feeling the demoralized part of my journey. I learned a lot about myself during this period: I didn’t want to talk AT people, I wanted to talk WITH people. I didn’t want my success to hinge only on my personal productivity, I wanted to be part of a team. And last but certainly not least, I absolutely didn’t want to be mean to anyone, quite the opposite. I found that I desperately wanted to empower others in a way that allowed them to work with their strengths and passions, rather than punishing them for areas of weakness or disinterest.

So, I started playing with the idea of leaving yet another industry in hopes to find a place in the world where I didn’t have to leave so much of myself at the door as soon as I walked into an office.

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed from the list professions above, but all of these positions I held previously existed within industries with heavy female influence. I had essentially- unknowingly- pigeonholed myself into jobs that hired people who, well, looked a lot like me which is a huge reason why I had never in my life, in no way, shape or form, ever considered or even thought it was within the realm of possibility to work in a field even remotely related to technology. Ever. It just never occurred to me. Another big reason technology always seemed off the table was simply because I generally excel in areas of communication and abilities akin to soft skills and, for lack of a better word, fail miserably in any and all areas relating to anything technical.

So here I was…. A female from female-dominated work environments with a bunch of soft skills who kept running into people who told me to be, well, essentially less me.

Then I met Leor. And here is how a nearly year-long conversation went:

Leor: You’d be great at this thing I do with technology departments and a thing called Agile.

Me: But I’m a people person, I like helping people, I like to be part of a group, I enjoy being on a team, my background has nothing to do with tech!”

Leor: “Exactly.”

Me: “No. I’ll never be able to do it.”

Then I got my first Agile gig. And this is how the conversation shifted:

Me: I’m helping people! I’m part of a team! Everything I have ever done was leading me to this very point in time! I’m even encouraged to be nice to people! I’m so happy!

Leor: “....” (Leor trying not to say I told you so)

Me: “Thank you for changing my life” (Alanna knowing he is thinking I told you so)

I realize this was supposed to be about how IA came to be, and in so many ways, it is. While this is just my version of the story, it’s actually exactly how we all got here because we’re with IA for the same reason, the reason I entered the workforce all those years ago with a mission I’d unknowingly be chasing for years up until now:

To make the world a better place, even if it’s just the immediate world around you.

From the moment I joined calls with IA all those years ago, I was having conversations with men and women with far more experience than I had ever had, yet they valued my contribution. I wasn’t just given a seat at the table, I was invited for my perspective and I was encouraged to speak up.

First, I joined IA as a pseudo spectator while I was still working at a PR company until I officially decided to jump ship— or should I say, they threw me overboard. If I had to boil down the main reason? I was too nice. Irreconcilably.

And while I was in between jobs, I meditated on whether or not I was actually going to try out this Agile career path thing for real.

Friends and family who have known me for years are still utterly confused and befuddled by this idea of me switching to a career in anything tech-related, and rightfully so. I had my own doubts and serious reservations about taking on an entirely new industry (let alone in tech with a bunch of dudes!), but there was a moment when my own self-doubt subsided long enough for me to know with all of my being that this was the right choice: ((date of 1st NYC)). ((Maybe I’ll expand but my memory sucks and might need to pull from someone else’s :) ))

After leaving the world of PR, I eventually made the terrifying yet exciting leap of faith to switch careers (yet again), but this time it was an entirely new and different arena with new words, acronyms, practices (and did I mention more people who don’t look like me…AKA men).

While I should have felt like I was drowning in a sea of the unfamiliar, it felt more like the butterflies in your stomach as a plane begins to take flight into the air. I was consistently supported by the IA team from early morning hours until late at night with all of my Agile novice questions. I had an answer for every question, and a calm reassurance for my every anxiety. 
For the first time in my life, I feel like I am actually making the big difference I always wanted to create. Instead of becoming a journalist and telling the stories about people, I get to be part of their story, even if it’s just starting my standup with “what did everyone do this weekend?”, “how’s your little one doing?”, “welcome back from your trip, have any photos to share?!” or simply “happy Monday” because making a big difference doesn’t have to seem all that big.

So, going back to how IA came to be? We all just wanted to make the world a better place. And for me? I wanted to also be happy while doing it. And finally, I am.

Agile for me has always been about enabling what lean manufacturing people call single-piece flow of ideas sourced by actual users and customers filtered through a purpose-aligned organization that prioritizes based on shared goals, then executed by talented software engineers working together with the knowledge that no one individual understands enough to get the job done.

It takes transparency and teamwork to achieve a truly great result, and Agile has been about creating that culture and also pulling in the leadership that's needed to guide the enterprise towards its goals and remove the barriers that prevent the people who best understand the work from creating breakout success.

Unfortunately, the early successes of Agile at the team level created a desire to bring these results to higher scale. And the easiest, most visible thing available to scale was the process. And process people felt that if only we can make the process that works for teams consistent and standardized, incorporate enterprise needs, then we would get the same results organization-wide. It looked on paper, so certifications and frameworks and career paths were created were created to facilitate the widespread adoption of the new way of working with the promise of producing greater results at scale.

Unfortunately, this has not happened, as just about any Agile coach who's been on the ground in a large organization can attest to. This is because it is not just about the Agile process and practices. These are great, really revolutionary, but they require something more to animate the results, and those who've taken the classes and paid the dues to maintain certification largely have really no idea how to bring about the magic, because it is not something that is taught, it is something that is learned through experience. Just as great leaders are rare, so are Agile coaches, because effective coaching and effective leadership have a lot in common.

In 2018, a group of such coaches got together in New York City (it wasn’t as glamorous as Snowbird, Utah, sorry Martin Fowler ) and reflected on the state of the industry, and what could be done to bring greater visibility to the art of achieving true agility at scale. We universally agreed that the last thing we need is another Agile Framework! Rather, we saw that while there is wisdom in each of the popular Agile Frameworks (Scaled Scrum, Disciplined Agile, SAFe, LeSS and others), and indeed a large degree of overlapping principles, there is no documented, systematic, effective method for using these process frameworks to transform regular organizations into the kind of Agile powerhouses envisioned in my opening paragraph.

Instead, achieving this large-scale result is left to a handful of loosely organized, often competing, Agile coaches who have come up the hard way and accumulated the expertise, leadership skills, and techniques to convince people at various levels that it is safe to let go of the things that have gotten them to where they are, in order to try things that will help them discover a new level of cooperation, give and take, vulnerability and trust that they have never before experienced but which comprise the culture that is the backbone of every successful Agile team and organization.

These people are widely scattered, do not have a platform or an approach to organize on, and largely have to work around the coaches produced by the certification mills that are hired, with good intentions, by the industry managers who have no other basis on which to evaluate their effectiveness.

The 8 people gathered in this rented room in New York City decided to change that. Rather than creating a new Framework to compete with the others, we decided to capture an Approach to applying any or all of the existing frameworks to drive organizational transformation, because that is where the magic happens. The Integral Agile Approach would soon grow to become a platform capable of attracting and focusing the energies of those isolated Agile Coaches who can deliver outsized results, who are frustrated with the status quo. A platform that can make them visible, and coordinate their efforts, placing them exclusively in the service of clients who truly want the benefits, who've seen the Agile movie play out at the team level and want those benefits at scale, and most importantly, are willing to reshape their organization to achieve them.

They want world class, stellar organizations composed of energetic people responding to change guided by leadership working together. Not all enterprises want that. At least not all leaders understand that they want that. Agile has become a buzzword; a box to check, something that may deliver value unspecified. It's not well understood how it does that. We understand how it does that. And we have hammered together an approach built by the people who've been able to do this over and over again, in enterprise after enterprise to guide and focus the kind of coaches who can make a difference and to give them greater reach.

When Leor and I first met at a David Deida event, “integral” emerged at the core of our worldview…and our work. We knew we wanted to do something together, but we weren’t quite sure what that was. We brought our teams together to explore the possibilities, and this began a process that transformed me and many of my colleagues, deepening our understanding and practice of Integral itself, in addition to understanding Agile from an Integral perspective.

We started with nothing but a shared purpose and to my amazement, at every weekly working session, I experienced flow and the co-creation of something special emerging. A couple of years later, our shared collaboration delivered a full scale, team to portfolio to enterprise approach to Agile in large organizations, from the Integral perspective. A first! This is a much-needed practice for companies embracing agility while expecting something beyond product delivery: individual health, team harmony, and culture development. The Integral Agile Approach has been delivered and is already proving results with our clients, but the journey is just beginning. As we get feedback from our clients, and partner with more companies and practitioners, I can’t wait to see what our collaboration will bring in the future. A future we believe will help companies use an Integral perspective to take their results to new heights and depths.

It was early March 2020. Raúl called me and said: “Luchi, I’ve met a guy in a training that we instantly made click. We had to do an exercise in pairs and when I asked him in which company he worked in, he said “Integral Agile”. And when I told him where I worked, I said “Integralis”. And then he added, “We are traveling to NY to have a working session with these guys. Be prepared, these guys are experts on the integral approach, and we bring the business point of view and the cultural organizational consulting experience. We can create something together, I don’t know what, but there is something in here”.

And that was the beginning of everything.

I live in Bs As, Argentina. At that time, my second baby girl was only 5 months old. My other daughter, 2 years old. I was thrilled with the idea of the possibility of knowing these guys and working with them, and, at the same time, I was thinking, “how am I going to make it to NY, be up for the challenge, and at the same time, take care of my baby girls?”. Finally, I decided that I was going to travel with my two daughters and my husband, who was going to help me to take care of them while I was working with them.

Everything ready, tickets, hotel, and….. COVID. I think it was two weeks or so before our trip to NY had to be canceled for very well known reasons. So now, what? Raul said, “Luchi, let’s do this, even if we have to work virtually. We can’t lose the opportunity of meeting these guys. I will suggest to them to do a Future Search session virtually and let’s see what they say. And they said: ok”.

And that was it. The Integralis team and the Integral Agile team participated in a two day Future Search session via zoom facilitated by Raúl. During those days, we were able to get to know each other. We defined and discovered what we imagined we could do together. We found out that we shared the same values…and that was key for everything that came after that. I remembered we use that app “mural” (an app that is so used nowadays but early in the 2020, it was pretty new, and we took the risk and used it.). And for me, what was the a-ha moment and the beginning of our endeavor together, was that by the end of that virtual session, I remember Ben saying “ok, this is all great and cool, but what’s next? Are we just “pretending” or would this be something real? And we said, “this is going to be real”. And in that moment, we made a commitment that we have honored up to now.

It's been two years now that we have been working together, with an ROB of 2-3 hours meetings per week. Being a mom with two small daughters during the pandemic, was really tough. Many times I struggled a lot on how I was going to be able to attend the sessions… but I was able to make it (thanks especially to my husband that took care of my girls while I was on calls. I couldn't have gone so far without his support). I still remember that during that 2-day Future search session, during breaks, my husband brought my baby girl so I could breastfeed her — and I have a picture of that moment ;) ).

When I look back at what we have accomplished and gone through, the way I see it is that we have built a team of people that work committed to something bigger than us, and above all, we worked on a consistent basis, every week, with mutual respect, transparency, and discipline. We are committed to creating something that I think we still don’t know where it would lead us, but there is this driving force that pushes us to keep on working together because we know it’s worth it. We have traveled so much now. At the beginning what we thought was only theoretical work, we are now seeing it coming true. Integral Agile is a team of people that stands out for its generosity. From the very first moment, they shared their knowledge without expecting something in return, and that I will always appreciate so much. It’s been such a learning journey and I’m so grateful that we have come together because I think we believe we have something noble to offer to the world.