Is Agile iterative development?

What do my followers think “agile” is?

Back in January, I asked my LinkedIn followers the question “What does agile mean to you?”.

One person, Tim, said:

If you ask ten people on ‘agile teams’ to explain what agile means, you’ll get ten different answers.

and he was right. I got a bunch of different answers to the question. Some people talked about “Agile done right” but no one referenced the Manifesto.

Almost everyone referenced iterative development - working in small release cycles - in their answers.

Everyone thought of Agile as being some variant of project management. Processes. Scrum. Minimum Viable Product. Lean. Pivot.

Agile wasn’t about project management

When the Manifesto was written, it wasn’t about project management.

Iterative development is mentioned, sure, but it’s literally one sentence: principle 3 of twelve principles.

The Agile Manifesto itself is a set of four values. It’s about what’s important, not just about how we do our work.

Soon after its publication, the consultancy industry got hold of the concept. The “Agile industry” or “Cult of Agile” actually very often doesn’t live up to the four values in the manifesto.

Valuing individuals over processes, valuing collaboration over contracts and valuing change over planning… these are hard to turn into a sellable product. Indeed, it’s likely that de-commodifying the work of software engineering was part of the point of the Manifesto in the first place.

Like so many values-based documents before it (and since), the Manifesto doesn’t work if you cherry-pick the bits that work for a consultancy product and ignore the rest.

If you’re doing iterative development, but you’re not:

• trusting your teams
• responding to change
• placing a higher value on human interaction than rigid processes

then you’re not really following the philosophy of Agile at all.

When Agile becomes just another process or “way of working”, it’s easy to see why it becomes distrusted or disliked by teams.

Have you read the Manifesto?

One thing that surprises me whenever I do a leadership consultancy job is how few leaders have actually read the Agile Manifesto.

Maybe because of its name, people think it’s a huge complex document?

But it’s literally four values, underpinned by twelve principles. The whole document can be read in its entirety in five minutes, and can even be memorised relatively easily.

The Manifesto is not perfect, and I want to use the rest of this series to explore its weaknesses, but it is important and I think it’s a cultural touchstone that I feel everyone should at least read once before they critique it.

What’s next?

Now I’ve (re)introduced you to the Manifesto, in my next post I’d like to explore the question: “Is the Manifesto still relevant in 2026?”