R.I.P. Mike Beedle, business agility visionary

The agile community has been shocked by the death of business agility visionary Mike Beedle in a Chicago stabbing. Mike is an Agile Manifesto signatory and the founder of Enterprise Scrum, an agile approach.

He left behind a family that includes six children: David (19), Sebastian (10), and Daniel (17), Urzula (3.5), Alexsandra (2.5), and Lucia (1.5). A GoFundMe account has been established to help his family who greatly need this support. If you can give any amount, it would really make a big impact on making sure his family have what they need at this very difficult time.

Mike Beedle’s agile legacy

The “agile” movement had its genesis in a desire to find a more effective approach to software development. Popularized by the Agile Manifesto, agile advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, continual improvement, and a rapid and flexible response to change.

While initially focused on software development, agile has now been extended to wider business and management applications. This can be seen in our agile decision-making series and range of articles discussing agile management.

Mike Beedle’s Enterprise Scrum approach can “agilize” an entire company or organization, or any level of management or business unit in a company or organization. He advises that:

Enterprise Scrum offers a way to agilize and entire company from top to bottom (hierarchy), or from “side to side” (collaboration), or even in subsumption (dependent knowledge levels), but always with the constraint that everything must remain agile at all levels, or for all organizations involved, regardless of its size, purpose, or evolutionary step. As such Enterprise Scrum equally agilizes any level of management from C-level executive levels, through all levels of middle management, and down to the program and project; or equivalently, it can agilize startups, medium size companies with product and services portfolios, with one or more customer segments, all the way to agilizing business units and business unit portfolios, etc.

A great way to honour Mike’s legacy is by considering how you could apply agile approaches in your company or organization. Please take a look at his Enterprise Scrum resources and our agile management articles, and reflect on the possibilities.

Also published on Medium.