Agile adoption, and the values that underlie Agile, are often at odds with the prevailing culture within organisations. As such, the culture of the organisation where Agile is adopted, shapes the Agile adoption and its success.

Last month I attended the Wellington Certified Agile Leadership (CAL1) course delivered by Toronto-based Certified Enterprise Coach Michael Sahota and hosted by Equinox IT.

It was a two day journey into the leadership difference between 'doing Agile' and 'being Agile', and a discussion about the conditions needed to ‘be Agile’. Michael took us through his high performance playbook, with a focus on the importance of leadership, culture and change in success – and an exploration of why telling teams to "go do Agile" doesn’t result in the high performance teams we need in our organisations.

Many New Zealand organisations are talking about Agile and using Agile, often on specific projects and in specific areas. But how many can truly say they have embraced Agile right into the heart of their culture and leadership to deliver a high performance Agile organisation?

We have always taken the view at Equinox IT that there is no single right way and that as consultants we bring a toolkit and use the right tool for the job.

For a long time we have used the sense making Cynefin Framework developed by Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge and the Cynefin Centre to help understand how we and our clients best respond to business and IT problems that are obvious, complicated, complex or chaotic. A number of our consultants have attended Cynefin training with Dave Snowden.

Many thanks to Michael Sahota who yesterday ran an interactive webinar talking about the 'Certified Agile Leadership' course and answering questions that people had about Agile Leadership and about the course.