Faced with agility, Arie van Bennekum concluded that agility is human nature, something innate.

But that doesn't mean that people can only acquire agile through talent. Learning agile will never work just by learning rigid frameworks, practices, processes, or techniques for those who want to learn agile. Likewise, only organizations that embrace an agile mindset and culture will become more agile and innovative. And Arie is also promoting agile transformation. 

Agile Manifesto

For Arie, 2001 was full of magic and a year destined to be extraordinary.

In the autumn of that year, Arie van Bennekum was invited to the Snowbird Conference to represent the UK DSDM Alliance. He came to Salt City Lake and signed the Agile Manifesto. Arie said that the Agile Manifesto was a distillation of the values and principles behind several lightweight methods at the time. It was a best practice recognized by the seventeen people. And he's still proud that the conference came up with "agile" -- a word that covers all lightweight development methods.

Since then, as the agile team has grown, there have been constant updates to the Agile Manifesto. Arie also revisited his "Agile Manifesto" and made slight adjustments to the original.

Firstly, while the Agile Manifesto signed in 2001 focused on finding ways to deliver better software, Arie believes that agile is an integrated enterprise solution. It applies to every function of an organization, from human resources to technology. Therefore, he proposes to replace the "software" in the "Agile Manifesto" with "solution" to satisfy the needs of today's organizations.

Secondly, the change from "responding to change is better than following a plan" to "responding to change better than following a rigid plan" focuses on what kind of plan to follow. According to Arie, the team needs to have a proper plan, as long as it is not stubbornly following the plan, and remember that it is flexible to "respond to changes" when new situations arise.

There is a myth in agile that practicing agile can do anything we like to do. At the same time, Arie believes that practicing agile must do what needs to be done and that success in agile comes from quality and discipline. For example, a team only holds a morning meeting once a week. They feel that holding a meeting every day will cause a waste of time and cost, which is too time-consuming and ineffective. This is foolish behavior. However, only by updating the team's work progress every day can we identify and solve the problems in our daily work in time.

Interview With  Arie van Bennekum（Source: ArievanBennekum） 

Most of the time, people working on agile transformation focus on one or a few frameworks, practices implemented dogmatically and ignore an essential part, the difference between implementing agile and doing agile. To be agile, members and teams have to shift to a completely different paradigm, including different ways of thinking, working, and collaborating. This shift, in turn, allows the entire team to gain tremendous benefits from agile.

Therefore, to be successful, you need to "be agile" rather than "do agile."

Agile TM Conversion Model

Arie has always put people at the center of his attention and work. As the spiritual leader of Wemanity, an agile leadership consultancy, he continually works to create and strengthen an agile (people-oriented) culture within Wemanity to provide the best value for Wemanity's clients.

Source: Arie Van Bennekum's Twitter account （@arievanbennekum）

To make the organization more flexible and agile, Arie and his team developed the Integrated Agile Transformation Model (IATM). This proven methodology can be used to successfully transition to a new agile paradigm, whether from individuals to leaders or from enterprise services to technology.

The IATM process starts with the environment, which brings people into the change process to be truly agile. Then the team, requires high quality and discipline to learn as a standard within a team. And finally, individual refinement. To achieve the best results, Arie also suggested that they would do a lot of simple, customized activities in development, which will help the organizations shift their focus from pseudo-agile to true agile and analyze a specific problem.

Today, ITAM has helped many Fortune 500 companies make successful agile transformations, and ITAM will continue to forge ahead regardless of the past or the future.

As an agile evangelist, Arie has worked on agile transformation for many years. Making the agile transformation team reach the best state is his long-term pursuit. In addition, he is very active on social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedln accounts: Arie van Bennekum). In Arie van Bennekum, we see that breaking the routine requires the courage to "deviate from the norm" and the practical spirit of going alone. To abide by the rules, what you need is not a superficial attitude but a well-versed application of skills.