About the Series
Strategy dies in the gap between the boardroom and the team room. The Applied Agility Series is the pragmatic plumbing to connect them.
The Problem
The market is drowning in methodology and starving for applicability. Organizations have poured millions into legacy agile training (Scrum, SAFe, and the rest) and are still paralyzed by organizational drag, the hidden friction training was supposed to fix.
The failure of current literature is prescription without context. Most books offer either high-altitude philosophy ("be like Spotify") or rigid instruction manuals ("run these ceremonies"). Neither helps a leader or a team staring at a unique, messy constraint that doesn't fit the textbook.
The Approach
Enterprise agility fails at two altitudes, and each altitude must be addressed through two lenses.
At the executive altitude, leaders make structural decisions about funding, governance, and decision rights that determine whether agility is even possible. Most don't realize they are the constraint. At the team altitude, delivery practitioners adopt frameworks they were told to use but can't escape the friction those frameworks ignore: unclear requirements, dependency gridlock, retrospectives that change nothing.
Each altitude must be addressed through two lenses. The mechanics lens diagnoses structural dysfunction and prescribes the operating changes to fix it. The principles lens surfaces the underlying decision rules that make those mechanics stick, or that sabotage them when leaders and teams don't know them. Miss either lens and the intervention fails. Mechanics without principles get reverted under pressure. Principles without mechanics stay as inspirational slogans.
The series is the missing field-grade manual for Disciplined Agile Next, stripped of academic fluff and focused on the mechanics of execution. It rejects the big-bang transformation model in favor of the Value Acceleration Process (VAP): a scalable, iterative approach to dismantling organizational drag one value increment at a time.
Shared Vocabulary
Readers of any book will encounter the same vocabulary across the series:
- 3 Barriers. Alignment Drift, Choked Flow, Broken Feedback. The three structural failure modes that block strategy from reaching execution.
- 23 Gaps (enterprise) / 20 Gaps (team). The specific structural dysfunctions feeding each barrier.
- Value Acceleration Process (VAP). The iterative improvement engine that replaces the big-bang transformation.
- Value Increments (VI). The slicing discipline that makes flow possible.
- DA Next Decision Framework. The contextual guidance engine.
- Quick Start Accelerators. Context-specific Ways of Working teams can stand up in hours, not weeks.
Who This Is For
- Executive leaders directing transformation who need a diagnostic framework for their own altitude (Books 1, 3).
- Delivery teams, team leads, product managers, scrum masters, engineering managers who need to escape framework purgatory and build context-specific delivery capability (Books 2, 4).
- Consultants, coaches, internal transformation leads who need shared language with leadership and operational guidance for the teams they support (all five books).
- Narrative-first readers and visual learners who will pick up a graphic novel before a 300-page business book (Book 5, with onramps to the rest).
What Makes This Series Different
The series is built on Disciplined Agile Next and on decades of combined field experience. It refuses the two dominant failure modes of agile literature: high-altitude philosophy that doesn't touch the real friction, and prescriptive framework evangelism that breaks on contact with context. Every book delivers a specific diagnostic, an evidence base, and operational guidance. Nothing is inspirational without being usable.
Stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting for the next framework. The tools, the evidence, and the operating principles are on the page. The Applied Agility Series is how you fix the system you're actually inside.