AO – Agile Organizations

The AO (Agile Organizations) method rests on a small set of simple systemic principles. It treats agility as an emergent property of a social system. This is driven by a few clear interaction rules rather than by heavy approaches.​

Core AO principles

• Agility as system dynamic: Agile is seen as a dynamic in the organization (a social system). It is not merely a set of team practices or frameworks.​
• Simple rules over complex methods: The organization is guided by a handful of simple rules. These rules are inspired by flocking: alignment, cohesion, separation, and avoidance. They shape interactions and allow agility to emerge organically.​
• Organization, not just structure: “Structure is not organization.” Charts and processes are secondary. The quality of human interactions is crucial. These interactions create the social system.​

Human‑centric and systemic focus

• People‑centered design: AO explicitly frames the company as a social system within a business container. It emphasizes engagement, autonomy, and shared purpose rather than pure process optimization.​
• Systemic, not team‑only: It targets the whole organization (platform, Plexus, programs, projects, swarms). This approach is not limited to delivery teams or IT. The goal is for agile dynamics to propagate across all levels.​
• Emergence and stigmergy: Behavior, values, and coordination emerge from repeated interactions. Visible outcomes, or “yesterday’s weather,” play a role. This reduces the need for heavy planning and control.​

Ten “distilled agile” principles in AO

AO often uses a distilled set of ten operational principles to steer behavior: value, transparency, coherence, innovation, mastery, and communication.​

• Value & transparency:
  • Deliver what customers need early and often; make performance and results visible.​
• Coherence:
  • Match demand with capacity; let “doers” take decisions; share and align a clear vision.​
• Innovation & mastery:
  • Be flexible by standardizing wisely; embrace problems as learning opportunities; strengthen people’s skills.​
• Communication:
  • Communicate results openly and give/receive constructive feedback as a continuous practice.​

Flocking‑inspired interaction rules

• Alignment: Individuals and teams orient around a shared purpose and simple common rules, rather than detailed central plans.​
• Cohesion and separation: Teams stay close enough for collaboration and learning. They maintain clear boundaries and span of control. This enables autonomy and creates safe‑to‑fail “containers”.​
• Avoidance: The system seeks to avoid overload, bottlenecks, and harmful interference, for example by managing cognitive load and clarifying responsibilities.​

Outcome orientation and learning

• Five experiences / metrics: AO focuses on five experience dimensions (enterprise, organization, people, customer, system) as feedback loops for adaptation.​
• Phased transformation: It describes transition phases toward a “full” agile organization, using these principles to iteratively adjust design and practices.​
• Continuous adaptation: The method expects structures and norms to evolve as the environment and experiences change. Agility is treated as an ongoing organizational skill rather than a one‑off rollout.

“From an AO perspective, “Agile” is the nature of the interactions of agents within a system.”

“we differentiate structure (the fail-safe container) from organization (fail-safe experiments).

“context and nature of work has different agile. AO helps you define the agile you need.”