2025 Agile International Conference Recap

Last week, Lean Agile Intelligence Inc. (LAI) had the pleasure of attending the Agile International Conference. We have been looking forward to this show for a while, and

We were joined by 🌲Marty Bradley and Manny Delarosa, friends and colleagues who live near Miami. Notably, Marty is collaborating with LAI on a series of new assessment templates that support organizations seeking to uplevel their readiness to use GenAI.

We are so glad we did. Here are our impressions:

• From talking with several people: there’s still the feeling that a tiny “Covid hangover”, really the sense of social isolation that started in lockdowns, is still somewhat in effect. Either that, or Agilists just love to get together. (Maybe a little bit of both!)
  
  
• Agile is most certainly not dead, but most enlightened organizations have dropped their blind adherence - by both coaches and leaders - to frameworks and practices that don’t move the ball forward.
  
  
• Avi Schneier’s presentation on this topic deserves a special mention. His presentation’s central message, which is that change agents need to prioritize pragmatism over idealism (and not the other way around), perfectly distilled the frustrations in the current state of Agility as well as offering the path forward for the industry and its practitioners.
  
  
• Further to the above: Agile practices - probably deservedly - are taking a backseat to the business outcomes that leaders have always cared most about. During the heyday of Scrum, SAFe, and other frameworks, there was always this wary trust placed in the hands of methodologists to bridge the gap between methodology and business outcomes. That gap is increasingly being closed by a tighter coupling of business results and support for ONLY those practices that support them.
  
  
• AI, and the promises and uncertainties it brings, was a hot topic.
  
  
• The community who attends that show - people from the region and also from around the nation, Canada, and the rest of the world - is fantastic! Extra thanks to conference organizers Rick Regueira, CEC, AKT, SPC6, PMP and Regina Batista, COO, Enterprise Agile Coach, Trainer for putting on a well-organized and well-attended conference.

In light of the above, what was our biggest takeaway from the show? Through our conversations, it was clear: Lean Agile Intelligence has an ever more important role and pertinency in supporting technology and business leaders in assessing only those practices that accomplish the goals of IT or Product, hopefully as they contribute to the business.

With our objective questions and answers, business orientation, and customization, we are poised to help the next generation of coaches and improvement leaders adopt and refine the methods and practices that matter most to their contexts. We enable those leaders to start not from process, but from outcomes, and work backwards to figure out how teams can improve to support business goals.

Do you have the organization capabilities in place for organization agility?
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To speak to one of our other impressions - the buzz, including both excitement and uncertainties, about AI - we are so excited to be on the verge of releasing a new assessment-based approach to improving organizational readiness for GenAI. If you haven’t already, follow our page as well as that for Accelerated Innovation.

My other takeaway was a few extra pounds from eating too much Cuban food, but that’s a given for any visit to Miami.

As a bonus: while at the post-conference Happy Hour, I witnessed the SpaceX rocket failure, of which I captured some shaky, zoomed-in video - that’s a true Florida bucket-list item!