Ten agile quotes from the world’s most brilliant minds

Truly embracing an agile methodology can be a very hard task, especially when life throws a spanner in the works. Agile practices are mostly learned and experienced; they are not something that you can easily glean from a book or article which is why we are here to help with Digital.ai Agility. Nonetheless, breaking down the concept agile isn’t always so easy–it often means different things to different people. But if you’re in search for valuable agile quotes to guide and inspire you and your teams, here are ten from some the world’s most brilliant minds.

Brilliant agile quotes

1. “Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” – Albert Einstein. As agile organizations, teams, and team members, we must constantly question what could be better in order to continually improve.
2. “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.” – Vince Lombardi. Perfection is a fallacy that leads to over planning, procrastination, and failure to ship; agile is about focusing on delivering the best thing possible in a set time period.
3. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” – Dr. Seuss. Agile practices focus on giving teams and individuals ownership of their work and accountability to the team and organization, so that you can care to make things better.
4. “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.” – Muhammad Ali. Service leadership and selflessness are foundation principles of agile; these are the prices to be paid to be part of an agile team.
5. “You simply have to put one foot in front of the other and keep going. Put blinders on and plow right ahead.” – George Lucas. Agile is about doing as opposed to being paralyzed by over planning; in agile you get the minimal necessary requirements and start working.
6. “It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” – Confucius. A core principle of agile is working at a constant pace, which in turn enables you to deliver at a constant pace, as opposed to working sporadically and delivering nothing.
7. “We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.” – Maya Angelou. You will inevitably run into challenges along your agile journey; the key is to learn from these challenges and overcome them through standups and retrospectives.
8. “Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.” – Stephen Hawking. Agile is all about adapting to change; it was built on the foundational principle that business drivers will change and the development teams must be ready to adapt.
9. “Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.” – Thomas A. Edison. In agile as in life there will be hiccups, but the iterative nature of agile makes it easy to do a retrospective and learn from our mistakes then move on to the next sprint and do better.
10. “If you can dream it, you can do it.” – Walt Disney. We should never forget that agile was formed to find a way to develop software better and to more easily conquer our dreams.

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