Organizational Creative Capabilities

5Agile Methods and Organizational Creativity

One of the priorities expressed for more than 20 years by proponents of so-called “agile” project management methods is to support the creativity of the internal teams that deploy them (Glass 2006; Conboy et al. 2009; Highsmith 2009; Morris et al. 2014). These methods differ from traditional project management and execution models, in particular the waterfall model, in that they have short, iterative and adaptive development cycles lasting only a few weeks and the centrality of the customer within the projects (Lee and Xia 2010). They encompass a set of more than 20 different project management practices and techniques (Rasnacis and Berzisa 2016) – the most widespread being ScrumKanban, or extreme programming (Aldave et al. 2019) – sharing the same core values and principles gathered in the 2001 Manifesto for Agile Software Development¹. According to Highsmith (2009, p. 67), one of the 17 experts who signed this manifesto, “creativity and innovation are the emergent results of well-functioning agile teams”.

In a book for practitioners published a few years after the manifesto, the American engineer Glass (2006) argues for a possible compatibility between the notions of agility² and creativity:

And given that Agile’s flexibility allows much more creative freedom than discipline’s “dregs of structure”, I for one see Agile as much more compatible with creativity than its traditional alternatives (Glass 2006, p. 42).

Furthermore, in ...