Big A, Little a: Making agility Part of Your Company's DNA

There is “Big A” Agility, the frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe, and there is “little a” agility, the plain human ability to change direction when the world shifts under your feet. Kate Megaw and Ryan Smith make the case that the second one matters most, and that it belongs in every company's core values, not just its delivery teams. Recorded ahead of Agile 2026 in Washington DC, whose theme is “Shaping the Future with Agility”, the conversation moves from VUCA to Bill George's VUCA 2.0, which answers volatility with vision, uncertainty with understanding, complexity with courage, and ambiguity with adaptability, to the most expensive words in business: “we have always done it this way”. Kate and Ryan dig into experimentation and the experiment log, why psychological safety is the ground everything grows from, the shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, and why the five year plan and the pretty Gantt chart no longer survive contact with reality. The takeaway is simple. Shaping the future with agility is not about predicting what comes next. It is about building leaders, teams, and organizations that can thrive no matter what does.