Pragmatic Agility: from buzz word to blueprint.

I have been talking about pragmatic agility for about two years now.

But I have not fully explained what this is about.

Today I am closing that side of the loop. It’s all about the difficulties of dealing with the triangles thrown my way when I was supervising a BPO operations team, joining projects, running the helpdesk and pursuing change management.

PM iron triangle, DEI, KPI triangles, Prosci’s PCT triangle – these made my corporate life very challenging. The usual advice is to prioritize just two out of three. But then the incentive program and the compliance rules demand to take care of all three corners.

Though a triangle is a sound fundamental geometric starting point to structure anything, it can also be trapping and a catch-22 hence my research focused on figuring out how to make triangles dynamically usable and sustainable for system thinking. Eventually, I figured out, that it’s all about putting the elements as sides, treat the corners as tension points, bound and connect the corners by a defined circle and voila, it provided the framework and modeling tool to figure out anything using the circles and triangles!

For PRAGMAGILITY, it may appear to be binary. Agility on one side, pragmatism on the other. But the powerful insight from CTF is that any binary forces need triangulation for balance, hence the emergence of the third side. Please see on the document how it is for PRAGMAGILITY.

PRAGMAGILITY White Paper.pdf

Download PDF • 161KB