Michiel van Gerven

Michiel van Gerven is an Agile Coach, Consultant and Trainer and international speaker at Organize Agile and Scrum Company, based in the Netherlands. He has a penchant for Agile in unconventional environments and likes a challenging organizational puzzle. Currently he is involved as the Lead Transformation Coach at an international insurance agency and coaches, trains and advises the Dutch National Police in adopting agile ways of working and thinking.

Michiel’s personal motto is ‘This shit could be so much better!’

Experiments with Holacracy: Why we stopped doing it, and what we learned along the way.

Michiel van Gerven

My colleague Minke’s recent article ‘Getting started as an employee experience chief’ triggered some questions about why we at Organize Agile abandoned Holacracy. It’s not an easy question to answer and while I have my own thoughts on the subject I also asked my coworkers to offer their opinions. This article will offer some insights from our journey, what Holacracy did (and didn’t do) for us, and some recommendations should you want to start your own Holacracy experiment.

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Key challenges for Agile: Confronting the bad and the ugly

Michiel van Gerven

This article came about by talking to various Agile people; Scrum Masters, Product Owners and Agile Coaches in a number of organizations, both public and private and of course my own colleagues. What you will find below are the challenges they mentioned most, coupled with some of my own thoughts on the subject.

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Why true agile transformation requires apex predators

Michiel van Gerven

Most of you have probably seen the video ‘How wolves change rivers’ (it’s embedded below). It famously describes how the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone national park changes the entire ecosystem. It triggers changes in deer behavior, which in turn allows vegetation to regrow, which eventually even changes the course of the rivers in the park. It is a powerful story of how you can

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About Best Agile Articles Project

Best Agile Articles is a collaborative project of the Agile community to bring you the best of the best publications each year. Our goal in publishing these yearly editions is to cull through the many articles that are published each year and provide you with a curated set of high-quality articles that capture the latest knowledge and experience of the agile community in one compact volume.
Our purpose is twofold. First, we understand that it’s hard to figure out where to go when looking for ideas and answers. There are thousands of blogs, videos, books and other resources available at the click of a mouse. But that can be a lot to sort through. So, we thought we could be of some help. Second, we wanted to bring some visibility to many people who are doing outstanding work in this field and are providing helpful resources. We hope that this publication will help them connect to you, the ones they are writing for.
Our intention is that this publication is to be by the agile community as a service to the agile community and for the agile community. With that in mind, we pulled together a great group of volunteers to help get this work into your hands.

The articles in this volume were selected by:
• A diverse Volunteer Committee of sixteen people with expertise in a variety of areas related to agile.
• The agile community. A call for article nominations went out in early 2020 and several dozen 2019 articles were nominated by the community.

The articles themselves cover a wide variety of topics including organizational structure, culture, and agile leadership. There is something for almost everyone here. All editions of the Best Agile Articles publication are available on Amazon and free to download on the Best Agile Article site.
We are thankful for the great participation by the agile community at large. If you would like to participate in delivering this publication in future years, we would welcome hearing from you.