Ways of Thinking (WoT)

The Disciplined Agile^® (DA^™) tool kit promotes the idea that for your organization to be agile everyone should have a shared mindset that supports and enables enterprise agility. It also observes that people, in practice, have a diverse range of ways of thinking that reflect their background, in particular the domain in which they work. The implication is that we need a common yet contextualized approach to capturing our ways of thinking (WoT).

A Shared Mindset for Enterprise Agility

The shared aspects of the DA mindset are captured in the form of principles, promises, and guidelines. As you see in Figure 1, disciplined agilists believe in the DA principles, so we promise to adopt these behaviours and follow these guidelines when doing so. The three aspects of the DA mindset aspects:

• Principles. The principles provide a philosophical foundation for enterprise agility. They are based on both lean and flow concepts.
• Promises. The promises are agreements that we make with our fellow teammates, our stakeholders, and other people within our organization whom we interact with. The promises define a collection of disciplined behaviours that enable us to collaborate effectively and respectfully.
• Guidelines. These guidelines help us to be more effective in our way of working (WoW) and in improving our WoW over time. 

Contextualized Ways of Thinking

Each process blade extends the DA mindset with one or more philosophies that are specific to that process blade. We do this because practitioners of each professional domain - such as finance, sales, enterprise architecture, governance, and so on - each have their own specific belief systems, priorities, and experiences. By extending the foundational principles, promises, and guidelines with philosophies, the DA tool kit embraces and respects the different viewpoints that people bring to the mix. Just as context counts when it comes to choosing your way of working, it also counts with it comes to your way of thinking.

Figure 2 overviews the DA finance mindset for where you can see that several philosophies specific to finance that build upon the base DA mindset. Will existing, non-agile finance professionals subscribe to all of these philosophies?  We hope so, but if not, then there is a coaching opportunity there. Similarly, Figure 3 overviews the DA security mindset.