Six years ago, I set out to write a series of posts exploring the Agile Principles. I only made it through the first one (customer satisfaction through early and continuous delivery of valuable software) before life and work pulled me in a dozen different directions. That’s the reality of being in the trenches—sometimes the practice of agility takes priority over writing about it.

But lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about those principles again. Not in a nostalgic, “wasn’t Agile cool back in the day” sort of way, but in a very practical, “we need this more than ever” sort of way.

Why Now?
The work I’m doing today has surfaced a hard truth: too often, organizations are obsessed with frameworks, tooling, and process compliance while completely missing the spirit of agility. I see teams burning out under heavy governance, leaders mistaking Jira dashboards for real outcomes, and “transformation programs” collapsing under their own weight. Sound familiar?

When I step back, I realize the answers aren’t in some new scaled framework or silver-bullet tool. They’re right where they’ve always been—sitting quietly on agilemanifesto.org. The 12 principles. The basics.

Getting Back to Basics
That’s why I want to revisit this series. Not to make grand revelations or coin new buzzwords, but to remind myself (and maybe you, too) what really matters. These principles have guided us for over two decades, but they only matter if we actively practice them.

So over the coming weeks, I’ll continue breaking down each principle, just as I started before. I’ll share where I see it show up in my work today, the traps I see organizations falling into, and hopefully spark conversations you can take back to your own teams.

Agile isn’t about ceremony. It isn’t about tools. It isn’t about your particular flavor of framework. It’s about principles. And when we drift too far from them, we lose the very thing that made agility powerful in the first place.

It feels like the right time to go back to basics again.