The Agile Thinkers

The Agile Thinkers Helping leaders and teams perform better under pressure and uncertainty. Agile Thinkers Academy is an Agile21 brand. Join us in this change of Agile education!

Agile21 is a consultancy and training company founded in 2012 with the motto “Improving through people.”

Between 2012 and 2018, Agile21 delivered as an evolution from the traditional PMI, IIBA, COBIT, ITIL, a new set of courses with a different mindset and structure from Scrum Alliance, ScrumOrg, DevOps Institute, Kanban University, Scrum@Scale, SAFe, LeSS, through recognized training partners al

l around the world. In 2014, Agile21 started organizing ScrumDay Portugal, that evolved to the eXperience Agile conference, the first five-day conference that reunites in Lisbon each year the most reputable Agile practitioners and organizations around the world. In 2018 Agile21 partnered with Radtac, a 20yrs old British Agile Consulting Company with offices in USA, Finland, and Pakistan, specialized in Agile Transformations with clients like JP Morgan, Lloyd’s, Vodafone, Volkswagen, Siemens, AstraZeneca, British Airways, Barclays Bank, among others. Between 2018 and 2020, Agile21 as Radtac Portugal delivered Agile consulting and coaching services working with all industries and departments, helping them improve the way they work. During this period, courses like Agility in Marketing, Agility in HR or Lean Agile Procurement were brought for the first time to Portugal. In September 2020, Agile21 launched a new brand: “Agile Thinkers” for Agile Training & Academies, including Universities and Business Schools partnerships, keeping the partnership with Radtac UK for consulting services worldwide. At Agile Thinkers®, we believe that the companies’ products and services serve the purpose of improving people’s lives. We enhance this through our knowledge in new ways of working, empathy, inspiration, dedication and relationships. That’s why we have practical on-job training, conferences which involve strategy, business and techniques, learning programs like academies applied to professional needs and consulting services to ensure that the principles practiced are done in a sustainable manner. We look for individuals and organizations that are inspired and want to contribute for a better world using better work practices.

"Rewrite my text so it sounds like a Fortune 500 executive."Variations of that prompt are everywhere.The interesting par...
27/08/2026

"Rewrite my text so it sounds like a Fortune 500 executive."
Variations of that prompt are everywhere.
The interesting part isn't the wording.
It's the assumption behind it.

Almost every prompt asks AI to improve the appearance of expertise.
Very few ask it to challenge the quality of the thinking.

Where's the hole in the argument?
What evidence contradicts this conclusion?
What would a customer disagree with?
What assumptions are we making without noticing?

Those questions create far more value than asking for a better writing style.
Twenty years ago, organisations often bought the appearance of agility.
Today, many are buying the appearance of expertise.

Different technology.
Same mistake.

AI is an extraordinary thinking partner.
But only if it's invited to think, not just to polish.

📖 Read the full article:
https://www.theagilethinkers.com/r/cWd

🔍 PULSE Organisational Assessment:
https://www.theagilethinkers.com/r/j90

Agile didn't become less relevant.We became better at looking Agile than becoming more capable.Over the years, many orga...
25/08/2026

Agile didn't become less relevant.
We became better at looking Agile than becoming more capable.

Over the years, many organisations built exactly what they were pushing back against.
Two-day certification courses.
Transformations measured by the number of people renamed.
Coaches who had never shipped a product teaching teams that delivered every week how to run their stand-ups.

That wasn't a rejection of Agile.
It was a rejection of confusing the appearance of capability with capability itself.

Scrum isn't the problem.
SAFe isn't the problem.

Capability can't be bought. It has to be built.

📖 Read the full article:
https://www.theagilethinkers.com/r/Um0

20/08/2026

$397.4 billion.
That's how much Berkshire Hathaway is holding in cash and short-term Treasuries.
The obvious question is "Why?"

I think the more interesting question is:
What does that say about the businesses we're building?

This short explores why value creation has gradually become somebody else's responsibility in many organisations.

Capital isn't scarce. Businesses worth buying are.Berkshire Hathaway is holding $397.4 billion in cash and short-term Tr...
18/08/2026

Capital isn't scarce. Businesses worth buying are.

Berkshire Hathaway is holding $397.4 billion in cash and short-term Treasuries.
The easy explanation is that markets are expensive.

The more interesting question is whether enough organisations are creating businesses with durable value in the first place.

That's a leadership question, not a finance question.

Peter Drucker argued that the purpose of a business is to create a customer.

Somewhere along the way, many organisations turned that purpose into a department instead of making it everyone's responsibility.

Teams optimise delivery.
Functions optimise cost.
Projects optimise milestones.

But customers don't experience departments. They experience one organisation.

Markets eventually make the same judgement.

📖 Read the full article:
https://www.theagilethinkers.com/r/cWd

🔍 Explore PULSE:
https://www.theagilethinkers.com/r/j90

If capital isn't the scarce resource anymore, what is?

The world's most patient buyer of businesses is sitting on $397.4 billion in cash and short-term Treasuries.That's easy ...
13/08/2026

The world's most patient buyer of businesses is sitting on $397.4 billion in cash and short-term Treasuries.

That's easy to see as a finance story.

We see it differently.

It's a leadership story.

When organisations stop treating value creation as everyone's responsibility, they often become very good at improving activity, efficiency and process while losing sight of the one thing that matters most: creating value for customers.

That's the idea behind our latest article:

Value Creation Is Not a Department.

Read it here: https://www.theagilethinkers.com/r/cWd

What do you think? Has value creation become everyone's responsibility in your organisation, or does it belong to one team?

Imagine your company’s Christmas party required three approvals before you could order a drink.Most people would laugh.T...
11/08/2026

Imagine your company’s Christmas party required three approvals before you could order a drink.
Most people would laugh.
Then they’d wonder what kind of organisation they worked for.

If that made you smile, go and read your AI usage policy.
Policies don’t just describe processes.
They communicate expectations.
They tell people what leadership trusts them to do without asking.
Every approval, every exception and every restriction teaches employees something about the organisation.

Your AI dashboard doesn’t just measure usage.
It tells people what kind of company they work for.

Governance doesn’t only influence compliance. It influences what people believe is safe to do.

That’s one of the organisational patterns explored in the PULSE Assessment.
→ https://www.theagilethinkers.com/r/ica

57% of employees hide how they use AI at work. (KPMG, 48,000 workers, 47 countries.)Read that as a CFO and the reflex is...
06/08/2026

57% of employees hide how they use AI at work. (KPMG, 48,000 workers, 47 countries.)

Read that as a CFO and the reflex is: tighten the policy.

Read it as a systems person and it says something else. When most of your population breaks a rule, you don't have a discipline problem. You have a design problem. Nobody writes a memo asking staff to conceal their best productivity tool, the incentives write it for you.

Employee resistance to AI is not irrational. It's the most accurate reading of organisational incentives you'll find anywhere in the building.

04/08/2026

Low AI usage doesn't always mean low adoption.
Sometimes it means people have stopped telling you what they're doing.
The carousel explores why that distinction matters.
What does low usage usually mean in your organisation?

Somewhere right now, a company is setting up an approval workflow for €3.The analyst costs €300 a day. Her AI tokens cos...
30/07/2026

Somewhere right now, a company is setting up an approval workflow for €3.

The analyst costs €300 a day. Her AI tokens cost €3. Finance is building a dashboard for the €3.

Here's what that dashboard actually measures. KPMG asked 48,000 workers across 47 countries how they use AI at work. 57% said they hide it. So the usage report the board reviews every quarter doesn't show usage. It shows the fraction of usage people were willing to admit to. The real number is higher, off the books, running on personal accounts.

Shadow IT used to be a Dropbox folder. Now it's thinking.

The strange part is that the metering is meant to build confidence in the AI programme, and it does the opposite. It tells every employee: we expect you to waste this. People read incentives faster than they read policy documents. If exploring costs an explanation, they stop exploring — or stop reporting. Both look identical on the dashboard, and only one of them is a problem you can fix.

The token bill is the cheapest line in the whole system. The expensive line is the behaviour of the person prompting, and no one is measuring that.

If you want to know which pattern your organisation is running, the hiding one or the learning one, our PULSE diagnostic takes 12 minutes. Details in the comments.

28/07/2026

Feeling stuck does not always mean you need to start again.

Sometimes the next step is smaller:

one capability,
one honest conversation,
one real situation to test your value.

Download the full guide: https://www.theagilethinkers.com/r/o0P

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