The Agile Thinkers

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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 all 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.

Your best people may be compensating for your worst problems.Experienced people often keep organisations running by find...
21/10/2026

Your best people may be compensating for your worst problems.
Experienced people often keep organisations running by finding ways around obstacles. They resolve unclear handovers, chase decisions, anticipate problems and adapt when processes don't reflect how work actually happens.

Their ability to adapt is valuable. But when the same people repeatedly compensate for the same problems, the organisation may be overlooking what those situations reveal about its operating conditions.

Work continues to be delivered, while additional coordination, rework and unnecessary effort gradually become accepted as normal.

At The Agile Thinkers, our High Performance Teaming approach helps organisations examine how people communicate, coordinate, make decisions and respond to changing conditions.

The aim is to understand what shapes performance and identify where meaningful improvements can be made.

Explore our High Performance Teaming approach:
https://theagilethinkers.com/r/i0w

You can't buy a high-performing team.Organisations invest in talented people, better tools, new processes and working en...
20/10/2026

You can't buy a high-performing team.

Organisations invest in talented people, better tools, new processes and working environments designed to improve performance. These investments matter, but they don't guarantee that people will work effectively together when circumstances become difficult.

The real test often comes when information is incomplete, priorities conflict or someone identifies a risk that others have missed.
Can people challenge assumptions without creating conflict? Can they disagree constructively? Do they know how to coordinate their response when the original plan no longer works?
High-performing teams develop these capabilities through experience, practice, feedback and learning. They also need an environment where those capabilities can be used.

Bringing talented people together is important. Creating the conditions for them to perform together is a different responsibility.

Does your organisation develop these capabilities, or simply expect people to have them?

The first prototype was a garden hose.Before On became a global sportswear company, Olivier Bernhard experimented with p...
16/10/2026

The first prototype was a garden hose.

Before On became a global sportswear company, Olivier Bernhard experimented with pieces of garden hose attached to the sole of a running shoe.
It wasn't a finished product.
It was a way of testing an idea.
And that's an interesting distinction.

Organisations often spend enormous amounts of time trying to make an idea convincing before exposing it to reality.

Presentations improve. Arguments become stronger.
But uncertainty may remain exactly where it was.

Sometimes the better question is:
What's the smallest credible experiment that would help us learn?

Observe. Test. Learn. Adapt.

An imperfect experiment that produces evidence can be more valuable than a polished idea that produces only opinions.

15/10/2026

Your teams may be working hard to compensate for problems nobody is addressing.

A decision takes longer than it should.
A handover creates more questions than answers.
A concern is raised when it's already too late.

Individually, these situations can seem insignificant.
But when they keep happening, teams spend more time waiting, clarifying and recovering, and less time making progress.

The people may be capable. The effort may be there.
What needs attention are the conditions shaping how they work together.

High Performance Teaming helps teams recognise these patterns and develop practical ways to improve communication, coordination and decision-making.

Explore our High Performance Teaming approach:https://theagilethinkers.com/r/9pP

Using a Kanban board doesn't mean you're managing flow.Work can be visible and still move badly.Too much gets started.Bl...
13/10/2026

Using a Kanban board doesn't mean you're managing flow.

Work can be visible and still move badly.
Too much gets started.
Blocked work remains blocked.
Priorities change while existing work waits.
Items age until a deadline suddenly makes them urgent.

The board isn't failing.
It's showing you what you need to manage.

The important question is whether what you see changes what the team does next.
Making work visible is a start. Managing flow is the capability.

Our next Team Kanban Practitioner course is online, in English, on 17–18 November.

Register: https://www.theagilethinkers.com/r/t3C

Human Factors are not soft skills.The label matters.Technical skills are usually treated as capabilities to develop: we ...
08/10/2026

Human Factors are not soft skills.

The label matters.

Technical skills are usually treated as capabilities to develop: we train them, practise them, observe them and improve them.
But communication, judgement, coordination and decision-making are often treated differently, as things experienced people should somehow already know how to do.

Yet these are exactly the capabilities teams depend on when information is incomplete, pressure increases or the plan stops matching reality.

They're not additions to the real work.
They're part of how the real work gets done.

If they influence performance, they deserve the same deliberate attention as any other capability.

Perhaps it's time we stopped calling them soft.

Good people. Important work. But performance can still be lost.Not because people don't care or lack expertise.Sometimes...
07/10/2026

Good people. Important work. But performance can still be lost.
Not because people don't care or lack expertise.

Sometimes performance is lost in the moments between people:
A concern that isn't voiced.
An assumption that isn't checked.
A decision made without the full picture.
A handover that leaves room for interpretation.
These moments rarely appear on a dashboard.

But together, they shape how teams perform when work becomes complex or demanding.

High Performance Teaming helps make these conditions visible and gives teams a way to improve how they work together.

Recognise this in your organisation?
https://theagilethinkers.com/r/3U7

Before changing the work, understand the work.When an organisational problem appears, an explanation usually follows qui...
06/10/2026

Before changing the work, understand the work.

When an organisational problem appears, an explanation usually follows quickly.
Communication. Priorities. Process. Accountability.
Any of those might be right.
But an explanation isn't yet a diagnosis.

What people describe and what actually happens when work meets dependencies, deadlines and incomplete information can be very different.

Before intervening, look at the conditions shaping the work.
Where does it slow down?
Where are decisions really made?
What information is available when those decisions happen?

Sometimes the answers confirm the original problem.
Sometimes they reveal a different one.

Better interventions begin with better diagnosis.

Organisations have become remarkably good at measuring activity.Projects completed.Features delivered.AI usage.Tokens co...
01/10/2026

Organisations have become remarkably good at measuring activity.
Projects completed.
Features delivered.
AI usage.
Tokens consumed.
Hours trained.

Dashboards continue to improve.

The harder question is different.

What changed in the quality of our thinking?
Did decisions improve?
Are assumptions challenged earlier?
Do teams recognise risks sooner?
Is collaboration stronger?

Those are harder to measure.
They're also much closer to organisational performance.

Not everything that matters appears on a dashboard.

Before asking whether you're right, ask this first.Most discussions begin with evidence.Reports.Dashboards.Data.Before l...
29/09/2026

Before asking whether you're right, ask this first.
Most discussions begin with evidence.
Reports.
Dashboards.
Data.

Before looking for evidence, there's another question worth asking:
What do we actually believe?

If we can't clearly explain the assumption behind a decision, it's difficult to know what evidence would support it or challenge it.
Evidence matters.
So do the assumptions we bring into the discussion.

Sometimes the best way to improve a decision isn't by finding more data.

It's by making our thinking visible first.

What assumption do you think organisations overlook most often?

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