Many Companies are working hard to nurture an Agile culture; and one of the very commonly discussed concepts is that of “being iterative and incremental”.

But what does it really mean, to be iterative and incremental? What does it mean to think, live and demonstrate it as part of our day to day work interactions?

The dictionary definition is pretty straight forward :

In its core, it speaks to repeatability, re-usability (practice) with continuous chunks of new outputs. But is that the main point?

It’s sure great and convenient to achieve continuous work outputs more efficiently, with repeatable, re-usable and scalable processes. It’s good for business ROI, and the ability to respond to change quickly are indeed outcomes we expect from an Agile culture.

But for this blog I want to focus on the cultural essence of becoming iterative and incremental. In an Agile sense, it’s about nurturing and acknowledging that we don’t know everything upfront and never will. Taking a leap of faith by starting in incremental and iterative ways is what will give us material learning to help us re-direct often where needed, continuously improve what and how we do it, and increase the likelihood we will achieve intended objectives.

Here are some of the ways in which this concept manifests itself in an Agile setting:

• Incremental Scope — not trying to solve every use case, every persona, every problem or opportunity upfront. Fiercely prioritizing and focusing on incremental scope that will iteratively bring us closer to a desired end State or vision.
• Operational Cadence — creating a cadence with time boxes and scope of work that we all agree should happen in a repeated way. In Agile, Scrum ceremonies and pre-defined intervals of time (Sprints, aka Iterations) are a manifestation of this, the process takes care of things that must always happen and frees mental space from everyone to focus on doing the work.
• Continuous Learning — continuously gathering and analyzing results and taking actions that steer us closer to our expected results.
• Continuous Improvement — refining and improving how we do something to do it better, whether in quality, timing or cost efficiency.
• Continuous risk assessment and mitigation — reading the situation and asking ourselves constantly if there are new risks we are overlooking, and taking actions to mitigate them with a proper sense of urgency.
• Continuous integration and deployment — continuously releasing code to production, getting value to users hands incrementally and frequently.
• A common denominator on the items listed above is the inspect and adapt nature of being iterative and incremental, acknowledging that there is a journey that will be guided by experiential learning cycles — action and reaction — Plan-Do-Check-Act cycles.

Behaviorally, it’s paramount that we adjust expectations accordingly to enable ourselves and the Company culture to become truly iterative and incremental.

We have to exercise our mental muscle to expect problems to be solved in an evolutionary way, to become comfortable with continuous change as solutions will continue to evolve, as will the problems we are trying to solve.

We have to abandon expectations of perfection and insular truths. We have to celebrate steps along the way, even if they are not a bulls-eye, and keep going. We have to continuously care and ask if there are better ways, with an open mind to listen and contemplate new ideas. If we are passionate about a problem or opportunity, we have to move on from talking about it to doing something about it. It does not matter if the world around us is imperfect, and not all of the ducks are in a row (let’s face it, they rarely are).

In the Agile community you will often hear this saying: “start by doing to truly become Agile”. This is true for the two big I’s. Look for systematic ways to drive Iterative and Incremental behavior and, just like the best slogan of the century: just do it!