Last night we held a free 2 hour workshop led by David Parker, executive director of the OpenAgile Institute, in which he explained the essence of OpenAgile, one of the newer agile methodologies. I’ll try to summarize what I took away from the evening.

OpenAgile is an open source methodology, meaning that anyone can participate in the process of creating and evolving it. This itself strikes me as a particularly “agile” way of building a methodology, one that embraces the very notion of continuous improvement based on the actual experiences of the people using it.

OpenAgile begins with three “foundations”: Truthfulness, the Learning Circle, and Consultative Decision Making. The evening began with small-group discussions of these, and we got to a pretty fine level of detailed understanding of these, e.g., the difference between Consultative Decision making and consensus (the former is focused on commitment, the latter on agreement). The practice of OpenAgile involves active, ongoing discussion of these–I like that it puts an emphasis on the continuous growth of deep understanding. On the OpenAgile homepage, there is a Chinese proverb that illustrates the value of this human-centered approach to continuous improvement: “Learning is like rowing upstream: not to advance is to drop back.”

On a similar note, I got the impression that OpenAgile is not prescriptive. Perhaps because it is intended to be used by teams in all different fields, not just software, OpenAgile appears to resist declaring itself as a set of rules. In that sense, it has more in common with the Agile Manifesto than it does with Ken Schwaber’s Scrum Guide. As someone sitting at my table remarked, it seems like a methodology that is well-suited to high-performing teams or experienced teams that want to adopt an agile approach–those whose teamwork may be past the shu stage of shu ha ri–and in that sense, I think it fills an important niche (which is not to say that OpenAgile is merely a “niche” product, quite the opposite).

At root, comparing OpenAgile to scrum, say, more things are similar than they are different. Both are agile, iterative methods. But the subtle-yet-profound difference in emphasis, language and orientation are interesting and thought-provoking. Nor are the two incompatible–you could easily layer discussion of the OpenAgile foundations, for example, onto an existing scrum practice, and doing so might help the team maintain a more holistic view of growth–that personal growth and the growth of “value” a business delivers are interconnected at a very deep level.

Two hours was barely time to scratch the surface, and I’m looking forward to learning more from David about how we can put some of these ideas into practice here at Agile Learning Labs.