autonomy ⁽²⁾

"You were the chosen one." That's how I feel about what happened to agile. We took beautiful principles for unleashing human potential and turned them into exactly what we were trying to escape: rigid ceremonies, certification mills, and story point torture sessions.

What Went Wrong:
🏝️ Cargo cult behavior: Copying agile forms without understanding the spirit
📜 Certification industrial complex: Weekend certifications and 150+ page frameworks
⚖️ Principles vs practices: We codified flexibility and removed adaptability
🔄 The scaling trap: When "this helped our team" becomes "mandatory for all teams"

What Actually Works:
✅ Experimenting and Learning is REAL agility
✅ Principles (trust, transparency) beat frameworks every time
✅ Voluntary adoption vs mandated compliance
✅ Local ownership vs corporate scaling

Real Examples:

• Valve: No hierarchy, billions in revenue through principles over process
• W.L. Gore: Lattice organization enabling constant innovation
• Spotify: Evolved organically, never became rigid doctrine

The Pattern:

• Boeing (rigid processes) failed.
• Alcoa (flexible principles) succeeded.

Your approach avoids the agile trap by growing change organically with informal leaders instead of imposing structure from above. 

Ever wonder why your best moments at work happened when someone trusted you to figure it out? Most of us know intuitively that freedom and trust lead to better results - so why do most organizations still operate like it's 1950?

In this episode, I introduce The Liberty Framework - four simple principles that create conditions where human creativity naturally aligns with business success:

• 🎯 Autonomy within clear boundaries - Maximum freedom within minimal necessary structure
• 📊 Evidence over authority - Let data win, regardless of hierarchy
• 📋 Information follows decision rights - Give people the context they need to succeed
• 🎯 Purpose connects individual to collective impact - Clear line of sight from daily work to meaningful outcomes