The Hot 30 with Matty, counting down the hottest 30 songs in Australia as voted by you.
Heard Coast to Coast on over 100 stations in Australia and around the world.
Please note: This is article 7 in a series that explores mapping agile certifications to what Daniel Luschwitz and I have coined the Agile Political Spectrum. The previous blogs in the series are available here:
A note on our political comparisons: These political comparisons are playful metaphors designed to illustrate philosophical positions on the agile spectrum. No certification body was harmed in the making of this analysis.
Every political spectrum has its left-leaning independents. Not career politicians shaped by party preselection and factional compromise, but people who arrive carrying genuine depth in a field, a clear set of values, and a conviction that none of the available options adequately represent what they believe. They don’t offer a party platform. They offer a proposition based on principles and evidence, choosing policies that best fit the community they serve.
In the agile world, the certification that best represents the left-leaning independent is ICAgile.
Now before we go too deeply, Daniel and I should acknowledge our relationship with respect to ICAgile. We both have a long association with the certification as founding partners and have dedicated much of our careers to what this certification set out to achieve. We have done our best to apply the same honesty here that we have brought to the rest of the series, but some bias might prevail.
The International Consortium for Agile was founded in 2010 by Ahmed Sidky, Ph.D and Alistair Cockburn, an original signatory of the Agile Manifesto. Their founding proposition was radical for its time: agile is not a process, a methodology, or a framework. It is a mindset, described by four values, defined by twelve principles, and manifested through an unlimited number of practices. ICAgile was the first certification body to build its entire certification architecture around this approach. It was designed explicitly to strip away any prescriptive approaches and invite participants to adopt agile in their context. ICAgile is the “choose your own adventure” story in the spectrum.
So who is ICAgile’s political counterpart?
As our values-driven and deliberately non-prescriptive agile certification, ICAgile maps to left-leaning independents, the credible crossbenchers who sit outside the major party structures, have deep expertise in their chosen discipline, and win on the strength of their knowledge and principles.
The parallels are immediate. Left-leaning independents don’t run on a party platform because a platform implies a fixed position regardless of context. Instead, they review the options, apply their expertise, and make policy decisions based on what their community actually needs. ICAgile works the same way. It accredited learning experiences against outcomes developed by thought leaders, and trusted facilitators to review the available approaches, apply their own expertise, and choose the practices that best suited their learners. Neither is making a bet on a single system. Both are making a bet on the quality of the judgement in the room.
Left-leaning independents also attract people of genuine substance. What draws them is rarely ambition for power, it is frustration that the existing options are failing the people they care about. Their constituents are not just voters; they are the community they have spent their professional lives serving. ICAgile attracted the same calibre of contributor. The thought leaders who built its learning tracks, Craig among them, brought genuine field experience to what they created. These were not theorists writing curriculum. They were practitioners who had lived the problems the learning was designed to address, and that credibility showed in the quality of what the best facilitators delivered.
One of the most compelling qualities of the left-leaning independent is the breadth of community they can serve. Unconstrained by party ideology, they are free to work across the aisle, drawing on whatever evidence and expertise the situation demands. Their values are progressive, but their reach is not limited to the left. ICAgile operates the same way. Grounded in a progressive, mindset-first philosophy, its certification was never the exclusive territory of product-led organisations or transformation advocates. Practitioners working in heavily governed, project-based environments found ICAgile equally valuable, because values and principles are transferable regardless of context. A conservative organisation and a progressive one can both benefit from genuine agile understanding. The method they choose to apply it through is simply a different chapter of the same adventure.
There is a challenge that comes with being an independent that party politicians rarely face in the same way. Without a machine behind them, left-leaning independents can spread themselves across too many issues, developing a view on everything and a focused mandate on nothing. The community expects breadth, but the work demands focus. ICAgile faced an equivalent tension. The curriculum expanded steadily across the years, reaching into coaching, leadership, product ownership, DevOps, and business agility, each addition driven by genuine expertise and real demand. But breadth created a maintenance problem. Learning outcomes that had been developed by some of the finest practitioners in the field began to age, and the pace of updates did not match the pace at which the discipline was moving. What had once felt current started to feel like it was describing a conversation from several years earlier. There was also a structural constraint that compounded this: every certification had to fit within a deliverable of two or more days to qualify, which worked well for standalone learning but became a genuine hindrance when organisations needed bespoke, modular transformation programs that didn’t map neatly to that format. The architecture that had once been liberating had quietly become a limitation.
For practitioners, ICAgile’s foundational certification remains one of the most intellectually honest starting points in the market. It grounds people in the thinking behind agility rather than the mechanics of performing it. Because the learning is anchored in values and principles rather than prescribed practices, it has an inherent flexibility that method-specific certifications simply cannot offer. Practitioners are not taught one way to do something. They are equipped to think about why agility works, which means the application of that learning can evolve as the field evolves, as their organisation matures, and as their context demands. For organisations, understand what you are investing in: practitioners who can think, adapt, and choose the right approach for their context, rather than practitioners who can only perform a prescribed one.
Left-leaning independents rarely form government. Their value is not in the machinery of power but in the quality of thinking they bring to the room, and in their willingness to hold a position on principle when the major parties are playing politics. ICAgile’s most enduring contribution is exactly that: it said, early and clearly, that agile is a mindset and that the values and principles that define it can be applied in any context, through any practice, by any team willing to genuinely understand them. No method required. No platform necessary. Just the conviction that the right answer should follow the evidence and the context, not the other way around.
The Hot 30 with Matty, counting down the hottest 30 songs in Australia as voted by you.
Heard Coast to Coast on over 100 stations in Australia and around the world.
Please note: This is article 6 in a series that explores mapping agile certifications to what Daniel Luschwitz and I have coined the Agile Political Spectrum. The previous blogs in the series are available here:
A note on our political comparisons: These political comparisons are playful metaphors designed to illustrate philosophical positions on the agile spectrum. No certification body was harmed in the making of this analysis.
Every political spectrum has its quietly effective parties. Not the idealists demanding systemic overhaul. Not the establishment parties jostling for the centre. But the movements that do serious, disciplined work, build a loyal following, and somehow never quite break through to the mainstream because a louder, more charismatic neighbour took all the air out of the room.
In the agile certification world, that party is Kanban.
Ask most practitioners if they ‘use Kanban’ and a majority will say yes. Ask them whether they actively limit work in progress, track flow metrics, use service level expectations, or practice evolutionary change discipline and the numbers drop sharply.
David J. Anderson, who pioneered the Kanban Method for knowledge work, has himself declared “Kanban is ubiquitous, it’s time to declare victory.” And in one sense, he’s right. Kanban boards are everywhere however the Kanban Method is far less common than you might think. That gap, between widespread adoption of the surface and shallow understanding of the substance, is precisely what makes Kanban one of the most underappreciated certifications on our Agile Political Spectrum.
Kanban’s roots stretch back to post-war Japan and the Toyota Production System, not as ideology, but as operational discipline. The original Kanban was a signalling card used to trigger replenishment in a pull-based production line. No manifesto. No cultural revolution. A control mechanism designed to reduce inventory risk and improve flow.
When Anderson introduced the Kanban Method to knowledge work in the mid-2000s, he was deliberate about what it was and wasn’t. He made the positioning explicit from the outset: start with what you do now, respect current roles and responsibilities, and pursue incremental, evolutionary improvement.
Kanban does not require new roles, it does not demand reorganisation or assume that hierarchy must be dismantled. Instead, it asks organisations to visualise their work, limit work in progress, measure flow, manage risk, and improve gradually over time. This is not structural reform. It is structural preservation combined with operational discipline.
Over time, Kanban matured into a serious professional discipline. Kanban University formalised the certification pathway, building a rigorous body of knowledge around flow metrics, service-level expectations, probabilistic forecasting, and the Kanban Maturity Model. The emphasis was never on ceremonies or team rituals. It was on service delivery systems and organisational capability.
So who is Kanban’s political counterpart?
As our right-of-centre, disciplined, and chronically underrated agile certification, Kanban maps to the Australian Democrats.
The Australian Democrats were a centrist party founded in 1977, best known for holding the balance of power in the Senate and their rallying cry: “keeping the bastards honest.” At their peak they wielded influence well beyond their vote share, doing serious legislative work while louder voices on both sides dominated the headlines.
The parallels with Kanban are immediate and striking.
Both built serious, rigorous bodies of knowledge and operated with genuine discipline. Both accumulated loyal, knowledgeable followings that punched above their weight in terms of real-world influence. And both were ultimately drowned out, not because their ideas were wrong, but because a louder movement captured the room.
Against the noise of certification ecosystems that scaled aggressively through the 2000s and 2010s, Kanban University’s comparatively modest global network barely registers. And yet, in organisations that genuinely implement it, the Kanban Method consistently delivers improved flow, reduced risk, greater predictability, and a cleaner picture of organisational capacity.
The Democrats were never trying to win government. They were trying to make the system work better. Kanban was never trying to replace whatever else was in the room. It was trying to improve how work flows through whatever system already exists. Both found meaningful influence in that role. Neither got the recognition their contribution deserved.
Kanban boards have become so ubiquitous that many practitioners genuinely believe they are “doing Kanban” simply by moving cards across columns in a tool or on a physical whiteboard. Far fewer implement WIP limits with discipline. Fewer still track cycle time, use probabilistic forecasting, or develop capability in flow analytics. The Kanban Maturity Model, one of the more thoughtful frameworks for understanding organisational development in the agile world, is largely unknown outside the Kanban community itself.
This creates a peculiar market dynamic. Kanban suffers not from bad press, but from misrepresentation by familiarity. Nobody declares Kanban adoption a failure. They just assume they’re already doing it. The certification therefore struggles to communicate its genuine depth to a market that thinks it already knows what Kanban is.
The agile world generated years of passionate debate, consultant wars, and certification inflation around louder frameworks, which paradoxically gave them more visibility. Kanban slipped in the back door, got implemented on whiteboards everywhere, and then got largely forgotten as a serious discipline.
Kanban sits on the right-conservative side of our Agile Political Spectrum, but in a particular way. It is not conservative because it adds bureaucracy or resists change. It is conservative because it genuinely respects existing structures and pursues improvement within them rather than demanding their replacement.
This makes Kanban valuable in a range of contexts that more progressive certifications struggle to serve. For teams operating in complex, highly regulated, or politically sensitive environments where structural redesign is simply not on the table, Kanban offers a credible, evidence-based path to improvement. For leaders who need to demonstrate results without triggering a governance revolt, Kanban’s language of flow, throughput, and risk is far more accessible than the vocabulary of transformation.
For organisations genuinely committed to a product operating model and cultural transformation, Kanban may feel insufficient on its own, though it often becomes essential as a delivery discipline within that broader journey. The ability to visualise and manage flow doesn’t become less important once you’ve reorganised around products. It becomes more important.
If you are an organisation wondering whether Kanban ‘counts’ as agile, or whether it’s just a board tool, the answer is that the board is the least interesting part. The discipline underneath it is where the value lives.
The Australian Democrats may no longer exist as a political party. Their legacy, however, is woven into the fabric of Australian legislative history in ways that rarely get acknowledged. Kanban risks a similar fate, its ideas absorbed into every tool and methodology without credit, its depth largely undiscovered.
Like a good Democrats senator, Kanban won’t promise you a revolution. But it will make the system you already have work considerably better. If you are attempting to reduce waste, bottlenecks and the invisible work quietly choking your organisation then Kanban might be just what you need in keeping the bastards honest.
This article was originally published on LinkedIn by Daniel Luschwitz. The next article in the series is ICAgile and the Left-Leaning Independents.
The Hot 30 with Matty, counting down the hottest 30 songs in Australia as voted by you.
Heard Coast to Coast on over 100 stations in Australia and around the world.
The Hot 30 with Matty, counting down the hottest 30 songs in Australia as voted by you.
Heard Coast to Coast on over 100 stations in Australia and around the world.
The Hot 30 with Matty, counting down the hottest 30 songs in Australia as voted by you.
Heard Coast to Coast on over 100 stations in Australia and around the world.
The Hot 30 with Matty, counting down the hottest 30 songs in Australia as voted by you.
Heard Coast to Coast on over 100 stations in Australia and around the world.
The Hot 30 with Matty, counting down the hottest 30 songs in Australia as voted by you.
Heard Coast to Coast on over 100 stations in Australia and around the world.
The Hot 30 with Matty, counting down the hottest 30 songs in Australia as voted by you.
Heard Coast to Coast on over 100 stations in Australia and around the world.
Craig Smith 
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