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:

1. What if Agile Certifications were a Political Party?
2. The Agile Political Landscape Series: PRINCE2 Agile and One Nation
3. The Agile Political Landscape Series: LeSS and The Greens
4. The Agile Political Landscape Series: DSDM and Katter’s Australian PartyDSDM and Katter’s Australian Party
5. The Agile Political Landscape Series: DSDM and Katter’s Australian PartyDevOps and Teal Independents
6. The Agile Political Landscape Series: Kanban and the Australian Democrats

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.