This is our depiction of Dr. Ivar Jacobson’s mission of verbalizing the ‘crazy things’ in working with agile methodologies and frameworks (‘methods’).

He describes that, what really adds value, are the practices that we do as part of a method. Unfortunately, these practices are locked in the ‘method prisons’ that are guarded by the so-called ‘gurus’ (for, e.g., proprietary reasons), which makes it difficult for organizations and practitioners to cherrypick the practices that fit their specific context.

And though the methods have quite a lot in common and take place in product development, they, paradoxically, still have no common ground in terms of, e.g., a common terminology or definitions.

Finally, when adopting the methods, organizations drown in commercialized certification systems and training material, while being left with the risk of falling back to their old behaviors when the trainers and external consultants have left the building.

So, what to do about all this? Well, a start is to look into how we can be more method-agnostic, bring the actual practices from each method into the light and make them available to pick and choose from for organizations with context-specific needs. Dr. Jacobson’s Essence model is an approach to this—which we do hope doesn’t become a method prison, itself.