Every now and then, I come across the word Agility outside my usual Agile bubble.
If you’ve ever seen a Border Collie fly through a tunnel, leap over bars, and slalom like lightning, you know: that’s agility.
But it’s not the agility we talk about in business. In fact, it’s almost the opposite.
Dog Agility
Dog agility is all about precision, timing, and control.
The handler knows the course, the dog doesn’t.
One leads, the other follows. No daily stand-ups, no retrospectives, no “inspect and adapt.”
It’s teamwork, yes, but with one boss. A performance, not an experiment.
Business Agility
In theory, business agility is about empowered teams, value, and learning.
In practice, it often looks like this:
- Measuring speed instead of value
- Managers “coaching” by telling
- Celebrating output over outcome
- Big Room Plannings where the only real alignment is everyone agreeing they’d rather be anywhere else
- Control disguised as empowerment
We meant to support teams, but kept steering them.
Agile turned back into agility-with-a-leash.
The Irony of Control
In software and business, agility means letting go.
Teams find their own route, adjust, learn, and sometimes redesign the whole track.
Where dog agility thrives on obedience, business agility thrives on trust.
One runs faster because it’s told to, the other moves smarter because it chooses to.
The Real Difference
Dog agility demands discipline.
Business agility demands trust.
The first is a dance of control.
The second, a beautiful kind of chaos.
Yet both share something essential:
- Trust; acting without fear
- Communication; clear and constant
- Rhythm; knowing when to push or pause
- Joy; because without joy, performance collapses
The Moral
Real agility, in any form, is knowing when to steer and when to step back.
Too little direction is chaos. Too much is control in disguise.
The magic lies in the middle, between speed and value, control and trust, doing and learning.
Because whether you’re running a course or running a company…
The goal isn’t just to move faster.
It’s to move together and create value.
