Twenty-five years ago, a group of practitioners wrote the “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” and that changed how teams work. Now, a new manifesto has arrived – and this one is for the whole organization. The “Manifesto for Enterprise Agility”, released by PMI in March 2026, expands agility beyond software teams and places it where it has always needed to live: at the leadership level, across every function, embedded in organizational culture. This is not a correction of what came before. It is the natural next step – agility, evolved.
Why Now?
The original Manifesto for Agile Software Development did exactly what it needed to do in 2001. It gave software teams a shared language, a set of values, and a framework for building better products. It was a snapshot of a specific moment in time, solving a specific problem.
But that word – “software” – created an unintended consequence. For 25 years, leaders outside of IT looked at that document and concluded it wasn’t for them. CEOs, COOs, VPs of Finance – people who needed agility most – opted out of the conversation before it started. Agile became something that happened behind the glass wall, managed by Scrum Masters and tracked in project tools. The rest of the organization continued as usual: building multi-year roadmaps, optimizing departments in isolation, and calling that strategy.
The Manifesto for Enterprise Agility changes that. Developed over 8-9 months in collaboration with the agile community and C-suite leaders across industries, it sends an unambiguous message: agility belongs to the entire organization. And it starts at the top.
Here is what that looks like in practice.
Value 1: Clear Purpose Realized Through Adaptive Plans
This is not permission to plan less. It is an invitation to plan differently.
The purpose, the vision, the “why” of the organization must be clear and stable. That part is non-negotiable. But the path to that purpose? Flexible. Revisable. Empirical. The mistake most organizations make is treating the roadmap as sacred when it is a hypothesis about the future.
Multi-year Gantt charts are not strategy. They are a plan that assumes the world will cooperate – and the world rarely does. Markets shift. Customer needs evolve. Entire industries get disrupted overnight. Organizations that treat their long-range plan as fixed don’t just miss opportunities – they actively resist the information they need to course-correct.
The antidote is not chaos. It is adaptive planning: holding the destination firm while staying nimble about how you get there. The purpose is firm. The path is flexible. That distinction changes everything.
Value 2: Shared Enterprise Outcomes Over Functional Optimization
Ask a room of leaders what five words describe their organizational culture. In most rooms, at least half will say silos.
This is the systems thinking problem at the enterprise level. An organization is not a collection of departments. It is a system. And you cannot optimize a system by optimizing its parts in isolation.
Peter Senge captured this decades ago: bring together a group of brilliant individuals and measure the collective output of the team – it is often lower than the potential of its parts. That is because local optimization and system optimization are not the same thing. A sales team that hits its targets while creating downstream chaos for operations has not succeeded. Nine healthy departments and one struggling one is still a struggling system.
The second value of the Enterprise Agility Manifesto confronts the over-reliance on departmental KPIs directly. KPIs that start as aspirational targets can rapidly become rigid requirements. Teams start asking “how does this work support our KPIs?” rather than “how does this move the organization forward?” The metric begins to consume the mission.
True enterprise agility requires every part of the organization asking: are we winning as a whole?
Value 3: Continuous Reinvention Over Preservation
What got you here won’t get you there.
This value invites organizations to be willing – genuinely willing – to question what made them successful and ask whether it still applies. The answer is sometimes yes. But practices that served an organization well in one era can quietly become constraints in another. Not because anyone made a wrong decision, but because the world moved on.
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper called “we’ve always done it this way” the most damaging phrase in the English language. That was decades before the pace of change hit its current velocity. In the digital world, organizations face thousands of decision points daily. The ability to inspect, adapt, and experiment is not a nice-to-have. It is a survival skill.
Here is the critical distinction: continuous reinvention is not continuous reorganization. Moving people around, reshuffling reporting lines, rebranding departments – that is activity, not reinvention. Real reinvention is cultural. It is an organization’s willingness to run small experiments, fail safely, learn publicly, and build on what works.
That kind of culture does not emerge by accident. It requires leaders who normalize experimentation – who model curiosity, create psychological safety, and make it structurally possible for people to surface what isn’t working and propose something different.
And it requires the previous two values as a foundation. Without a clear and stable purpose, reinvention has no anchor. Without system-wide thinking, reinvention in one pocket gets strangled by preservation in another.
Value 4: Human Centricity Amidst Change
Change doesn’t fail because of people. It fails because people were ignored.
Every initiative, every transformation, every strategic pivot passes through human beings. And human beings are not passive recipients of change – they respond to it, champion it, or quietly disengage based largely on how they were treated in the process.
Change done to people creates stress and resistance. Change done with people – where individuals have agency, voice, and genuine understanding of the why – creates ownership and momentum.
The fourth value asks organizations to build learning environments. To invest in organizational emotional intelligence, not just individual capability. One highly empathic leader surrounded by a command-and-control culture does not make a human-centric organization. The question is: what is the emotional intelligence of the system as a whole? How does the organization handle uncertainty, conflict, failure, and growth – together?
Senge’s learning organization framework is the right lens here. An organization that learns together – across roles, levels, and functions – is one that can adapt without fracturing. One that can reinvent itself without losing people in the process. Because without the humans, you have nothing. They are not a variable in the equation. They are the equation.
The Shift That Has to Happen
The nine principles that support these four values fall into three areas:
- Leadership Behavior
- Organizational Design
- Execution
Each one builds on the same foundational argument.
Enterprise agility is not a software delivery methodology. It is an organizational capability that leadership must build, model, and protect.
For 25 years, the framing of the original manifesto gave the broader organization an easy exit. The Manifesto for Enterprise Agility removes that exit. It speaks directly to every leader responsible for creating the environment in which others do their work. It says: agility is yours too. In fact, it starts with you.
This is not about making what came before wrong. The original manifesto was exactly right for its time. It solved the problem it needed to solve. Now, 25 years on, the problem has expanded – and so has the solution.
Enterprise agility is not a process shift. It is a leadership shift. An organizational shift. An everyone shift.
The next chapter of agile is here. And it belongs to all of us.