Most people in agile can quote the four values. Ask the same room about the twelve principles underneath and something changes. A pause. Some counting on fingers. Maybe someone offers number eight.
Fifteen years ago, trainers and coaches knew all twelve by number. That has quietly faded, and there is a simple reason why. The original Manifesto website has looked the same since 2001, and the principles sit one click down, at the bottom, formatted like a footnote. So the values got the attention and the principles became forgotten lore.
There is a second reason, and it does more damage. Read the first line:
Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
If you work in marketing, finance, HR, or operations, you stopped at the last word. Software. Not mine. Someone else’s problem. The document was written by seventeen people about software development, and it says so, and that gives everyone outside of engineering permission to stop reading.
Which is the thing to fix. Not the principles themselves. The distance between the words on the page and the work in front of your team.
Start with the word that stops people
Take software out of principle one and something has to replace it. Deliverables is the obvious swap and it is the wrong one. A team doing process improvement may have nothing shippable for the first few Sprints and still be moving something real forward. Work product has the same flaw: you can generate an enormous amount of work product and none of it worth having.
Value holds up better. Not because it is precise, but because it forces the conversation that matters. Value to a tester is not value to a coder. Value to a leader is neither of those. A CEO does not deliver software, so the moment the sentence says software, the CEO decides this is a team thing rather than an organization thing, and the whole idea stays boxed in one department.
There is a fair objection. Value is vague. Someone can wave the word around and mean nothing by it. That objection is the point. Once a team has to define what value means in their context, they have had a far more useful hour than any wording exercise would have given them. Define it, and you have a much better chance of delivering it.
Business people and developers
Principle four says business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project. The intent is not in question. The nouns are.
If your team is marketing, nobody in it is a developer, and “I am not a developer” is the easiest way to leave a conversation ever invented. Stakeholders and teams carries the same meaning and closes the exit. Stakeholders is broader than business people and truer than customers, and team is whatever your team happens to be.
This is one of the two or three principles that everything else leans on. Getting the words right so that people stay in the room is not a cosmetic change.
The word project, and why it is fine now
Principles four and five both say project. There was a period, roughly five or six years long, when the community got very worked up about this. Product, not project. Fund the product, not the project. People were dogmatic about it.
Twenty five years on, with the Agile Alliance and PMI having signed a partnership, project reads perfectly well. A great many organizations run projects, always have, and will keep doing so. Bringing an agile mindset into project work is harder, and it works.
The failure mode is not the word. It is what happens when an organization goes all in on a stage gated plan and then bolts Scrum on top of it. That is worth arguing about. The noun on the page is not.
Face to face never meant in person
Principle six says the most efficient and effective method of conveying information is face-to-face conversation. Before 2020 this was routinely used as an argument for co-location, and after 2020 it was routinely used as an argument that agile could not survive remote work.
At the Manifesto’s twenty year anniversary, the surviving signatories gathered on a video call and were asked about exactly this. It says face to face, and we are all remote now. Do you stand by it?
Alistair Cockburn’s response was a question of his own. Does it say body to body?
It does not. It does not say in person and it does not say co-located. On a video call you can see someone’s face, their hands, their posture, whether they mean it. Turn the camera off and you have lost it, but that is a choice about the camera, not about geography.
The reason this principle exists is worth spelling out. Albert Mehrabian’s communication model puts 55 percent of what a person absorbs in body language, 38 percent in facial expression and tone, and 7 percent in the words themselves. Some people dispute the numbers. Nobody seriously disputes the direction.
Which means that when you send a message instead of having a conversation, you are delivering a small fraction of what you meant and trusting the other person to supply the rest. They will. From their own mood, their own week, their own assumptions about you. Send that message to six people and you now have six different stories running in parallel, and by the time they surface you are not resolving a misunderstanding, you are cleaning up after one.
Pick up the phone. Better still, turn the camera on. Do not lob it into Slack and consider it communicated.
Translate, do not replace
None of this is a case for a new version of the principles.
Asked whether he would change the Manifesto, Alistair Cockburn did not pause. No. It was written then. He called it a snapshot in time, and that is exactly what it is.
The work is different, and smaller, and something any team can do in an hour. Read the twelve out loud together. Where a word does not fit your world, say what it would be instead. Keep the meaning intact and change nothing but the vocabulary.
Do that and two things happen. Your team engages with a document most of them have never read. And nobody gets to opt out on the grounds that it was written for somebody else.
If the words do not resonate, people shut down. Give them words that do.