Last week a friend of mine commented that there isn’t much stuff on Agile Tai Chi on the Internet. There is an official Agile Tai Chi website, which is at:
https://www.agiletaichi.com
But that is more of a members' site and doesn’t have much public information available. One of the reasons for this is that Agile Tai Chi is a very “hands on” thing, and is generally disseminated through the people involved.
So here goes my attempt at rectifying the situation….
A bit about me:
Everyone in the Agile Tai Chi world gets a nickname, and I mean everyone, even people who are just starting out. This is about teams gelling and team members feeling like friends rather than colleagues. Mine is Rocboy, and I kind of like it. “ROC” was one of the former names of one part of Agile Tai Chi. Agile Tai Chi has had a lot of names over the years as the people involved got used to the idea - it’s been “in development” - they were kind of like the code names that car companies give their cars before they reveal them under their official names.
But one of the things that we all like to do is put things in little boxes, and viewing Agile Tai Chi as a framework that might be equivalent to something like Scrum or XP would be a mistake. It is a framework, but it’s much looser and more expansive than those frameworks. It’s more like a massive collection of wisdom about team working that uses somatics as a platform for continual growth and learning.
One of the constants in the world is change, and Agile Tai Chi is very much of the opinion that agile > Agile, that is to say, being agile (in it’s common dictionary definition) is a much bigger thing that adopting Agile (the group of competing frameworks and their associated world-views).
Agile Tai Chi is about getting teams to work on the way that they are collaborating as much as they do on the work that they are doing. It is the very opposite of a prescriptive framework, indeed it enshrines principles that are intended to divert people from their natural inclination to focus on processes and tools, rather than on the much more important issue of people and their interactions.
