Agile Mindset Model

Defines agility through reflection, openness, and outcome focus.

"The Agile mindset is a set of beliefs, habits, and attitudes that support working in conditions of uncertainty and complexity." 1

Karen Eilers & Christiaan Verwijs

The Agile Mindset Model by Karen Eilers and Christiaan Verwijs offers a practical and research-backed lens on what it truly means to think and behave with agility. Rather than treating Agile as a fixed set of values or beliefs, the model identifies five measurable mental habits that can grow with practice: willingness to reflect, desire to improve, openness to others, ability to navigate complexity, and focus on outcomes. These traits describe how people respond under uncertainty, pressure, and change. This model brings clarity to a term often used vaguely and helps organizations shift from performative agility to embodied, resilient practice.

Impact on Teams & Organizations

Teams and organizations adopting the Agile Mindset Model experience more sustainable growth and collaboration. The five traits create an environment of safety, learning, and adaptability.

  1. Willingness to Reflect:
    • Teams pause to evaluate decisions and behaviors.
    • Encourages learning from failure instead of blame.
  2. Desire to Improve:
    • Drives intrinsic motivation and experimentation.
    • Prevents stagnation and promotes continuous refinement of both product and process.
  3. Openness to Others:
    • Builds trust, empathy, and receptiveness to feedback.
    • Strengthens psychological safety and shared ownership.
  4. Ability to Navigate Complexity:
    • Encourages adaptive thinking and comfort with ambiguity.
    • Supports iterative planning and contextual decision-making.
  5. Focus on Outcomes:
    • Shifts attention from outputs and activity to real-world impact.
    • Aligns effort with value delivered to customers and users.

Each trait reinforces the others, creating a flywheel effect where reflection leads to better decisions, which improve outcomes, which feed back into further learning.

Scenario

A product team is working in a scaled Agile environment but facing recurring delivery delays and unclear priorities. Initially, blame is placed on dependencies and external blockers. However, a coach introduces the Agile Mindset Model and facilitates a workshop to explore each dimension.

  • The team realizes Retrospectives are rushed and superficial (low reflection).
  • Feedback is siloed and unwelcomed across roles (limited openness).
  • Team members feel reactive and disoriented by shifting initiatives (struggles with complexity).
  • User impact is rarely discussed, replaced by talk of story points and velocity (low outcome focus).

By targeting these five dimensions, the team slowly begins to improve: Retros become richer, empathy across functions increases, and alignment with customer outcomes sharpens.

Ways to Mitigate:

Organizations often stall in Agile transformation because mindset shifts are assumed rather than developed. The following practices help foster each dimension:

  1. Willingness to Reflect:
    • Encourage frequent Retrospectives with meaningful depth.
    • Normalize learning from failure and surfacing tension.
  2. Desire to Improve:
    • Use feedback loops, mentoring, and improvement experiments.
    • Reward experimentation over risk avoidance.
  3. Openness to Others:
    • Facilitate cross-role collaboration and dialogue.
    • Model vulnerability and active listening in leadership.
  4. Ability to Navigate Complexity:
    • Introduce systems thinking and visual models like Cynefin.
    • Replace linear plans with hypotheses and short feedback cycles.
  5. Focus on Outcomes:
    • Tie work to user value and product goals, not output metrics.
    • Use OKRs, customer feedback, and user testing to anchor delivery.
Conclusion:

The Agile Mindset Model by Eilers and Verwijs translates agility from an abstract cultural goal into specific, trainable capabilities. Teams that embody these five dimensions tend to navigate change with clarity, cohesion, and creativity. They learn, improve, and deliver, not because they follow a checklist, but because they think differently. Agile coaching becomes more effective when rooted in developing these internal habits rather than enforcing external rituals.

Key Takeaways

  • The Agile Mindset consists of five dimensions: reflectiveness, improvement drive, openness, complexity navigation, and outcome focus.
  • These traits are not innate, but can be developed through coaching and team practices.
  • A lack of mindset is often the root cause of failed Agile adoptions.
  • Leaders play a critical role in modeling and reinforcing mindset dimensions.
  • Agile success is more about how people think than how they follow a framework.

Summary

Karen Eilers and Christiaan Verwijs's Agile Mindset Model offers a grounded, observable framework for building agility from the inside out. When teams cultivate these five dimensions, they create a resilient foundation for learning, delivery, and growth. The result is not just Agile in form, but in spirit, a team that can navigate complexity with purpose, humility, and focus.