Agile LearningLinkedIn post text: Traditional marketing ignores the possibility of bad strategy. As a result, the quality of the strategy is a constant niggling issue, undermining satisfaction and commitment. Agile simply opens up the possibility of bad strategy, and schedules time to discuss it. This then gives teams permission to simply follow the strategy - a rare and strange freedom in many big organizations

This LinkedIn update sums up one of our core findings from research into how Agile methodology should be applied to a marketing organization.

If you’re implementing Agile right in your marketing organization, then you’re applying it in a way that’s about learning. The focus on speed or pace is a part of that, but it’s not the point of it. The point is to figure out what the right thing to be doing is, as quickly as possible.

It’s like that anecdote about directions. A foreigner asks a local in the street how to get to some landmark. The local responds: “Well, first of all, I wouldn’t start from here . . . ” The beauty of Agile for marketing is the assumption of poor assumptions.

That’s why our published research focuses a lot on two things: the marketing team’s learning agenda and its planning cadence.

Learning agenda: a framework for investigating how marketing activity ladders up to measurable business outcomes and then the data and discussion to address it.

Planning cadence: the iterative discussions against which teams assess data, input, and opinions from customer-facing activities against future marketing activities.

Our counsel to marketers: Get your learning agenda and your planning cadence right, then address your team and Agile process composition (i.e., kanban, two-week sprints, scrumban, in-person retrospectives or not, etc.).

If you’re a client and you want to dive deeper into how Agile should be implemented across marketing, there’s a brand-new report on it for you.

If you’re not a client, feel free to join the discussion I started on LinkedIn.