Modern Agile is a framework proposed by joshua-kerievsky around 2016, emerging from his dissatisfaction with the state of mainstream Agile. Kerievsky — founder of Industrial Logic and a practitioner who had worked extensively with extreme-programming and scrum — argued that the Agile movement had become "drowning in bureaucracy": ceremonies without values, certifications without capability, frameworks without outcomes. Modern Agile was his attempt to distill what actually mattered into a simpler formulation.
The Four Guiding Principles
Kerievsky proposed replacing the agile-manifesto-four-values and agile-manifesto-twelve-principles with four high-level principles:
Make People Awesome — Create conditions where everyone involved (customers, users, team members) can do their best work. This is the humanistic core of individuals-and-interactions extended to include users and customers, not just developers.
Make Safety a Prerequisite — Psychological safety (the ability to speak up, raise concerns, fail without punishment), physical safety, and system safety. This principle draws on Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety, which the Agile movement had discussed but not foregrounded. Making it prerequisite — not something to aspire to but a condition before other work proceeds — is a sharper formulation than the manifesto's more implicit humanistic commitments.
Experiment and Learn Rapidly — This condenses inspect-and-adapt, empirical-process-control, and the lean startup Build-Measure-Learn loop into a single principle that explicitly values the speed of learning, not just the fact of it.
Deliver Value Continuously — Continuous delivery as organizational capability and aspiration, not periodic releases. This connects to the DevOps and continuous delivery movements, aligning Modern Agile with the technical evolution that had occurred since 2001.
The Critique Embedded in the Proposal
Modern Agile is as much a critique as a framework. The implicit diagnosis is that mainstream Agile had:
The "Make Safety a Prerequisite" principle is particularly pointed: it implies that many Agile teams operate without psychological safety, making inspect-and-adapt ceremonies performative because team members cannot honestly surface problems.
Reception and Influence
Modern Agile has found traction primarily in communities already sympathetic to the post-Agile critique — practitioners who had experienced dark-agile implementations and were looking for language to articulate what was missing. It has not displaced existing frameworks but has contributed to the broader conversation about what the movement's core values actually are. The simplicity of four principles (compared to four values and twelve principles) is appealing; critics note that the principles are abstract enough to be interpreted in nearly any direction, which is both their strength and their limitation.