The Power of Context

Drawing on decades of experience in Agile and digital delivery, Daniel Luschwitz shares how context-aware leadership drives better outcomes. By aligning delivery with organisational goals, team dynamics, and client expectations, Agile becomes a strategic enabler—not just a methodology.

Key takeaways:

• Context improves decision-making and stakeholder engagement.
• Agile delivery thrives when teams understand the broader organisational landscape.
• Tailored solutions outperform generic frameworks.

It’s been over two decades since I first became involved in the agile movement. I had just joined SoftEd months before our Agile Development Conference and I vividly recall the hot topic at the time was pair-programming and how to get managers approval for what looked on the surface to be two people doing the job of one. A few years later, on the cusp of the Global Financial Crisis I got involved with Suncorp’s Agile Academy – at the time this was “the poster child” of the agile movement, a world’s first that fundamentally shifted my perspective on how work gets done – I was hooked. Since then, I’ve been deeply embedded in the agile community and felt privileged to be developing capability in modern ways of working for organisations to be future ready.

I’ve just been on a mini-break between roles, and this gave me the opportunity to reflect on this journey – one that we have all been on. I was attempting to boil down what made engagements successful and where things went wrong and I landed on one word – context. At the heart of every successful engagement I’ve been part of, context was always key. I realised I loved this way of working because it’s real, it’s human, and it actually works when we met our customers where they were at and align on how much change that particular team/division/organisation could actually absorb.

As an agile industry, we certainly got ourselves into a pickle though as it became one big mashed up system of complexity. If it wasn’t so sad, it is actually impressive that we somehow took four values and twelve principles and turned them into:

Hundreds of methods –this is actually a good thing where we can learn from various approaches and apply them in context (that word again). Check out Craig Smith’s viral talk on 40 agile methods in 40 minutes for a taster (40 Agile Methods in 40 Minutes: 2022 Edition by Craig Smith #AgileIndia 2022).
But then we created wars between different approaches. We publicly argued about method K vs method S and hell; we even created wars between companies using the same approach.
An alphabet soup of certifications offering unrealistic expectations of competence after 2-days of training
A marketplace flooded with agile tooling with variety and configuration as complex as choosing your method
And then we created a handful of enterprise frameworks, each claiming to be the silver bullet your organisation has been waiting for. It worked over at company X so therefore it will work for you!

No wonder we have companies on their 4th, 5th, or 6th transformation (because surely this time it will stick) and a growing acceptance that “agile transformations” are a thing of the past. The irony isn’t lost on me.

We started with something beautifully simple and somehow managed to create what Joshua Kerievsky 🇺🇦 described as “mainstream Agile, which is drowning in a bloated tangle of enterprise tools, scaling frameworks and questionable certificates that yield more bureaucracy than results.”

So what have we got now? If I look across the current landscape, we have a smorgasbord of:

Organisations with a traditional operating model, humming along as they always have (and seemingly missed all of the action)
Organisations with a traditional operating model with some agile teams as a proof of concept (usually tucked away somewhere safe where they can’t do too much damage)
Organisations with agile teams trying to navigate a traditional operating model / management layer (water-scrum-fall)
Organisations with an agile operating model still feeling the gravitational pull of the past (old habits die hard)
And lots and lots of confusion

This is all hard and I’m now speaking from experience which was… enlightening. The last few years I found myself in a traditional operating model with all the bureaucracy and red tape you could hope for – a great piece of research for my journey ahead.

Here’s what I want to be crystal clear (coincidentally another agile method) about: agile isn’t going away. In fact, in the age of AI it’s needed more than ever. What’s actually happening is something far more interesting – we’re seeing the decoupling of agile from the agile frameworks. We’re witnessing the dismantling of the “business of agile” and a return to the core: a set of values and principles that ultimately build organisational efficiency, effectiveness, and add real business value.

We are back to understanding context. I really do believe that pragmatism and context over “following the bouncing ball” will ultimately prevail. And thank goodness for that.

The frameworks had their place – they gave us training wheels, somewhat of a common language (we created wars on this front too) and, a way to begin conversations about different ways of working. But somewhere along the way, we started treating them as the destination rather than the vehicle. It is like we forgot that every organisation is different, every team is unique, and every context matters.

It’s the Spotify story all over again. Henrik Kniberg and Anders Ivarsson went to great lengths to explain it was Spotify’s unique culture, their own guiding principles, that was at the heart of their success. They captured Spotify’s way of working in a 2012 whitepaper and BOOM – suddenly everyone wanted to implement “tribes, squads, chapters and guilds.” Can you sketch out that structure? I bet you can. Can you equally describe the cultural elements that led to this way of working? That’s where it gets interesting.

But here’s the kicker – agile was never the destination. It was, in essence, a conduit of change. A shift that explored the boundaries between a project operating model (with its defined start and end points, fixed scope, and linear progression) and an operating model that supported the ongoing delivery of products and services (with its continuous value delivery, adaptive planning, and customer-centric focus).

This shift represents something profound: moving from a world where we manage temporary endeavours to one where we steward ongoing value streams. It’s the difference between building something once and walking away, versus continuously evolving and improving something that serves real human needs.

The project model served us well in a more predictable world. But in today’s environment – where customer needs shift rapidly, technology evolves continuously, and market conditions change overnight – we need operating models that can adapt, learn, and respond in real-time. Context becomes everything.

After over two decades in the industry helping organisations navigate transformation initiatives, I recently made the move to Certitude Australia. The transition has given me fresh perspective on something I’ve always believed in deeply – you don’t build lasting impact unless you understand that every organisation’s journey is unique.

Now at Certitude Australia, a company with deep expertise in project management, I’ve been brought on to develop our Product Management capability. But it’s really the “murky middle” between project and product management that gets me excited – and where my decades of experience become most valuable.

We can all paint a picture of the ultimate model where “all trains run on time” and “one, two princes kneel before you” (Spin Doctors). But here’s the reality: agility thrives when we:

Understand the current context – Where is this organisation really at? Not where they think they are, not where they wish they were, but where they actually are right now. This isn’t always comfortable.
Understand aspirations for change and desired future state – What does success look like for them? What’s driving the need for change? What constraints are they working within? What change can they actually absorb?
Apply pragmatic approaches to add value and measure it – What’s the smallest meaningful step we can take today that moves us toward that future state while delivering real value to real people? What measures do we have in place that we are improving the process?

Context isn’t just about the current state of systems and processes. It’s about culture, leadership appetite for change, existing skills and capabilities, market pressures, regulatory environments, budget constraints, and a hundred other factors that make each organisation beautifully, frustratingly unique.

When we ignore context, we end up with those painful scenarios we’ve all witnessed: agile ceremonies performed like religious rituals with no understanding of their purpose, transformation programs that create change fatigue without delivering value, and teams going through the motions while the real work happens in the shadows of the old ways.

The future isn’t about choosing between project and product management as the only way. It’s not about being purely agile or purely traditional. It’s about being contextually intelligent – understanding what approaches, methods, and mindsets serve the specific situation we’re dealing with.

The organisations that will thrive are those that develop this contextual intelligence – the ability to assess their situation honestly, choose approaches that fit their reality, and evolve their ways of working as their context changes. They’re the ones who understand that value delivery is the engine room of every organisation, with customers at the heart of their efforts.

Context isn’t just important – it’s everything.