Executive Education White Paper

Agile Methods: How Can we Stop Hyper-Focusing on Clients, and Why?

with Sylvain Bureau Professor at ESCP Business School

In the past 20 years, agile methods have spread.

From the Scrum model in software development to Design Thinking, from Lean Start-ups to logistics management.

These methods have a common foundation in that they focus on the client. We must empathise with our users, increase perceived value and find the right product for the market as quickly as possible.

These methods help to speed up the commercialisation of new solutions that are reliable from a technical standpoint and economically viable and desirable for clients.

However, given the hyper-focus on clients, agile methods are now coming up against three major limits. First, they do not account for the aspirations of creators such as entrepreneurs, innovators, developers, and designers, and they are disconnected from their reason for existing, Simon Sinek's famous 'Why'.

Secondly, they have a hard time creating breakthrough innovations since they are so focused on optimisation.

Finally, this obsession of responding to existing clients, whose current average consumption is having dramatic effects on the environment, is contributing to a decline in biodiversity and the quality of our living environments by accelerating destructive innovations for the planet.

Sylvain Bureau, professor at ESCP, takes a look at these methods and the need to stop this hyper-focus on clients. To this end, he suggests a new agile method that is no longer interested in clients: Art Thinking. This method is based on several years of research, and expresses and embodies unprecedented proposals to take a new look at the challenges of the 21st century.

Its potential has already been tested all over the world and can be summed up as thus: if the probable becomes unacceptable, Art Thinking helps you create the improbable with certainty.