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218 R.van Solingen is necessary, but how it is reached is largely left open. And even the goal can be regularly reviewed, since that, too, may well alter in our rapidly changing world. And themoreagileyouare, the easier it is todealwith change. The starting point of this chapter is that above all agile is a broadly applicable mindset thatwill find itsway intomanydifferentenvironments.And this isn’t such acrazyidea.Afterall, society is rapidlyacceleratingasa resultofdigitalisationand new ways of working together. Agile helps you, in cooperation with others and in small, clear steps, toachieveobjectives that canbeadjustedat any time. This makesagile particularly suitable for what we often call ‘knowledgework’: cooperation between people in which the work itself and the results are often volatile,uncertainandconsistof information,dataand the like.Knowledgework is non-physicalandis thereforefundamentallyfaster thanphysicalwork.Afterall,you cansendmessages,documentsandfiles to theothersideof theworldindigital form inseconds (and for free!).Thisaccelerationmakeshierarchieswithinorganisations unsuitable for rapid operational decisions. The speed and dynamism of change are simply becoming too great to ask permission from the boss each time. As a result, operational decisions and choices are increasingly made at the operational level, usually in teams that areallowed to organise themselves. Agile working is, as such, a response to a rapidly changingand complex world. And it turns out to be effective rather than a short-lived hype. Many organisations are actively engaged in increasing their agility—whether they are large or small, commercial or public, young or old, technical or administrative in nature. They all strugglewith the dynamismof the outsideworld, and theyall see manyadvantages inmakingtheirworkingmethodsmoreagileandnimble.Howtheydothiswillvary from one organisation to another. It dependson their situation, their customersand their people.But striving for faster results and more flexibility is a uniformchange inalmostanyorganisation. The essence of agile working lies in the acceptance of the fact that, as far as the future is concerned, it is never exactly clear what you can achieve and when. The reality is that so much is changing that we cannot actually make agreements far in advance. An important personal threshold for achieving agile working is therefore daring to let go of the idea that a detailed plan is necessary in order to besuccessful incomplexsituations.Learningto trust that taking the first step is the most important, because it is only during that first step that you will discover what thebestnextstep is.Workexperimentallyandstepbystep.Agile teamsdonotplan too far ahead, and they jointlydeliver results at a gradualpace within short periods of time, with the aim in particular of learning from each step. Learning how to do things better, learning what customers really need and thus discovering together where the highestcustomervalue lies. The structure of this chapter is the following. In Sect. 2 of we present the key characteristics of agility: iterations, validation and step-wise improvement. In Sect. 3 we present the key dimensions along which to decide whether agile ways of working make sense, depending on the amount of unpredictability. Section 4 introduces the reasons why more and more organisations start to implement large-scale agile transformations. In Sect. 5 we introduce a step-wise approach to