Introduction

the agile way is a guide to agile leadership and superalignment for artificial and human organizations. Originating in an era when software was agriculture and development was domestication, its theme of mutual benefit for evolutionary advantage applies equally to agentic ai swarms and human organizations seeking a functional alternative to bureaucracy.

Although this book is a literal refactoring of Lao Tzu, there’s no mysticism in it. Each chapter represents an independent Alexandrian pattern - a proven solution to a commonplace problem in a well defined context. The narrative across each of the book’s six sections is equally valuable, and, like a koan, each chapter carries deeper meanings by which, on reflection, a reader may not come away unchanged.

The back of the book provides explanations of its journey through time and line-by-line correspondence with the original pictograms. But the main body of the book speaks for itself and requires no historical background for modern readers to understand and apply it.