Last week i joined a class with Mike Cohn to become certified scrum master. Although I've been practicing agility in an agile team since 5 years many concepts sounded interesting and revolutionary to me. Also in a such young subject like agility there are so many different interpretations and opinions that sometimes is good to go to the origin. Mike Cohn is not an author of the agile manifesto but in my opinion is definitely one of the "original sources" of agility due to his long and various experience.
Mike divided us in groups and asked every group to add a fifth sentence to the agile manifesto.
These are the four original ones:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
I proposed
face to face communication over back to back communication
where back to back communication is a joke that in my opinion well represents all the other forms of communication we usually interact with like emails, phone calls, written documents, slides, etc etc.
Every day I'm bewildered by the fact that simply talking to people I can achieve goals that I'd never reach in any other way.
p.s. no, it's not due to my very bad English ... I usually write emails in Italian ;)