Making People Awesome: The Human Heart of Agile

Trust is not a soft metric. It is the foundation of every high-performing team.

Of the four principles in Modern Agile, one stands apart. Not because it is more important than the others — though it arguably is — but because it is the most easily misread. "Make People Awesome" sounds like a motivational poster. It is, in fact, a precise and demanding design brief.

The principle asks a deceptively simple question: does what we are building, and how we are working, make the people involved — customers, colleagues, partners — genuinely more capable, more confident, more effective? Not satisfied. Not retained. Awesome.

That distinction matters enormously. Satisfaction is a lagging indicator of a transaction. Awesome is a leading indicator of transformation. And transformation — of people, teams, and organisations — is where the real business value lives.

Where the principle comes from

Joshua Kerievsky introduced the Modern Agile framework in 2016 as a response to what he saw as the bureaucratisation of agile. Scrum ceremonies had become rituals. Frameworks had become compliance exercises. The original spirit — trust people, move fast, learn constantly — had been buried under process.

Make People Awesome was his attempt to restore the human centre of the whole endeavour. It draws on a lineage that includes Toyota's foundational belief in respect for people, Deming's insistence that quality begins with the worker, and the servant leadership tradition that asks leaders to ask first: what does this person need to do their best work?

It is not a soft principle. It is a strategic one. And the evidence for its commercial value is now substantial.

The business case: what the data actually says

The relationship between employee experience and business performance is no longer a matter of opinion. It is one of the most replicated findings in organisational research.

These are not soft outcomes. They are the hard numbers that boards and investors care about. Making people awesome is not a cost centre. It is a growth strategy.

What it looks like in practice

The principle operates at three levels simultaneously: the individual, the team, and the customer. Each requires a different application, but the underlying question is always the same — are we designing this to amplify human capability, or to constrain it?

The wellbeing dimension

Making people awesome is inseparable from making work sustainable. You cannot be awesome when you are burned out. This is not a philosophical point — it is a physiological one.

The CIPD's 2023 Health and Wellbeing at Work report found that 76% of UK workers experienced some form of work-related stress in the previous year, and that stress-related absence costs UK employers an average of £1,652 per employee annually. Presenteeism — being physically present but cognitively absent — costs three times more than absenteeism.

The agile principle of sustainable pace — the idea that teams should be able to maintain their velocity indefinitely, not sprint to exhaustion — is the operational expression of this. Teams that work sustainably outperform teams that work intensively over any period longer than a few weeks. The evidence is unambiguous.

Making people awesome means designing work so that people can bring their full capability to it — not just today, but next month and next year. That requires attention to workload, autonomy, clarity of purpose, and the quality of relationships within the team.

The leadership imperative

None of this happens without leadership that genuinely believes in it. The principle cannot be delegated to HR or embedded in a framework. It has to be lived by the people with the most influence over how work is designed and how people are treated.

Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety — the belief that one can speak up, take risks, and make mistakes without fear of punishment — shows that it is almost entirely a function of leader behaviour. Leaders who model curiosity, acknowledge their own uncertainty, and respond to failure with inquiry rather than blame create the conditions in which people can be awesome. Leaders who do the opposite — however well-intentioned — systematically prevent it.

The lesson is not that culture is everything. It is that culture — specifically, a culture designed to make people awesome — is a precondition for everything else. Strategy, technology, and process all depend on the quality of human performance. And human performance depends on whether people feel capable, trusted, and genuinely supported.

Common failure modes

The principle is easy to endorse and difficult to implement. Several failure modes recur consistently across organisations that attempt it.

Conclusion: the compounding return

The most important thing about making people awesome is that it compounds. A team that feels capable and trusted today will be more capable and more trusted tomorrow. The learning accumulates. The confidence builds. The relationships deepen. The work gets better.

This is why the organisations that do it well — Toyota, Spotify, Patagonia, Buurtzorg, and a growing number of less famous companies — tend to sustain their performance over decades rather than quarters. They have built something that is genuinely difficult to replicate: a culture in which people consistently bring their best.

The principle is not idealistic. It is the most pragmatic thing an organisation can do. Because in the end, every product, every service, every customer relationship, every competitive advantage is created by people. The question is simply whether those people are working at their ceiling or their floor.

Make them awesome. The rest follows.