Agile development is not about doing a set of practices, it's about a way of "being." If we start down the path toward adoption of agile principles, we can never assume that we will ultimately reach nirvana. Agile development is not an item on your To Do list that can be checked off allowing you to move on to the next task. Agile development means *being* agile. It's about learning. One of the things you will learn is that this approach works not only for software development, but for your own life. How is this learning accomplished? In the Fearless Change patterns, we say that a useful metaphor is a journey.

We recommend that you keep with you at all times (in your carry-on bag), the following patterns: Test the Waters, Time for Reflection, Small Successes, and Step-by-Step. The most important of these (although they are all important, and work together) is Time for Reflection. Without making space in our day for thinking about what is working well, what should be done differently, and what still puzzles us, we find our learning grinds to a halt, that not only do problems *not* get solved, but that we keep making the same mistakes over and over again. By taking brief pauses after small experiments, even large problems can be solved. In a recent Harvard Business Review interview of Toyota's president, Katsuaki Watanabe, he observed, "...when 70 years of very small improvements accumulate, they become a revolution." That's agile!