As we head into Agile 2010 I’m starting to have post-agile-apocalypic nightmares that are being fueled by the many Agilists who are seeking, promoting, and in some cases demanding, a successor to Agile.

And it is giving me nightmares. Nightmares about software and technology development organizations getting better, and better, and BETTER at improving their processes. In my nightmare, these development machines hum at a perfect sustainable pace of optimal velocity. They are lean, mean, done, done, done, done DAMMIT I’M DONE code machines that chews through backlogs and demands to be fed more… and more… and more…

I wake up in a cold sweat, wondering about the customer, and reflecting on the sage advice that my friend Guy Kawasaki (Guy wrote the foreword to my second book, Beyond Software Architecture) taught us so eloquently in The Macintosh Way:

It is not enough to do do things right (Agile, or post-Agile, or whatever is after Agile).

You have to do the right thing.

AND you have to do things right.

Which means you need to focus on identifying the problems your customers are facing and creating solutions that solve this problems. Total and complete solutions. Solutions that entail the right marketing, sales, communication, support, pricing, licensing, and support. Yeah, the whole thing.

That’s one of the primary uses of Innovation Games®. The games enable you to better understand yourself and our customers in all of these dimensions. Simply put, the games help you do the right thing. And these are the things that come before – and after – Agile. But definitely before.

Are these things hard? Heck ya. Take our little company. While we’re continually proud of our software and how it is improving every release (hey – the new version allows you to add players to the game while it is being played – and yeah, that’s AWESOME), we know that we have a lot of work to do. So, we keep at it. We keep trying to do the right thing. And we keep trying to do things right.

For my Agile friends, I invite you to consider that perhaps post-Agile isn’t what we should be talking about. Instead, perhaps what we should be talking about is pre-Agile: What comes before development? How are we creating our backlog? What evidence do we have that we’re building the right thing?

For those of you attending Agile 2010 (yes, that’s me on the home page in the lower right wearing the black “I PLAN TO RE-PLAN” T-Shirt) talk with any of the almost 100 Innovation Games® Trained Facilitators that will be at the conference. All of them will be happy to discuss how the games can help you avoid your own post-agile-apocalyptic nightmare.