Agile is fundamentally just...

Is Agile fundamentally just X (where X can be any one trait)?

For example is Agile fundamentally just...

• ..."violent transparency"?
• ...getting smart people together and getting out of their way?
• ...removing the gap between developers and customers?
• ...inspect and adapt?
• [insert your version here]?

I've seen too many failed Agile teams and situations to be that naive.

Sociotechnical systems are complex.  For a complex system, there is no "fundamentally just" one particular thing.

I have argued that Agile can be generated from just a handful of key concepts (rather than 12).  For example:

• Empathy and insight, safety and confidence, dissatisfaction
• Creating transparency and alignment to improve trust in intent; delivering reliably and more frequently to improve trust in capability; building better products; building organisations that systematically build better products
• Engaging directly with the relevant situation and people; conversing with examples and iterating; building in a thoughtful, collaborative, disciplined way; managing system complexity as an ongoing exercise
• Reducing the distance between problems and problem solvers; validating every step; taking smaller steps; cleaning up and improving as you go

I can't say for sure that I'm right about any of these attempts, but I'm quite confident in saying that I'm sure there is no one concept that generates all of Agile AND that there is no one trait that fundamentally represents all of Agile.